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 18th 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.
