Dublin Writers Festival 2008 — 11th – 15th June

by Kevin Power

Finally, I can’t exit the blogosphere without plugging my own novel, Bad Day in Blackrock, which will be published by Lilliput Press in September this year. Hope you all had a great festival.

Gate Theatre
Sunday 15^th 8:00pm
By Kevin Power

“Don’t write about what you know,” counsels Ian Rankin. “Writing about what I knew got me into trouble.” His other scrap of advice for young writers is, “Get lucky” – though it’s hard to believe that Rankin’s low-key personal charm and wit didn’t help persuade the Bodley Head to “take a punt” (in Rankin’s words) on his first Rebus novel, and that luck had less to do with it than discipline, dedication, and aptitude. Rankin is one of those “natural storytellers” we often hear about but seldom see. Like Stephen King, he’s made the genre novel into a repository for his interests in place and perception. Rankin’s Edinburgh has become as definite a locale as King’s Maine or Dicken’s London.

Colin Bateman (“If you take the e out of my surname, I am Batman”) proved an excellent foil for Rankin’s genial musings on his own career. Questions from the audience ranged from Rankin’s current taste in music (a question with which the author was delighted), to how quickly or slowly he writes (the answer: it takes him 40 days to do the first draft of a Rebus novel, at the rate of ten A4 pages a day). The biggest laugh of the evening came when Rankin told a story about researching Knots and Crosses. He told the police he was writing a crime novel and asked if they could help him with the details. They asked him what the novel was about. It turned out that Knots and Crosses closely resembled an actual case in progress, which led to Rankin briefly being considered a suspect…

All in all, an excellent finale to the Festival proper – though a Panel Discussion, “What is an American Writer?” takes place in Trinity College tonight as an addendum. Admission is free – see programme.

Irish Writers’ Centre
Sunday 15th 3:30pm
by Kevin Power

American undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch is a personally jovial sort of chap whose poetry reads like TS Eliot by way of Wallace Stevens – the whole leavened with a rugged, humane practicality bordering on anger. His themes are the big themes, handled with affecting stateliness and wit. The first poem he read, “Dear Mr. President,” used the metaphor of a cow with its head stuck in a gate to talk about what George W. calls “the War on Terror.” The style is effortlessly contemporary, effortlessly classical – in such ancient forms as the verse epistle, Lynch finds new strengths and possibilities. Another poem, “Walking Papers,” was a meditation on (of course), death – a strain of gallows humour ran through the work, which took the form of a letter to a hypochondriac friend of the poet.

Frank McGuinness read his rigorous, imagistic poetry in incantatory style, drawing out the rhythmic elements of the work, its rootedness in ballads and folk songs, and its more complicated rootedness in the poet’s own experience. These two poets complimented each other in unexpected ways (this has become a theme of the festival): in the work of both, questions of the local and the individual experience are sensitively united with “the universals”: love, death, memory, nature. McGuinness read a poem, “Blackrock Park”, which had an added significance for me: I used to live in Blackrock, and every now and then I would see the poet on the walks he describes in this poem.

Project Theatre
Saturday 14th 8:00pm

It proved an unexpectedly moving evening. Tobias Wolff read two of his short-short stories, “Say Yes” and “Bullet in the Brain,” and as he spoke aloud the final paragraphs of this second story in his stately American baritone, the audience was hushed and respectful: just possibly, a tear quivered, here and there, and fell. If Marian Keyes was the feelgood event of the festival, this was the “literary” corrective. Wolff told us what a pleasure it was to be reading in Dublin, “this story-haunted city.”

Niall McMonagle began the event by quoting V.S. Pritchett’s famous definition of the short story as “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye in passing.” He then introduced Anne Enright, who read her Davy Byrne Award-winning story “Honey,” included in her most recent volume Taking Pictures.

Enright offered some excellent apercus about the form of the short story. “It must change,” she said. “That’s all it has to do. Change. Fuck off. There it is.” And: “The short story is such an unassuming form… I don’t do greatness [in writers] any more.”

It was an enlightening event, full of good feeling between the two writers – a warmth that involved the audience, too.

Project Theatre
Saturday 14th 6:00pm
By Kevin Power

Linn Ullman was, alas, prevented by ‘family circumstances’ from attending the Festival, but Esther Freud in conversation with Kate Holmquist proved fascinating all by herself. She read from her recent novel Love Falls, which deals with the relationship between a seventeen-year-old girl and the taciturn father whom she’s getting to know for the first time. Kate Holmquist gently suggested that the prevalence in Freud’s work of these remote father-figures had something to do with Esther’s relationship with her own father, Lucien Freud, for whom Esther posed nude at the age of sixteen (a question about this was politely deflected). Esther made the point that fathers can offer valuable things beyond the things traditionally expected of fathers. Asked whether she worried about offending family and friends by portraying them in her fiction, Freud said, ‘You’ve got to be quite ruthless, I think – or not be a writer.”

Project Theatre
Saturday 14th 2:00pm
By Kevin Power

Marian Keyes in conversation with Maria Dickinson: certainly the highlight of my festival so far. Marian (she seems to invite a first-name basis) is an excellent performer of her own work – she was reading from her new one, This Charming Man. The audience loved her. (Irish people love writers who are, or appear to be, “just folks”). And, in this case, they were right to love her: her public persona is generous and inclusive, and has no air of artifice or pretension. She’s a cut above the kind of writer usually rounded up and imprisoned in the “ChickLit” ghetto. “I like to write about people coexisting with their damage,” she said. Which is exactly what good fiction should be about. Writing good popular fiction – popular fiction that works – isn’t as easy as it looks; in fact, it’s remarkably difficult. Bestselling writers are usually (though not always – there’s always a Dan Brown lurking in the bushes, with a fistful of dangling clauses and inapposite adjectives) bestsellers for a good reason – as opposed to for a bad reason. Marian Keyes, it seems to me, deserves her popularity. The questions from the audience this afternoon, by the way, were the most intelligent I’ve heard asked at the festival so far. I’ll remember this, the next time I feel moved to condescend…

MacNeill Theatre, TCD
Friday 13th June 6:00pm
by Kevin Power

“I hope at least some of your applause was for Tom Stoppard,” said Fintan O’Toole as he took the stage. It was. Sir Tom – by some measure the most articulate human being I’ve ever listened to – is one of two people in line for the title of Greatest Living Playwright (the other being Harold “I’ve Been a Grumpy Old Man All My Life” Pinter). Scanning Stoppard’s “By the same author” page is a daunting experience: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia… These are works that will endure in the theatrical repertoire for a very long time. His recent plays show no signs of a talent on the wane. “I take a furtive pleasure in not burning out,” he admitted. “I have in me an ugly streak of competitiveness.”

Stoppard’s chat with O’Toole covered all sorts of topics, from questions of censorship to whether we should start ignoring Beckett’s stage directions (Stoppard thinks we should). He’s so compulsively aphoristic a talker that I’ve decided to forgo commentary and simply quote some of his polished sentences, culled from my notebook:

On Shakespeare: “Hamlet exhibits a genius for memorable remarks.”

On politics: “There is no political issue which cannot be resolved into a moral issue.”

On the state of the world: “We live in a society of general incompetence.”

On his own temperament: “I tend to wish to reconcile, rather than have fun being divisive.”

On public appearances: “I’m very good at performing modest charm. It’s my big thing.”

On playscripts: They are “a description of an event which has yet to take place.”

On censorship: “Freedom of expression is desirable as an absolute. It’s worth defending.”

On Mrs. Thatcher: “Mrs. Thatcher was an appalling philistine.”

I note from the Guardian website that Rawi Hage has been declared the winner of the IMPAC Dublin literary award. See him receive his prize tonight at 6:00pm in the Project Theatre.

Project Theatre
Thursday 12th June 8:00pm
By Kevin Power

Despite a no-show from David McWilliams (where was he?), the Irish Values debate proved a fairly stimulating seventy minutes. It was a fearsomely bourgeois event – a reminder of the extent to which the Irish middle class still hasn’t become aware of itself as the dominant social and cultural force in this country. For a young(ish) person, there was, however, something frustrating about the occasion. The mean age of the audience hovered around fifty, and the absence of McWilliams – who, if you ask me, gets closer to understanding this country at the present moment than any of the other panellists – was sorely felt. By the end, I was writing things like this in my notebook: “Here we have the liberal middle classes looking around at what they’ve made and saying, ‘Yeah. We’re doing alright.’” Outbursts of journalistic spleen aside, the debate offered a variety of sensible – even intelligent – answers to the question, “What’s happened to the Irish in the last twenty years – have we got worse, or better?”

Better, seemed to be the consensus. Complaints from the audience about the still-dreadful fate of the myriad disadvantaged children (ah, those disadvantaged children!) in our midst offered a corrective to the Pollyanna-ish prognostications from the platform. There was a great deal of insistence about the lingering influence of “the C word” (Catholicism) on the ethos of the boom years: chair Emer O’Kelly opened the evening with an RTE news item about a priest in Galway who instructed his congregation to vote on the Lisbon treaty – and, to a man, they did. Historian and Yeats biographer Roy Foster responded to this by pointing out that the significance of this story is that “the priest told them to vote, not how to vote” – correctly identifying the changed nature of our relationship with our erstwhile Roman overlords.

Director Alan Gilsenan hazarded a suspicion that a lack of “common decency” was now perceptible in Irish life – but he admitted that this was a feeling common to those who have arrived in middle life with a modicum of respectability. Ivana Bacik spoke (as usual) a great deal of sense. She remarked on a “misplaced nostalgia” in contemporary Irish life – the feeling that “because we were poorer, we were better. In fact, we weren’t better, we were just poorer.”

I was disappointed that no one tackled the two great unspoken schisms in contemporary Irish life – I mean the schism between Dublin and the rest of the country, and that between the old and the young. There are unbridgeable gulfs here: between our parents, who came of age in Catholic Ireland, and us, who grew up on an island saturated in American pop culture and sponsored by Abercrombie and Fitch… Then, of course, there’s Dublin (where 40% of the population energetically reside, and where Catholicism is generally doing the decent thing and giving up the ghost) and the Country (where the remaining 60% still go to mass and play hurling and enjoy, we are told, an inviolate sense of “community” which generates a warm glow of common decency and traditional values). Ireland is a schizophrenic country, these days. We’d do well to talk about this.

It’s easy to be sceptical about the kind of self-congratulation on view in the Project last night, but there is something to be said for the Republic at the minute. To me it seems inarguable that this is the best of times to be an Irishman. Our task, just now, is to identify a distinctively Irish way of being modern – because we no longer have any choice about being modern. In a sense, all that’s happened in the last twenty years is that we caught up with the rest of what gets called (by economists) “the developed world.” But, as Roy Foster pointed out, “Change comes readily to the Irish.” A good thing, too: modernity isn’t going to go away. We would be wise to come to terms with it.

Project Theatre

Wednesday June 11th 6:00pm

by Kevin Power

“I always feel sorry for people who don’t write. It’s such fun.” This was Lloyd Jones, author of the Booker-shortlisted Mister Pip, in conversation with John Boyne and Claire Kilroy tonight at the Project. The Festival proper kicked off with readings by two writers interested in the power of story – adroitly picking up from where Salman Rushdie left off at the end of April. Lloyd Jones read from Mister Pip, a novel that tackles (in the author’s own words) questions of “identity and mistaken identity,” as well as the somewhat larger problem of “how to be in the world.” John Boyne, the man who launched The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on a ravished world (so far, the book has sold 2.5 million copies, and the major motion picture comes out this year courtesy of Miramax), read from his new novel, Mutiny on the Bounty, a retelling of the familiar adventure through the eyes of Capt. Bligh’s fourteen-year-old cabin boy.

There proved to be various sympathies and synchronicities at work between these two superficially dissimilar writers. A question from Claire Kilroy about the presence of orphans in both books led to a discussion of Dickens, a crucial presence in Mister Pip and, it transpired, in the early reading life of John Boyne, who told us that encountering Dickens – particularly “the orphan books, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby” – was one of the experiences that made him want to write fiction. Lloyd Jones, an intelligent, softly-spoken New Zealander, returned to the question of identity (Jones is obviously influenced by recent postcolonial theory – he comes back again and again to ideas about imperialism, cultural heritage, the “New World” versus the Old). The onstage consensus had to do with the centrality of literature – of reading and writing – to the formation of both individual and cultural identities. This was plainly a notion of personal significance to the two writers – without writing, Boyne said, “I would lose my entire identity.”

An excellent beginning, all told. Highlights of the coming days include Kathy Lette at the Morrison on Saturday Morning, Tom Stoppard in Trinity on Friday, and, tomorrow night, the Irish Values Debate, which I expect will be one of the more enjoyably controversial evenings of the Programme – particularly in the aftermath of the Lisbon vote.