Loose Leaves Caroline WalshOne can't say the excitement was quite the same when the Man Booker shortlist was announced on Thursday as it was last year when two Irish writers, Sebastian Barry and John Banville, featured - Banville going on to win.
But it is fascinating when one senses batons being passed to a younger generation, and this year's shortlist is a comparatively youthful one. Last year's Booker chairman, John Sutherland, wasn't alone when he wondered if the list might signal a changing of the literary guard: "What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new."
Kate Grenville (The Secret River, Canongate), in her mid-50s, is very much the senior of the six authors, followed by Edward St Aubyn (Mother's Milk, Picador), in his mid-40s, and Sarah Waters (The Night Watch, Virago), who turned 40 this summer. After that it's a troika of thirtysomethings: MJ Hyland (Carry Me Down, Canongate), Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss, Hamish Hamilton) and Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men, Viking). Given that towering senior figures such as Nadine Gordimer were toppled from the longlist, this makes the shortlisting all the more of an accolade for these young novelists.
Anyone who had money on the big names on the longlist got a shock when most failed to survive the paring down - but the bookies were thrilled.
"We couldn't have compiled a better shortlist from a bookmaking point of view," said William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe. "Many of the fancied runners, like David Mitchell, Peter Carey, Barry Unsworth and Howard Jacobson, have all fallen by the wayside and most punters have already lost their money."
The company made the one remaining well-known contender, Sarah Waters, the 2/1 favourite to win the £50,000 (€74,133) prize on October 10th. In terms of life stories, the shortlist has thrown up extraordinary material. Hisham Matar's father, a Libyan dissident who was kidnapped when his son was a student, was imprisoned in Tripoli and there has been no word of him since 1995. Edward St Aubyn, meanwhile, was raped by his father as a child and was later a heroin addict, only to become a writer after undergoing therapy. And in
MJ Hyland, born in London to Irish parents and whose early childhood included a period living in a tower block in Ballymun, there turned out to be an Irish aspect to the shortlist after all.
Under the Ibsen influence
The seismic effect on the young James Joyce of receiving a message from Henrik Ibsen is legendary.
"I am a young Irishman, 18 years old, and the words of Ibsen I shall keep in my heart all my life," Joyce wrote when the playwright passed on his thanks in April 1900 for a piece the young Irishman had written on him in a small literary journal called the Fortnightly Review. It was, as Joyce's biographer, Richard Ellmann, said, a real benison at the beginning of his career: "He had entered the world of literature under the best auspices in that world."
But Joyce was not the only Irish writer influenced by the Norwegian, and to mark the 100th anniversary of his death, Trinity College Dublin is hosting a colloquium in his honour on Tuesday. The organisers - Terence Brown , Nicholas Grene and Maryann Valiulis - stress that Ibsen's impact on Ireland was considerable, as an influence on Wilde and Shaw as well as Joyce and also through his dramaturgy, which inspired playwrights associated with the early successes of the Irish theatrical movement. Contemporary Irish dramatists have also produced adaptations of canonical Ibsen texts. But the colloquium will range beyond the literary and theatrical to the way his work explored gender issues, created remarkable roles for women and, as such, was part of the consciousness revolution that stimulated feminism.
The event is being held in association with the Norwegian embassy, marking the State visit to Ireland of King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway.
Catching the Trevor-mobile
A festival of films based on the work of William Trevor is on its way from the Leitrim Cinemobile, in association with the Irish Film Institute. The festival, Adaptation: William Trevor On Screen, runs from next Friday until Sunday. The opening-night programme begins, appropriately enough, with a reception in the Rainbow Ballroom of Romance, in Glenfarne, Co Leitrim, inspiration for what is arguably Trevor's best-known story. The Frank Chambers Dance Band will set the mood and anyone who turns up in 1950s dress gets free admission to the screening of Pat O'Connor's classic film, The Ballroom of Romance, on later that evening in the Cinemobile, which then moves to Dromahair for screenings of other films over the weekend.
www.irishfilm.ie, www.leitrimcinema.ie