Listowel Writers Week 2010 - the finalists reviewed

In the forthcoming Listowel Writers Week there is abundant evidence that Irish writing is alive and well. By Kate O'Toole.

Along with my fellow judge Giles Foden, I have sifted through the 150-odd titles entered by publishers for this prize. I can’t say it has been easy, but one of the writers here will go ahead to win the €15,000 prize on the opening night of the Listowel Writer’s Week Festival on June 2.

(Picture: Colum McCann, author of Let The Great World Spin)

We begin with John Banville’s The Infinities. This extraordinary novel imagines a world in which the Greek gods still play a role in human life (the book is narrated by Hermes) yet it is set in a weird version of the future. Cars are powered by cold fusion but steam trains are still in use. The patriarch of the human Godley family, Old Adam, lies in a coma on his deathbed.  He is a mathematician whose revolutionary equations have made this new world possible, exposing relativity as a myth but opening up an infinity of other possibilities. His relatives, consisting of his wife Ursula, young Adam his son, and his daughter Petra gather to see him off.  There are many special things about this book — the description of Zeus’s ravishing of young Adam’s wife is one — but in the end it is the amazingly beautiful prose you take away with you. I don’t think I have ever read anything like it. A book by one of the Old Masters of Irish writing.

Next on our list is Glover’s Mistake, by a young writer from the north called Nick Laird. His second novel tells the story of three characters living in London. Thirty five year-old David Pinner is ill at ease, misanthropic, and overweight. A teacher at a London crammer, he seems like someone who has missed the boat. He’s desperate for a girlfriend but spends most of his time writing an arty blog called The Damp Review. His lodger, meanwhile, is James Glover -- fit, handsome, and working as a barman. When 45-year-old American artist Ruth comes into their orbit, David falls for her but she, of course, falls for the lodger. David soon finds himself listening to them having sex in his flat and not long afterwards a wedding is being planned. This is a darkly comic revenge story, but it’s also about someone searching for strength inside himself. David must look into himself and see what he is capable of. The book is unusual in that it mixes satire with genuine emotion; at the same time, it is a realistic picture of dating and despair in a contemporary urban setting. Laird has also published poetry and the evidence is here too, in a lyricism not often found in novels with this kind of subject.

Not Untrue and Not Unkind, the debut novel by journalist Ed O’Loughlin, is a story of doomed love set against a African backdrop. It’s narrated by a foreign correspondent called Owen Simmons. Though neither the paper nor the city of Dublin are specifically named, part of the book is set here, and one of the papers involved is the Irish Times. The wider story involves a bunch of journalists who bump into each other mainly in the Congo but also in Sierra Leone and South Africa. Among them are Tommo, an Australian photographer, Beatrice, with whom Simmons falls in love, Fine, an American who is Simmons’s rival for Beatrice’s affections, and Charlie Brereton, a cynical but amusing Englishman. This bunch of wild geese turn up in some of the most afflicted places in the world and O’Loughlin’s handling of distress, or more properly his handling of the handling of distress, can only be marvelled at. He himself travelled the world as a correspondent for many years and clearly that has informed this book. But he is such a good writer than you can see him turning his hand to any subject.

Our next book is The Space Between Us, by John MacKenna, who won an Irish Times first fiction award for a volume of stories a few years back. He has written a number of books since. His new novel is a genuinely shocking, disturbing tale with a number of plot twists which I will try not to reveal here. The book is set here in Ireland and tells the story of an architect who loses first his wife, Beth, in a car accident, and then seventeen years later his daughter, Jane. The man experiences a slew of contradictory emotions about his wife’s death, but that is nothing as to what readers experience as they come to terms with the complicated emotional landscape of this extremely well-written novel. It is about relationships between the living and the dead, between fathers and daughters, husbands and wives and lovers. The space between us indeed.

The final book on our shortlist is Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann, already winner of the National Book Award for fiction in the United States. The novel features a sprawling cast of characters in 1970s New York City whose lives are ineluctably touched by the mysterious tightrope walker who traverses a wire suspended between the Twin Towers one morning. This is another book full of amazing prose, as illustrated by the following passage, which describes the amazed spectators as they catch sight of the tightrope walker:

“Sure, there were some who ignored the fuss, who didn’t want to be bothered. It was seven forty- seven in the morning and they were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone. Up they came from the subway stations, from limousines, off city buses, crossing the street at a clip, refusing the prospect of a gawk. Another day, another dollar. But as they passed the little clumps of commotion they began to slow down. 
Some stopped altogether, shrugged, turned nonchalantly, walked to the corner, bumped up against the watchers, went to the tips of their toes, gazed over the crowd, and then introduced themselves with a Wow or a Gee- whiz or a Jesus H. Christ”.

Only one of these authors is going to get to the end of the high wire that is the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, but the writing of all of them is worthy of a Wow or a Gee- whiz -- or even a Jesus H. Christ. Overall, they show the strength and range of Irish writing, both on this island and in the wider Irish diaspora.

Kate O'Toole is an award winning actress.