Floating on Lake Wobegon

FESTIVALS AND EVENTS: Garrison Keillor spent two hours at the Kilkenny Arts Festival enticing, wooing and, ultimately, winning his audience over

ONE ESSENTIAL part of the storyteller’s art is to deliver a stirring invitation that can’t easily be turned down. Some will start with a command: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles”, for instance, certainly grabs the attention.

A more indirect approach is to tantalise the listener with the thrill of the subject matter: “Of arms and the man I sing”, is an opener that doesn’t need an added “shall I go on?”

Garrison Keillor, the American novelist, journalist, columnist, filmmaker and broadcaster (he himself tends to go by humorist), may find comparisons to Homer or Virgil a tad grandiose.

Indeed, following an introduction from Colm Tóibín, heralding his addition to the Kilkenny Arts Festival with references to Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney, Keillor replied: “My God! Start off with a high standard, won’t you?”

Yet his performance – in an over-subscribed, effusive and expectant audience in the Ormonde Hotel – was just as infused with a sense of place, hearkening back to past masters, while easily shrugging off any whiff of pretension. And so he began with a command, a joke and a song.

“Here I am, o Lord,” sang Keillor, in a voice as steady and slow as dripping caramel, “and here is my prayer: Please be there. When I die, like other folks, don’t want to find out you’re a hoax. Oh Lord, please exist.”

For many in the audience, the world Keillor creates is something similar: you want to believe in it, even when all known evidence suggests you shouldn't. Keillor's weekly news on his 35-year-old radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, begins, "It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon", a place now as richly detailed, densely populated and as hard to find on official maps as Narnia or Middle Earth.

Nonetheless, Keillor fans make frequent imaginary pilgrimages to the small, church-dominated town, wrought with such affectionate detail, creative leaps, titillating gossip and barbed asides that, even though Wobegon occupies a midwest geographic blind spot, you’ll still hear all about it.

Likewise, Keillor’s voice is so familiar that it can be hard to reconcile with a face. The one he supplies – broad, downturned and deceptively sour – like a bulldog’s, seems to spurn attention as he directs his oration to his fingernails, his red shoes or the floor. It’s 20 minutes before he shows us his eyes.

Such is the contract between storyteller and listener that it’s hard to work out which is richer in appeal – that Keillor lets us into his wide, capricious imagination, or that we let him into ours. But as he drifts between several sung sonnets, mentioning Homer, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, nubile women and roasted carrots, witticisms of a Yankee in Kilkenny (“America invented Ireland. It has some relationship to the one that many of you live in. We took a contentious and cantankerous people and made you sweet”) and a fond extended remembrance of his uncle, a lapsed Lutheran sinner who saved his life, it is impossible to tell what is extemporary and what is by rote, what is pure fantasy and what contains a kernel of truth. The only certainties are that, for about two uninterrupted hours, his speech is unfailingly hilarious and – good God! – the man can talk.

The careful embellishment of a wild story with specific detail is a trick shared by the epic poet, the consummate yarn-spinner and the accomplished liar. If Keillor’s mellifluous monologue sounds too good to be true, his audience has learned to swallow its disbelief.

But the dazzle of his oratory – which concluded with a story drawn, almost verbatim, from his 2007 novel Pontoonand so thick with character and backstory, accident and design, improbability and inevitability, it could never be summarised – was to see a man spinning innumerable plates of narrative, often letting them wobble, but never allowing them to come crashing down.

After a denouement of such ludicrous comic contrivance, which somehow reassures us that every ordinary life is part of a much more extraordinary story, Keillor concluded, simply: “As we say in Lake Wobegon, it could have been worse.” His audience erupted with appreciation for another dispatch from a place they will never see; a place they never need to.