Unfortunately, I couldn´t make it to the Jennifer Johnston event on Friday. So a huge thank you to lifeisafestival for the following post:
When Jennifer Johnston and Lelia Doolin took to the Dublin Writers Festival stage on Friday night, you could tell that they knew each other well. Doolin joked that the fact they are old friends ‘might make for an interesting conversation as they were bound to disagree over a few things.’ She was definitely right, as the evening proved to be an enlightening insight into the process of novel writing.
The event concentrated on Johnston’s book ‘The Illusionist‘, which she herself thought of as ‘actually, excuse me, quite well written.’ Listening to Johnston read a number of excerpts from her novel, it became obvious why she has been called one of Ireland’s finest authors by so many critics. Her writing is full of beautiful imagery and there is a great rhythm to her prose.
Prompted by Doolin, Johnston explained that at the time of writing the book she was living away from Dublin, away from family and friends. Feeling very isolated, the writing process was therapeutic. It helped her to face her own demons: ‘I just started writing the book and it started to grow like a plant growing. The Illusionist was a sort of medecine book for me, it cured me,’ she says.
The novel, a story of two interlinked narratives with a limited cast of characters, deals with a complex family relationship. The themes Johnson explores tend to be, naturally, close to her own heart, but not necessarily autobiographical. In this book, the female protagonist, Stella, reflects on her role as a mother and a writer.
Doolin suggested that Martyn, the male protagonist is a ‘nasty piece of work, a bully‘ and their daughter Robin more or less a replica of him. So, are there any parallels to her own life? Her own family, Johnston replies, is ‘large and fairly eccentric, they all have their own stories to tell and I have used some of those in my writing.‘ The characters are not modelled on anyone in particular, however, because ‘if I was to put them all into one book it would be “War and Peace“,’ she jokes.
At the end of the reading Johnston took questions from the audience including who her favourite writers were (McGahern and Chekhov topped her shortlist) and what she thought of screen adapations of her books (the latest one being ‘Two Moons’, the screenplay of which was recently written by actor Gabriel Byrne).
One sentence that stuck with me from the last excerpt Johnston read from ‘The Illusionist‘ is ‘Tomorrow is another day, perhaps even another life‘, which goes to show that despite the serious subject matter of the novel, Johnson’s prose is not pessmistic . On the contrary, her down-to-earth sense of humour and the visual, almost theatrical aspects of her writing shine through on every page. Naturally, the signing queue after the event was a long and appreciative one as the momentousness of the occasion was not lost on anyone who attended the reading.
blog post written by lifeisafestival