Festivals, Festivals Everywhere

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Cúirt Literary Festival, which launches in Galway on Monday, 19th April and will run to the end of the week. Colum McCann, Claire Keegan, Ciaran Carson and Kevin Barry are among the Irish writers lined up this year, while there’s also a strong international presence. Barry recently made his debut in The New Yorker, which is itself hosting an event at the festival, as is Granta magazine. While Granta contributors like James Lasdun and Mary Gaitskill will be knocking about, there’s also former editor Ian Jack speaking to Fintan O’Toole on his 2009 book, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. Am I in Galway next week? Am I heck.

On the marginally brighter side, those of us stranded on the east coast will be around to catch Philip Pullman ‘in conversation’ on the The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ in Trinity College on Saturday, 17th April. Apparently this is part of the Dublin Writers’ Festival, which doesn’t actually kick off until 1st June. I’m confused. But it’s also one of the university’s Trinity Week events, which begins on Monday 12th and will include appearances from the science fiction writers Philip Reeve, Oisín McGann and Conor Kostick, as well as a talk by Terry Eagleton on evil. Take that Weshties.

The Irish Lost Booker

Lost books, lost authors, and now lost prizes. The Man Booker Prize is reproducing like a mangy alley cat. First came the Booker of Bookers in 1993, then the Booker International in 2005 and the Best of the Booker in 2008. The newest arrival is the Lost Booker, a one-off award to be announced on 19th May. Why? Since 1971, the Booker has been awarded for the best novel of the year. But for the first two years of its life, the prize was awarded retrospectively. Because of this, much of the fiction published in 1970 slipped through the cracks. So the Lost Booker is an act of reparation, to be chosen by popular vote from a shortlist selected by a group of judges born ‘in or around’ 1970. The winner will receive from these childer a designer bound copy of their forty-year-old novel. So that’s alright then.

One of the more interesting contenders is J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, a darkly ironic novel set during the Irish War of Independence. Farrell was a Booker winner in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur, the subsequent book in his empire trilogy. But Troubles is a novel with a much broader genealogy; it belongs in fact to a vast and grotesque family of Irish fiction dealing with imperial decline. The Big House novel properly kicked off around the Act of Union in 1801, a fact which itself hints at a certain black humour. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, published on the brink of Ireland’s legislative union with the United Kingdom, set a template which lasted well into the twentieth century – stories of Anglo-Irish families in decline, isolated among an unfathomable and untrustworthy peasantry.

Troubles is no different. The book opens in 1919 with Major Brendan Archer fetching up at the Majestic Hotel in Ireland to fulfill a wartime promise to a vaguely acquired fiancee. A veteran of the trenches, he finds a stronger (and stranger) attraction in its pervading atmosphere of decay. This is a place out of time, an outpost of a society on the brink of extinction – except that Ireland’s last Edwardian summer is mostly populated by a dysfunctional Anglo-Irish family and a few decomposing spinsters. As violence intensifies across the Irish countryside, snatched newspaper reports provide reminders of an answering unrest throughout Europe. But in the Majestic Hotel only timber rots and plaster falls.

This is only one of the ways in which Farrell plays on the usual features of the Big House novel. Troubles is not short of a few knowing cliches: the Englishman abroad, the crumbling pile and its decaying residents, the inscrutable family retainer and the promise of Anglo-Irish romance. But any sense of purpose in that romantic sub-plot is misleading. Archer, like all the Majestic’s guests, lingers irresolutely as a new Ireland is slowly formed beyond its gates. There is only one (blazing) ending to these Big House stories, and the rest is a prolonged study in futility and eccentricity.

The knowledge of what is to come gives these novels their flavour of weary irony. And for all his nuance, Farrell has a great gift for the ridiculous. Stranded in increasing squalor, surrounded by proliferating ginger cats, the Major is a misplaced and confused representative of imperial Britain. But Farrell’s guiding irony is almost too cleverly sustained. Troubles has echoes of Castle Rackrent, echoes of Elizabeth Bowen’s Last September, perhaps too many echoes for the novel to sustain. Towards the end of the book, as the inevitable disaster approaches, a group of Oxford undergraduates land on the now irredeemable Majestic Hotel. Finding revolvers laid out with the table settings at dinner, the embattled owner blustering furiously like the archetypal John Bull, they marvel at how wonderfully ‘Irish’ it all is. The reader might be tempted to do the same. At points, Troubles tips dangerously close to self-parody. But this is also a book with a deep and infecting sadness. And this in itself gives it a well-deserved place on that Booker shortlist. Even if it comes forty years too late.

In the beginning…

Why blog? Because I’m tired of review pages. I’m tired of book sections that dutifully attend to the big new releases at the same time and in the same way. When I read about books, I want to find out about lost treasures and new voices. I want a glimpse of a book that might excite or intrigue me. I don’t want to read a careful precis of a historical biography, or a pastiche of a publisher’s AI sheet. I want opinion and passion, knowledge and expertise, and a good heft of cranky judgement. Because all good reading, like all good writing, is individual.

The Book Page will be a strange melange of news and reviews, commentary and criticism, book-related chatter and hopeful strikes out into the wide blue yonder. At least it will be for a while. It might have a literary tint. It will definitely have an Irish tint. And hopefully it will pick up a few other cranky voices along the way.