Currently being feted for his own first novel, Our Fathers, reviewed below by Eamon Delaney, Scottish author Andrew O'Hagan named John McGahern's first novel, [IT]The Barracks, [RO]when asked the other day by the Guardian what book he most wished he'd written.
Describing it as "a little masterpiece," O'Hagan declared that "the words are strange and beautiful; emotion passes through the sentences like clear water". He went even further in his praise: "There is more grace in these quiet pages than in the whole of War and Peace. You watch a few lives going on - and going on, and going on - and you can feel involved in the wonder of all that. Nothing happens, and yet everything does."
He concluded rhapsodically: "McGahern is, in some way, in some priceless way, out on his own: his prose is richly odd, and has none of the mannered simplicity much loved by the world's Creative Writers. He is a writer with nerve. God bless him."
Let's forget about the brat pack and their multi-million-pound book deals, and ponder instead that other, perhaps more encouraging, phenomenon - the late starter. Frank McCourt was 64 when he completed Angela's Ashes, J. M. O'Neill was the same age when his first novel of life among the Irish in London was published, Mary Wesley was 71 when she wrote the first of her novels, and Amy Clampitt was 63 on the publication of her first volume of poems.
And now along comes Deasun Breathnach to beat them all for tardiness: at 77 years of age, he has just had his first book of poems published. Launched in Instituto Cervantes and entitled Danta Amadora, the collection features original poems in Irish and Spanish, as well as translations from Lorca and Borges and from Latin and Italian.
Set in a Dublin suburb, the only short story Iris Murdoch wrote will be published by Chatto and Windus this autumn as "a little book, something special for her readers".
Indeed, the story is called Something Special and is described by Murdoch's agent, Ed Victor, as "stunning but very un-Murdochian, more like a story from Dubliners". It was, in fact, published in 1957 but in such an obscure anthology that hardly anyone read it at the time.[
What's the difference between the two big novels of the season, Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music? Hardly anything in terms of advances from the respective publishers (more than ú500,000 for each), not much in length (465 pages of Rushdie, 320 pages of Seth), and not a lot in themes (love and music in both books).
However, only one of them can win the Booker, and John Sutherland, one of this year's Booker judges, has already indicated where he wants the prize to go. Or, at least, a sub-editor on the Evening Standard has - above a review of the Rushdie book in which Sutherland declared "This is a great novel," the headline trumpeted "The 1999 Booker Prize Winner." Well, time will tell.
Best wishes to Seamus Heaney, who celebrates his 60th birthday next Tuesday. May he persist in keeping the spirit level and continue to write poems that "catch the heart off guard and blow it open".