Feature:The Dublin Review of Books is a new online literary forum - and it's free. Editors Maurice Earls and Enda O'Doherty talk to Arminta Wallace.
'Money?" Maurice Earls and Enda O'Doherty are far too polite to gawp. They are, however, regarding me with a kind of dismayed surprise, as if I'd stomped into the civilised environs of the Kilkenny Design café on Dublin's Nassau Street and plonked my boots on the table. They're here to talk about the imminent launch of their online magazine, the Dublin Review of Books (drb).
"It's not intended to make money," Earls says, gently.
"It's totally free," O'Doherty adds, in case I still haven't made the requisite cognitive leap.
I tuck my feet firmly beneath my chair and admit that I'm impressed. I've come to associate the internet with the regular and often lethally costly consumption of books. This enterprise, by contrast, will provide the voracious readers of Ireland with a forum for discussion, entertainment and cultural dialogue. And now that we have such a forum, it's really quite hard to figure out why we didn't have one before.
"Well, the idea of a literary magazine is one we've had for a long time," says Earls, who has been running the bookshop, Books Upstairs, on College Green in Dublin since he co-founded it in 1978. "We looked at the possibility of a print edition on a few occasions, and could never quite see a way of making it work. Distribution would be confined to Dublin and a few other Irish cities, and maybe - if we were lucky - a few cities in Britain. Our audience is potentially much more widely dispersed than that."
The internet, however, provides a ready-made special-interest audience - and on a global scale. With the online ink barely dry, reactions to a sample edition of the review have already come from as far afield as Australia and Canada.
"The prototype edition has been seen by, I suppose, a few hundred people," says O'Doherty, an Irish Times journalist. "And we got a certain amount of feedback which was quite positive. Actually, it was all positive. I suppose the people who felt negatively didn't respond. But we're quietly confident, because a lot of the things that people have said are things like 'sorely needed', and 'at last'."
The first issue of the drb features 10 review essays on diverse topics, reflecting its editors' desire to cover a wide range of subject matter, from architecture to literature, from history through economics and social issues to philosophy and religion. Highlights of the opening issue include the final interview with the late Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski - which is appearing in English translation for the first time - and an essay by an Orthodox Christian, Peter Brooke, on what has turned into one of the hot topics in scientific and theological circles, the ding-dong initiated by the publication of Richard Dawkins's bestselling book, The God Delusion.
"It's a wonderful piece," says Earls of the latter. "It's terribly well-written, not nit-picking at all. A very attractive statement of Christian sensibility."
The eclecticism is deliberate. The review will offer a distinctly Irish perspective but will also, say its editors, take a lively interest in what's going on in neighbouring cultures, especially those of the new Europe. Thus the first issue boasts two pieces about Poland as well as an article on the history of eastern Europe by a Slovenian diplomat. There'll also be a survey of the career of the painter, Camille Souter; an examination of Gore Vidal's relationship with radical politics in the US; and a piece which examines the way in which the work of the 19th-century novelist and storyteller, William Carleton, bridges the transition from oral to written culture, and from Irish to English.
All essays published in each new edition of the review will be easily accessed in future by means of the drb's online archive. They can also be printed off with ease - good news for those who prefer to read hardcopy on the train or the bus, rather than online.
"What has been in our heads from the beginning is that no matter what subject is treated, the essays we publish will be intelligible to any intelligent reader," says O'Doherty. "If we were to commission a piece on Raphael, for example, it would - we hope - be accessible and understandable to someone who knows little more than that Raphael was a Renaissance painter."
Some of the material will be written by academics, others by people with a strong personal interest in a subject, "but even those which are written by academics are not written for academics", according to O'Doherty.
WITH THE REVIEW due to appear four times a year, plans are already under way for the June issue.
"We have four or five things bouncing about as possibles for future issues," says Earls. "We'll definitely be carrying a fairly lengthy essay on the poetry of Paul Muldoon, and also a serious look at the nature of Celtic Tiger crime. There have been a plethora of potboilers on the subject - we'll be taking a look at what's involved in the sociology and economics of crime in prosperous Ireland."
For the moment, the plan is to develop an identity for the magazine by concentrating on review essays rather than by publishing original works of fiction and/or poetry. But with other online journals offering everything from quirky personal ads, snazzy merchandising and poetry on podcast to interviews and book previews (see panel), there's no telling what the future will bring for the drb.
One thing's for sure; there's no shortage of potential books to review. British and Irish newspapers rarely review books from, say, American university publishers - many of which are serious, but not specialist - and almost never run essay-length pieces of longer than 2,000 words. But in trying to steer a middle course between the often superficial world of popular journalism and the often stuffy world of academe, is the drb running the risk of falling between stools? In other words, is there a real readership for such an online magazine in Ireland?
"There are, it's true, good review pages in newspapers - The Irish Times, the Guardian, and so on," says O'Doherty. "But our project is predicated on the notion that if people will read a 1,000-word review on a topic in which they're very interested, there's a good chance that they'll also be interested in reading a 4,000-word review on the same topic. Of course, they don't have to read everything - they can pick and choose. But to read a 4,000-word article takes half an hour. What's half an hour?"
Well, we all know the answer to that one. In the company of a good book - or a good book review, or a good review essay, as the case may be - it's a happy half-hour indeed.
The Dublin Review of Books is at www.drb.ie