Spotlight on the Reader with Kate Bateman - Workshop 3 (Openings of Novels & 'Time Present and Time Past' by Deirdre Madden)

Kate Bateman is a teacher, reviewer and seminar facilitator. She has given workshops at a variety of book club festivals in Wexford, Dublin and most recently at Ennis. As part of our 'Spotlight on the Reader' series Kate examined a variety of literary genres, focusing on works by authors participating this year's Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.

Workshop 3  

·         Openings of Novels – Notes

·         Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden: Faber & Faber, 224pp, £12.99

  

The critic, Terry Eagleton, says novels, seem to “spring out of a kind of silence”; they inaugurate a “fictional world that did not exist before”.

Think about this . . . .

As, readers, though most likely we are unaware of it, we are culturally conditioned even before we open a work of fiction to have expectations  - expectations and an anticipation to be engaged. We have expectations at a deeper level too – that the work honours what it says on: the blurb, the reviews, the word-of-mouth or what we know of treatment of the topic.

Writers, on the other hand seek to create a method of entry to a book’s substance. Whether writers and publishers cooperate is only known to the individuals themselves,  - as they thrash out such matters possibly over at least  one “literary lunch! Publishers are selling an artefact, which for them eye-appeal is the most important. But there are other items contributing to a book’s appeal on the self. The kind of soft/hard cover, for instance. Remember the Hare With Amber Eyes – an elegantly shaped book with a heavy board cover, no picture, printed on paper with the type setting at deep margins. As well as the usual frontispiece with the copyright & publishing information, there is a table of contents, a diagram, with the crest top right of the Ehphrussi Family Tree. Then the work itself begins with an eighteen-page Preface, followed by the first page of the novel with its title -  PART ONE – PARIS 1871-1899 and a map of Paris (Google, I think, not 18^th Century). Each page has the chapter title and page number in point 3 font at the bottom of the page.

Question: What are our expectations and why do you think the presentation style was chosen? 

We begin reading and grasp meanings because we come from a cultural framework of knowing we are at the beginning; just as we enter a theatre with a sense of crossing over, we have preparedness about how things open and have some knowledge of what a literary work is – we know the scene has to be set.

We, readers enter a contract to engage with the text but also knowing we can break it by not finishing the work.

Sometimes we are decoyed with a false start or a start that seems to have scant or unrevealed relevance to the body of the work until the book has been read. It is I’d argue a good idea to read the work with an awareness of any trim – lines of poetry/prose, a preface, an introduction

It’s as though, Eagleton says, the author clears his throat . . . . .

The power of the opening is to create a world, sometimes to amuse or frighten, certainly to persuade the reader to let go and commence the journey.

If we are going to talk about a work of fiction we should aim to going beyond the words on the page.

Perhaps look at the sentence formation, listen for the sounds of words and phrasing. An awareness of the emotional attitudes in a passage is worth thinking about when talking about a novel. Also, a focus on defining the kind of writing – whether lofty, or casual; glib, clever or witty; sombre, serious, sardonic or comic or some other mood or attitude that may be detected, is worthwhile.

  
(Kate looked at the opening chapters of three novels by Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival authors

• Eloise by Judy Finnegan
• The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
•  The Blue Book by A.L. Kennedy

Time Present and Time Past by Deirdre Madden: Faber & Faber, 224pp, £12.99

The three lines of poetry centrally placed on the novel’s pre-opening page and the words of the title are from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton.  These are helpful to the reader later when, the apparently practical-minded, Fintan Buckley becomes distant and vague; even visionary over the cardboard sleeve of the carrot cake (p.9). He surmises that it was his second such moment that day and, as we read on, the epiphany or reverie melds with a close scrutiny of a photograph of old Dublin. What Madden does so well in this book is to show us the outward appearance and knowledge family members have of each other and to combine it with the interior working pulse of the historic imagination. The Now and the Then; Time present and Time past are conflated in the mind of Fintan Buckley as he travels through the book. .

The language and structure of  the novel, however is very grounded.  The time is 2006, before the tiger lost his head and tail. The locations are as vivid as anything in Joyce’s Dubliners. Like Stephen Deadalus, the characters walk on named streets and into named buildings – hospitals and restaurants.  Baggot and Grafton streets are cited, the village of Howth is where the Buckleys live and a journey to Armagh is undertaken to reconnect with a cousin not seen since ending the Troubles. They meet, have meal and resolve not to let too much time pass before their next meeting.

The story links the narratives of several members of the Buckley family over a few days; they are living in Dublin just before the economic crash. They are an ordinary family, which of course means that they are unique. Fintan, the father, at 47 is a solicitor, happily married with three children, is on the surface a completely conventional member of society. 

Fintan’s teenage son points out that his father’s own youth is now “the past”, for the young in Ireland now, it takes an effort to imagine living during the Troubles while the bank crash which will affect Fintan’s sons lives will also pass into history – a history that was once a “now” for us readers.

Houses get attention. Fintan’s sister Martina, lives with their aunt Beth in a curious old house heavy with the aura and furnishings of previous generations.  She is also thinking about the past and about the circumstances in which her life seemed to derail. For her, it’s a process of separating out what is truly past, how it has formed her, and what she is now, there is a sense that places and objects have an almost tangible energy beyond their substance. Eventually Fintan and Martina revisit the location of a photograph and their different responses feel perfectly true to each of them.

The book lightly invites us to explore our own memories as they rampage through the imagination and it also touches on the way modern Ireland rests uneasily on its history.