It was a lively festival weekend for literature, and the writers weren't complaining either. Due homage was paid to Joyce as the annual Bloomsday pilgrimage wound its way around the city which provides the map of Ulysses. Wildeans were pleased to see the 100th anniversary of the death of the great wit and tragic romantic honoured, while the International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award was presented by John Hume. The author of the winning book, Wide Open, British writer Nicola Barker, lamented that her dress did not have a pocket in which to stash that extremely handy £100,000 cheque.
The Dublin Writers' Festival may have had to compete with the good weather, but it triumphed thanks to the appeal of a diverse range of national and international writing talent.
Attendance varied from packed to comfortably full. Paul Durcan drew a capacity lunchtime crowd on Friday, while Doris Lessing held court the previous night, demonstrating her curiosity and powerful sense of self. Ghost Road trilogy author Pat Barker had to cancel, but in her place the organisers could pull, as if from a magician's hat, a Pulitzer Prize winner, American novelist Jane Smiley, whose new book draws on her love and understanding of horses (see interview above).
Reading from her new novel The Gingerbread Woman, due out in September, the Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston yet again demonstrated the nature of her quiet, intelligent art. A writer who says she has never thought of herself as specifically an Irish writer - "Although it's what I write about, nor would I say, I am a woman writer" - she looks to language for excitement. "It's like trying to catch sunbeams." Her elegant fiction possesses exactness and feeling, and perhaps this is explained by her comment: "My mother was an actress. I grew up on the rhythms of Shakespeare." Because she is a reader, she tends to talk about books other than her own, praising Amit Chaudhuri, David Malouf and Annie Proulx, in reply to a question which started out being about her own work. Calmly, insistently, she stressed the Rooney Prize had been "seriously" overlooked and praised winner Claire Keegan's collection, Antarctica.
The coincidence of the IMPAC event with the Dublin Writers' Festival was often reflected in the programme. Nicola Barker participated in the gala closing session and poet Paul Muldoon, who was in Dublin for IMPAC, proved a world-class replacement when David Dabydeen was unable to come. The American poet Julie O'Callaghan was impressed, not only by Muldoon's performance but by his attitude. Much has been written about the intellectual force and linguistic fire of his work, but as O'Callaghan remarked, "he is also very moving; there is real feeling in his work".
Reading with them was the Lebanese poet Venus KhouryGhata whose work draws on the French and the Arabic cultures. O'Callaghan has always worked through a variety of voices. Her tone is matter of fact, witty and disconcertingly conversational. The monologue is her form, and although she has lived in Ireland for many years, the work remains American. No Can Do, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, is her third collection and follows Edible An- ecdotes (1983) and What's What (1991), which were also both recommended.
The new collection again confirms O'Callaghan's sharp ear for the subtleties of intonation and speech as spoken, and above all a forensic feel for language. The opening section was inspired by Sei Shonagon, a Japanese court lady. Sei Shonagon is practical but she is not lacking in poetic sensibility: "Only a moment ago/ he lay beside me/ saying silly poetic things./ The mat is still warm,/ incense from his robe/ haunts the air." (Time)
More by allusion than detail, she evokes a world some 1,000 years in the past. The middle section is of the moment. But the closing third, dedicated to her dying father, is her most personal work. "I can't read those poems," she says, leaving the reader to enter a record of a slow leave-taking.
The Irish writer, Colum McCann, whose work This Side of Brightness was shortlisted for IMPAC, read from a work in progress, a novel that may be called Dancer. Nureyev is the inspiration, "but I'm more interested in the people around him than I am in him". McCann, one of the most interesting young writers working today, lives in New York, and while he has certainly already looked and written beyond his tradition, he is passionately convinced of the value of the past.
"I am worried about this new aggression," he says. "It seems that if you are young and Irish and have just published a book, that suddenly you are important. Everyone, whether they know it are not, has been made by Ben Kiely, Jennifer Johnston, Edna O'Brien, the early Neil Jordan, Des Hogan (he's one of my heroes; I walked from Dublin to Galway to meet him).
The author of last year's IMPAC winner, Ingenious Pain, the British novelist Andrew Miller, seemed alert and at ease, obviously unharmed by having won £100,000. This year's winner, Nicola Barker, admitted to being too mean to buy that new pair of running shoes yet. "I'm not going to read that much from the book," she said with a quizzical expression. "I think people are more interested in writers talking about books than reading from them."
The Irish writer Rose Doyle, with a new book due out shortly, has also completed an historical novel, based on the Wren Girls, a strange colony of female misfits, loose women, feminists and outsiders living rough on the Curragh in the 19th century. "It's told by two women, each through a journal." She enjoyed the historical research. A former Hennessey Award Winner and Bisto Prize-winning children's writer, she describes herself as "a storyteller". On the subject of commercial fiction, she said " `commercial' seems to be a dirty word. I think that is elitist and insulting to readers. Balzac and Dickens were commercial writers; it's an honourable occupation."
Several of the writers praised the festival organisers for paying them before they performed. Jack Gilligan, the festival director, set out to look after his writers. He did, and it showed.
