What do a nonagenarian poet, Seamus Heaney's hiking buddy, the LA Times crime correspondent, the doyen of ghost writers, a schools' rugby legend, a retired Eng Lit professor, a celebrated drag queen, a recent Hennessy winner and internet apostate have in common? Well, all of them are participating in the seventh annual Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival which runs in its new spring slot from March 18th-22nd in Dún Laoghaire. On a deeper level, what they really have in common is a grá for words and a mastery of language in all its teeming diversity.
As readers, we tend to dwell on what a book is "about". We agonise about plotting, stress about "spoiler alerts", declare favourites "unputdownable" when arguably the greater question is what a book is actually "made of". Pace Fifty Shades, no amount of surface gloss can rescue a book if its creator can't write.
Language is what distinguishes us as a species and its skilled deployment in books is among our greatest achievements. Right now, however, language is suffering. Simon Schama recently noted “that the world started to go downhill when the word ‘friend’ became a verb.” Yesterday, I heard a CEO on RTÉ saying how she was determined to “right-size” her company. Silicon Valley execs talk about technology “disintermediating” useless jobs. In times like these we need to cherish those who use language not to obfuscate, but to elucidate.
Ninety-two-year-old US poet and translator David Ferry has spent a lifetime in the company of the classics and he remains as obsessed as ever with "word choices, keeping the measure, line-ending decisions". Andrew O'Hagan has earned his reputation as a novelist but insists that "it was really poetry that made me a writer". Crime reporter Jill Leovy wrote a blog that covered all 845 murders in LA County in a year so the victims would not go undocumented. Ghost writer Andrew Crofts has made a career of telling other people's stories in more than 80 books. Paul Howard so perfected his hilarious Dort-speaking caricature Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, he recently racked up his millionth book sale. In The Language of Fiction, David Lodge rendered literary theory intelligible to the present writer while in college. Rory O'Neill aka Panti Bliss electrified The Abbey Theatre with his noble call for gender tolerance in a speech that evinced passion and eloquence in equal measure. Sara Baume uses language in new and startling ways and last December she lamented our infatuation with "tiny pocket screens", closing her blog with the ringing sign-off "Goodbye screen!"
In 2008, when literaryfestivals.co.uk went live, it covered 40 literary festivals; seven years later, the site now provides details of more than 350 book festivals throughout the UK and Ireland.
Where once small towns and villages celebrated community with garden fêtes and fairs, now they start a book festival. Puck Fair might soon become the Killorglin Literary Festival. Is the market now so overheated that the crash is just around the corner; or should we be taking the Maoist view and letting a thousand flowers bloom? Too many book festivals sounds as mad a concept as too many books and for as long as authors like to get out and about and readers want to hear them, there will be book festivals aplenty. Truly, we are living in the age of the book festival so come to Dún Laoghaire and meet the authors who fashion from language a strange and wonderful magic.
Bert Wright is curator of the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival
