In the plethora of events marking the Beckett centenary, it is especially appropriate that an RTÉ Radio Thomas Davis Lecture series should be devoted to the writer.
Beckett nearly broadcast a talk on the station himself, back in 1946; and its drama department has delivered some very fine productions of his radio plays over the years, especially a memorable All That Fall with Marie Keane.
Broadcasting of the lectures which are collected in this volume begins next Thursday, which means that what I write is as much a preview as a review.
Christopher Murray, the editor, has assembled a collection which commendably covers all the main areas of Beckett's prolonged artistic activity, which was more multifarious than one might imagine.
Murray also contributes an introduction which manages the difficult feat of doing justice to this remarkable body of work.
The series also examines Beckett's relation to Irish society and to philosophy. Obviously, there are space and time limitations, but it would have been nice to hear or read something on Beckett and art, or memories of Beckett the man - there is no need to be too reverential. Nonetheless, it would be hard to think of a better centenary overview of Beckett's work than this.
It is particularly pleasing that the contributors are mostly Irish, or Irish-based: there was a time, not so long ago, when this would not have seemed as natural as it now appears. Terence Brown, indeed, focuses on Beckett's relation to Irish society. He has a keen awareness of the nuances of Beckett's exact social position, far keener than that of some of those who write on this topic, and it stands him in good stead.
Understandably, Waiting for Godot gets an essay to itself, from Gerry Dukes. It is the canonical place from which to start in any consideration of Beckett's work; though he himself was distressed by its instant fame and believed it had been greatly misunderstood, he was saddled with it for the rest of his life. Dukes sensitively explores the play's wider resonances, without reducing it to allegory or parable.
The story of Beckett's work in drama after Godot is taken up by Anthony Roche. He is perhaps rather restrictive in his decision that just four works, subsequent to Godot, merit the term "great". But he treats of those four - Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days and Come and Go - with great insight and a strong theatrical sense, a quality not always found in academic discussion.
Knowledge of the ways the plays work in performance is greatly enhanced through the essays by the theatrical practitioners Barry McGovern and Rosemary Pountney, and through the special expertise of Katherine Worth.
The fiction is discussed by Declan Kiberd (Murphy), Anthony Cronin (the trilogy) and John Banville (the late prose). It is good to see Murphy receive special attention: Kiberd's is a very searching essay, focusing, in an unusual but important perspective, on the position of the mentally ill in that work. Cronin is particularly sensitive to the effects of the removal of social context in the trilogy, with characters who are reduced "to the extremer simplicities of need and satisfaction".
The most beautiful and impassioned essay, not surprisingly, comes from John Banville on the late prose, which he has long championed. Reading it brought sharply back the excitement of those days in the 1970s and 1980s, when another slim volume would issue from Calder or Minuit, bearing witness to another Beckettian foray into the unknown. Banville brings out the qualities of these extraordinary late texts with the special intimacy born of a long love.
JCC Mays is perhaps unduly modest about Beckett's achievement as a poet. It is a small body of work, it does not aspire to "major" or classic status, but it is a fascinatingly personal witness, in many ways self-lacerating and self-defeating (though in this, of course, just mirroring the larger Beckettian project). It is in any case difficult to write about Beckett's poetry because it remains in a mess, both textually and in publication terms. And Mays's essay, in discussing the poetic qualities of the prose and drama, is full of the insights one would expect from this marvellous pioneer of Beckett studies in this country.
Whether much can really be said about Beckett and philosophy in the course of a brief radio talk is debatable. Dermot Moran strives valiantly and would at least give the listener or reader an idea of the main issues. Richard Kearney's challenging essay, centring on Imagination Dead Imagine, similarly should at least give a sense of the kind of impasse into which Beckett unflinchingly drove his work, although I do think a greater focus on the actual image this text presents - and less on the narrator - might have yielded more insights.
Reading this finely diverse collection, one is struck, again, by the variety of Beckett's achievement. It's not just a matter of the different media, or of the long writing career. Starting always from the same predicament or impasse, from which he refused to avert his gaze, he managed to express it in an extraordinary diversity of forms and modes which bore tribute, despite himself, to the imagination's unceasing resourcefulness. It was risky - but Beckett proceeded with an incredible sureness of touch that hardly ever faltered. From these exiguous and impoverished materials he produced work that enriches us all.
Samuel Beckett: 100 Years, Edited by Christopher Murray New Island, 184pp. €14.99
Terence Killeen is the author of Ulysses Unbound: A Reader's Companion to James Joyce's Ulysses. He is an Irish Times journalist
The Thomas Davis Lecture Series on RTÉ Radio 1 starts this Thursday at 8.45pm and will be broadcast each Thursday for 13 weeks