I never win anything, so when I found out I scored two free tickets to attend an event celebrating international literature I was quite excited. The tickets came courtesy of @Vintagebooks (on Twitter) and the event, part of Harvill Secker's 100th birthday celebrations, was staged at Foyles flagship store yesterday.
Getting me out of bed early on a rainy miserable Saturday is no mean feat, and still nursing a sore shoulder and stiff neck, makes it even more of a miracle. But I was keen to see Irish writers Joseph O'Connor and Gene Kerrigan, among many other interesting names on the bill.
There were five sessions, but the most interesting, in my opinion, was the first, entitled "Books that Changed the World" (in which Joseph O'Connor, Clare Clark and Nicholas Shakespeare discussed how literature has the power to change how we view the world), and the fourth, entitled "Crime Pays" (in which Stuart Neville and Gene Kerrigan looked at the popularity of crime fiction).
I'm not going to bore you with the details of either, mainly because I didn't take notes, but in the first session each of the authors named a book that had changed their world -- here's what they chose: Joseph O'Connor went for Catcher in the Rye, Clare Clark chose Black Beauty and Nicholas Shakespeare singled out Love in a Time of Cholera, which he's read six or seven times.
In the "Crime Pays" session I was brave enough to put up my hand and ask did either author see the day when a crime novel might win the Booker Prize. Neville, whose debut novel The Twelve is set in Northern Ireland, said he couldn't see why not. He referred to the controversy surrounding Tim Rob Smith's Child 44, which was longlisted in 2008, but thought the prize had recently been opened up to include all sorts of books, so why shouldn't a thriller win it. Kerrigan, a softly spoken Irishman with a Dublin accent, was as pragmatic as ever: "No, it's a literary prize for literary fiction."
My Other Half, who I had shamelessly dragged along with me, also asked a question: did Kerrigan's career as a journalist help him to write fiction? Again, the answer was pragmatic. He said that even though he had reported on all manner of horrendous crimes (for the Irish press), when he writes fiction he has to get inside the heads of these people -- and that's not always easy.
What I liked most about this session, aside from Kerrigan's practical, if somewhat world-weary, attitude, was that both authors believe it is crime writers who tell us most about the society we live in today. Which backed up the theory that I wrote about in this post, where I suggested Irish crime novelists were "dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half" in a way that had been ignored by literary novelists.
Ironically enough, this session was the least well attended out of all five on the bill, which, to me at least, suggests a slight snobbishness about crime fiction. Indeed, the woman sitting next to me spent the entire hour that Kerrigan and Neville were on stage reading a book and eating her lunch, completely oblivious to the whole discussion.
Finally, the best part of the day was receiving our Harvill Secker goodie bags as we walked out the door. This household now owns two copies of each of the following: Gunther Grass's Peeling the Onion, Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame, Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, Jose Saramago's Blindness, Louis De Bernieres's The Partisan's Daughter and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I smell a giveaway or two coming soon...
