I don't know if Anne Enright is planning to enter her next novel for the Orange Fiction Prize, but she certainly has a thing about the colour, not to mention about wallpaper. What that thing is I can't even guess at because, despite having gone to the trouble of twice reading her page-long Diary in the current issue of the London Review of Books, I haven't the faintest notion what she's on about.
"Sitting in France," she begins, "writing about death and wallpaper, it is no surprise to find my walls orange." Let's ignore the dangling participle and allow her to continue: "Like the fruit, the walls are good in the morning and odd at night. Unlike the fruit, the colour is strangely flat, very inedible: the blind colour of optimism, of airport furniture, of faith in the modern and the failure of that faith." Er, yes, Anne.
Staring at the wallpaper, she then muses about the difference between a pattern and a story, "as paragraphs repeat and strain for change, like the unsuccessful mutation zigzagging the walls: flowers held monstrous in stasis, trying to stop being flowers and start just being shapes - or is it the other way around?" Probably the latter.
There is also wallpaper on the bathroom ceiling: "I can see it when I look up in the shower, while my thigh is grabbed by the different, orange flowers of the shower curtain, cold and wet and friendly, the way strange shower curtains always are.
At this stage, I began to wonder what Anne was on while writing this, and if I could have some of it, too, but she was only getting into her stride. Having observed that "the poor have different emotions from the rich, even with their eyes closed", and that "this is what the Tories have done to English literature", she's immediately back to wallpaper: "Wallpaper described is always hopeful, tacky, peeling, while the walls of the rich remain tastefully general, defying geometry."
From there she takes a geographical leap into Bucharest, which apparently "is full of untrammelled, pregnant women, in swirly tights, cross-hatched skirts and floral tops, like an Irish sitting-room". Very like an Irish sitting-room. I'd say.
And having savaged the Tories, Anne now offers a searing analysis of liberal values (and no, don't ask why): "One thing a liberal cannot stand is a good sprinkling of things that might be taupe chrysanthemums on a deep purple ground with a trellis of lurex thread." No taupe chrysanthemums in Paddy Ashdown's house, you can bet.
From Bucharest it's merely a short hop to Dakar, where the hotel "is decorated in brown and orange, looped in thick sine waves around the lobby where the prostitutes wear Laura Ashley ... I go to sleep and dream of upholstered sex.
Then it's back to Romania where the Ceaucescus have divided the country into "his'n'hers, like bath towels, his nuclear power plant, her petrochemicals factory - they treated it like their living room". Best place for a petrochemicals factory, in my opinion, just beside the television set in the corner.
Finally, back in Dublin, I open my mouth and a roll of wallpaper falls out of it". By now my mouth was also open, very wide, and there was a strange throbbing in my brain. Still, I can't wait to read Anne's new novel.
IF you have an overpowering desire to write, perhaps in the manner of Anne, Catherine Phil McCarthy is running a creative course in the Irish Writers' Centre on Monday mornings from February 3rd to March 10th. I have my own views on the whole idea of creative writing classes, but having aired them in this column before I won't bore you by repeating them. I'll merely say that this course costs £65 and that, for all I know, it might provide just the stimulus you need.
It's one of four courses about to start at the Centre. Joe, O'Donnell will be taking hopefuls through the intricacies of short stories for radio, Enda Wyley will be holding poetry workshops, and Gerry Beirne will be grappling with the contemporary American short story. These three courses begin on January 21st.
JOHN SWEENEY of Galway writes to put my mind at rest about an academic controversy I mentioned a few weeks back. With commendable brevity he declares: "The Keats versus Dylan debate was recently resolved: Dylan the better poet, Keats the better singer." Yes, but the CD transfers are very scratchy.
JUST before Christmas, I pointed out that Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark was the most popular choice in the Books of the Year lists in newspapers both here and in Britain. Indeed, it was mentioned far more often than Graham Swift's Last Orders, which, in the opinion of the Booker judges, was the superior work.
However, the Derryman's book is strongly tipped to win the Whitbread first-novel prize, which will be announced on Monday. Indeed, it may well be announced as overall Whitbread book of the year.
If so, many readers will be delighted - though probably not the people at Granta, whose ex-editor Bill Buford (now with the New Yorker) had commissioned the book. However, after Buford left, Granta dragged their heels for so long about a publication date that the author decided to give the book to Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape instead.