Anne Enright's Blog, page 6

The taboo-breaking, the men, the fabulous prose there's no one like Edna O'Brien. By Anne Enright

The day she visited the piece of land in Co Donegal on which she would build a house, Edna O'Brien saw a rainbow over it, looping from Mount Errigal to the sea. This is what she writes: "It faded slowly, with such cadence, getting fainter and fainter, the orange tint being the last to fade, a kind of tangerine." Look at that sentence. Just look at it. No one else could have written this: it is purest Edna O'Brien. Every rise and fall of it, every lift and sigh. The yearning in the word "such", the passion in the word "cadence", the fading of the word "fade", the lingering, scooping, last couple of clauses, giving us a colour that is not just orange but a surprising almost contentious "tangerine". This is a sentence that trails its fingers on the edge of the set as it leaves the stage. So get ready to applaud, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no one like her. O'Brien, in her 80s, may look like an icon and talk like an icon, but she writes like the thing itself, with prose that is scrupulous and lyrical, beautiful and exact.

It is important to praise O'Brien because she has taken enough insults in her day. John Broderick, in the literary periodical Hibernia, "quoting my husband's exact words said that my 'talent resided in my knickers'". Broderick, a novelist whose work was also banned in Ireland for sexual content, is 20 years dead, and whatever resided in his own knickers is long since turned to dust. It is easy, now, to see his misogyny but in the 1960s these things were not so simply understood. In her memoir, O'Brien says her supposed "fault" was not that she was a woman, but that she was thought "glamorous". Who could blame her for making this elision, of trying to rise above? The problem was not one of sex but of beauty, charisma, style. The problem was not the truths she told in those first novels the ones that caused all the fuss but of the fame those novels brought her because, for those years, fame and notoriety were a plane journey apart.

We challenged well-known writers from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper to come up with a story of up to 140 characters. This is their stab at Twitter fiction

I know I said that if I lived to 100 I'd not regret what happened last night. But I woke up this morning and a century had passed. Sorry.

Anne Enright on Alice Munro's collection of subtle short stories

I remember a conversation I had about Alice Munro with a Canadian, 30 years ago, that was, for reasons I could not quite figure, a bit sticky. It took me a while to realise he thought Munro wrote about the lives of women in rural Ontario which she did, of course and this was why he didn't like her work so much. He didn't like it because of Ontario.

It stayed with me, as a kind of deliberate smallness about what writers do. Thirty years ago, in Canada, people thought Munro was writing about what it was like to be a woman in rural Ontario, and that this was territory they knew something about. Because rural Ontario was not just a flat place with some farmers and small towns, it was a set of ideas about itself, and these ideas could be owned and disputed and placed in the balance. Is this what Ontario is actually like? Are there, perhaps, more important things to be said about Ontario or, indeed, about being a woman, in 1982? Also, by the way, are there more important books to be written about being Canadian: ones about men and grizzly bears, ones about immigrant communities in Toronto?

Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver reflect on their own disappointments in life, love and work

Diana Athill: 'It is possible to make use of failure, and forget it'
Margaret Atwood: 'Get back on the horse that threw you'
Julian Barnes: 'Success to one person can be failure to another'
Ann Enright: 'Failure is what writers do. It is built in'
Howard Jacobson: 'You have to see failure as an opportunity'
Will Self: 'People say my writing is dreadful and pretentious'
Lionel Shriver: 'No one wants to buy a book about disappointment'

This account of Irish girlhood is an instant classic, says Anne Enright

About a third of the way in, I was discussing this book with my husband, who asked: "So is the author a genius or is she just very good?" "Well, she is definitely a genius," I said. "But I don't know how good she is, yet."

"Genius" was always a term that contained arguments about art and order and the relationship of the writer to society whether he (there were no female contenders) was sacrifice or magus, mad artist or Great Novelist. There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes. These days the middle classes are in decline and the term has gone out of fashion, though we still retain the sense of the genius as someone who is brilliantly "beyond"; who breaks the rules and plays the edge.

'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know'

This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest in the whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great as Chekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. She has done more for the possibilities and the form of the short story than any other writer I know. You can never tell what she is going to say next or what you the reader are going to feel next from line to line. She appears to be in perfect control of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once and she described how she writes enormously long versions of stories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely. One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a story where a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as a series of things that have got to be done and are done: "not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising these peculiar in some ways ludicrous rhythms of mental life.

Donal Ryan's second novel, set in rural Ireland, is an exquisite tale of a man-child's struggle to make sense of a greedy world

Every so often, a writer comes along who cheers Ireland up, not because the books are cheerful on the contrary, indeed but because the writing enlarges a particular sense we have of ourselves. Claire Keegan is one such writer, John McGahern is perhaps the best known, and Donal Ryan is the latest addition to this distinguished line. He writes from the rural heartland in prose that always pushes for the truth of things. Ryan's language is colloquial and easy, but the central emotion is, for lack of a better word, dignified. His characters are large-hearted people in a small-minded world and this timeless theme is played out, not in misty boggy nowhere-land, but in a contemporary Irish space, where people talk on their mobiles and the halal meat plant has been recently closed down.

The Spinning Heart, his first published novel, was told from 21 different points of view and was set after the collapse of the Irish boom. It was the success of this book that brought his first, much rejected manuscript to light. The Thing About December is set while the bubble is still inflating and it is, for my money, the better book. It has only one voice, that of Johnsey Cunliffe, whose slow puzzlement burns through the story like the spark on a long fuse. The explosion, when it comes, is finely judged by Ryan, who is interested in what makes men kill other people or themselves. Maleness is experienced, by his characters, as an impossible state, a kind of accident waiting to happen. McGahern is the reference point here because masculinity is an issue for both writers, their characters are often in thrall to the figure of the father, and they are both interested in knowing how to escape that love, or what it might mean.

Donal Ryan's second novel, set in rural Ireland, is an exquisite tale of a man-child's struggle to make sense of a greedy world

Every so often, a writer comes along who cheers Ireland up, not because the books are cheerful – on the contrary, indeed – but because the writing enlarges a particular sense we have of ourselves. Claire Keegan is one such writer, John McGahern is perhaps the best known, and Donal Ryan is the latest addition to this distinguished line. He writes from the rural heartland in prose that always pushes for the truth of things. Ryan's language is colloquial and easy, but the central emotion is, for lack of a better word, dignified. His characters are large-hearted people in a small-minded world and this timeless theme is played out, not in misty boggy nowhere-land, but in a contemporary Irish space, where people talk on their mobiles and the halal meat plant has been recently closed down.

The Spinning Heart, his first published novel, was told from 21 different points of view and was set after the collapse of the Irish boom. It was the success of this book that brought his first, much rejected manuscript to light. The Thing About December is set while the bubble is still inflating and it is, for my money, the better book. It has only one voice, that of Johnsey Cunliffe, whose slow puzzlement burns through the story like the spark on a long fuse. The explosion, when it comes, is finely judged by Ryan, who is interested in what makes men kill other people or themselves. Maleness is experienced, by his characters, as an impossible state, a kind of accident waiting to happen. McGahern is the reference point here because masculinity is an issue for both writers, their characters are often in thrall to the figure of the father, and they are both interested in knowing how to escape that love, or what it might mean.

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Donal Ryan's second novel, set in rural Ireland, is an exquisite tale of a man-child's struggle to make sense of a greedy world

Every so often, a writer comes along who cheers Ireland up, not because the books are cheerful – on the contrary, indeed – but because the writing enlarges a particular sense we have of ourselves. Claire Keegan is one such writer, John McGahern is perhaps the best known, and Donal Ryan is the latest addition to this distinguished line. He writes from the rural heartland in prose that always pushes for the truth of things. Ryan's language is colloquial and easy, but the central emotion is, for lack of a better word, dignified. His characters are large-hearted people in a small-minded world and this timeless theme is played out, not in misty boggy nowhere-land, but in a contemporary Irish space, where people talk on their mobiles and the halal meat plant has been recently closed down.

The Spinning Heart, his first published novel, was told from 21 different points of view and was set after the collapse of the Irish boom. It was the success of this book that brought his first, much rejected manuscript to light. The Thing About December is set while the bubble is still inflating and it is, for my money, the better book. It has only one voice, that of Johnsey Cunliffe, whose slow puzzlement burns through the story like the spark on a long fuse. The explosion, when it comes, is finely judged by Ryan, who is interested in what makes men kill other people or themselves. Maleness is experienced, by his characters, as an impossible state, a kind of accident waiting to happen. McGahern is the reference point here because masculinity is an issue for both writers, their characters are often in thrall to the figure of the father, and they are both interested in knowing how to escape that love, or what it might mean.

Johnsey is in mourning for his father who was a paragon, tough but fair: "He'd give ground to no man." A farmer who took no notice of the neighbours, in their foolishness and venality, he "often talked about money as though it was only a nuisance of a thing that you had to pay heed to only the odd time". And he was tender of his son, who has few defences against the outside world. When Johnsey's mother also dies, leaving him the land, the pressure on him to sell to local developers becomes immense.

Johnsey describes himself as "a bit of a gom". His language is a reminder that the Irish have a hundred words for "stupid" and use the word "clever" as an insult all of its own. He is a bit of a God-help-us, a great clumsy yoke, a meely-mawly, an auld eejit of a crossbreed pup. We are not sure, in fact, how "stupid" Johnsey is, or how self-lacerating. The creeping reveal of his mother's character is key to understanding his nature, perhaps. At the beginning of the book, she is a maker of powerful, tasty dinners; by the end, "she had a tongue on her that could cut a man right in two".

It is a fashionable thing to do – to work a narrator who is somehow childlike in an adult world – but Ryan's control is terrific. He underplays the ironic distance and pulls our sympathies tight. And he tells a great story. His paragraphs are unnoticeably beautiful, his heart always on show, and he writes with a social accuracy that is devastating. He knows the tiny differences that make all the difference – between the small town and the countryside, between the labouring classes and those who own a few acres, between the local council tenants and the ones relocated from the city.

This is a world away from posh Protestant versus cute Catholic tales of yore, and different again from the airless self-enclosure of the families in McGahern's books. People drive around and meet one another in a novel that is set in the Irish countryside. I don't know why this seems like an amazing thing for them to do. There are others who manage this trick, perhaps, but not many who hit the sweet spot of the Irish tradition as Donal Ryan does here.

Donal RyanFictionAnne Enright
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'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know'

This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest in the whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great as Chekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. She has done more for the possibilities and the form of the short story than any other writer I know. You can never tell what she is going to say next – or what you the reader are going to feel next – from line to line. She appears to be in perfect control of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once and she described how she writes enormously long versions of stories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely. One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a story where a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as a series of things that have got to be done and are done: "not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising these peculiar – in some ways ludicrous – rhythms of mental life.

Continue reading...