I’ve realised that after 52 weeks and 52 books, it’s all about falling in love.
I didn’t know it was going to be like this. When I stood in front of my bookshelves and picked my favourites, I based my choice on memory and something close to instinct. No filter was applied. I didn’t weigh up the gender balance, the writer’s nationality or ethnicity or the sale figures. All that mattered: did I love the book? Had I admired the writing? Was the subject important to me? And, something else. What would my choice say about who I am?
It was a bit of a gamble. I’m of an age when memory is faulty. The past can be, not only another country, but, at times, an illusion. So it was with something close to relief that, as the weeks passed, and I read more, it became apparent. It was the characters that I remembered, the characters with whom I had fallen in love. And they hadn’t let me down.
Take Francie Brady, from The Butcher Boy. He's pathetic and terrifying. A killer. Abused by the repulsive Fr Sullivan. He steps right off the pages and looks me in the eye. And Rosamond Stacey, from The Millstone. An academic living in "swinging London" in the 1960s. I laughed out loud at her hapless sexual adventures. Then, pregnant by accident, she becomes an unmarried mother. But Rosamond's a survivor. As she looks into her daughter's eyes she feels "love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life". I, who'd had the same experience, applauded her loudly
It wasn’t only the fictional characters who were captivating. Randy Shilts took me to the Aids-ravaged world of San Francisco and New York; Primo Levi showed me where to hide my spoon in the mud of Birkenau; I walked with Azar Nafisi, wearing a chador, away from Tehran University to her apartment to discuss her favourite books with her favourite students.
The ability to create a world entirely of words is pure magic
I read the books as a reader and not a writer. I wasn't looking for hints, tips, for a "how to" manual. It is said that to be a good writer you must be a good reader. And I was. Before my first novel, Mary, Mary was published in 1998, I read everything. But then I stopped. Fear took over. What if something was too brilliant, too original, too earth-shatteringly good? I knew I would close the computer and crawl away to hide. So, for many years I didn't read fiction. Non-fiction was my choice. It was wonderful, in different ways. I read about war. I read about gardens, cooking, food, voyages and adventures. Antarctica was as familiar as the strip of sand at Seapoint. I travelled with Tom Crean and Ernest Shackleton to Elephant Island. I lay in Scott's tent, in my reindeer-skin sleeping bag, listening to the blizzard raging.
But something was missing. The ability to create a world entirely of words is pure magic. So the time had come to go back to the books which were my old friends, to rekindle my love of reading; fiction as well as non-fiction, one as important as the other.
Beating heart
It’s been a year, therefore, of reading and writing; learning how to capture the essence of a book in 330 words. To slice through the fat of description to the book’s beating heart. To understand its core. Despair, love, anger, joy, deceit, hatred, desire; I’ve found them all. And what have I learnt about myself?
The magic has taken me back to my childhood in New Zealand. Mary O'Hara's Thunderhead, Mary Treadgold's We Couldn't Leave Dinah and Alberto Moravia's A Woman of Rome, stolen from my mother's bedside table, awakened my senses to the taste of sea water on my bare arms, the heat of the sun on my back, the vivid scarlet of the Pohutukawa tree's flowers at Christmas.
Levi, Gitta Sereny, Vassily Grossman, Justin Cartwight and Martin Amis took me into the concentration camps. Should I be surprised? I was born a mere six years after the end of the second World War. My Irish father and mother both served in the British forces. Their wartime experiences saturated my childhood. I remember when Eichmann was put on trial in 1961. Newspapers and magazines documented in words and photographs what we now call the Holocaust. As a precocious child I read everything; it terrified me. And it still makes me wonder. Could it happen again. And who would I be? The woman who opens the door to welcome the Jews? Or closes the door and leaves them to their fate?
And then there's Molly Keane's Good Behaviour. The Anglo Irish, debt-ridden, slipping into genteel poverty. Aroon St Charles, daughter of the house. Tall, plain, awkward. Despised by Mummie and Papa. Saved from caricature by the exquisite precision of Keane's prose. I recognise my own family in her world. Protestants in decline. Losing their place in the scheme of things. "People like us", my aunt warned us, newly arrived in Ireland from the "colonies", you only mix with "people like us". Aroon could have been saved by the local solicitor Mr Kiely who offers to "look after" her. But, as I know only too well, his kind would never do.
And that sense of desertion I felt as a small child when I lost my father, washes over me as I read Joan Brady's Theory of War. The story of Jonathan Carrick, the "boughten boy", abandoned, sold into slavery as a four-year-old in the aftermath of the American Civil War, breaks my heart. And I remember the middle of the night terror that I was barely able to articulate, then or now.
So thank you, Joan Brady. You and all the other writers of my “older books” will be my inspiration. You have filled my year with magic. And now it’s my turn, to make magic for others.
