Reading for Writers During Lockdown:
The Irish Voice: Niall Williams
“Don’t you think there’s something wonderful about the Irish voice?”
So said the actress Ann Peacock who herself has narrated – beautifully – some of my novels in audio. She is an expert on the voice, having narrated many hundreds of novels. See her here: https://www.annedover.co.uk/ and https://www.annedover.co.uk/anne-dover/
I am ntrigued by Anne’s comment about how good the Irish voice is to the English ear. I
have long thought this. The power of the Irish voice emerges clearly in
recordings on BBC Sounds for instance, and the voices of narrators of novels
delivered on Audible. But more importantly it emerges very clearly through the
words written on the page, where the vocabulary, syntax and rented landscape sing
out to the ear in a very particular way.
These thoughts crystallised for me when I read on Audio a novel by writer
This Is Happiness explores the human minutiae of daily living in a village West Cork, seen through the fresh eyes of a boy “Noe” visiting his grandparents –“Ganga” and “Dodie”- from the city, in his school holidays.
It
seems to me that all life is here on these pages: the layers of human experience
in a village with a traditional, stoical, hard way of living, stubbornly
adhered to by people confident of their own identity and rightness in their
world. In the story this taken-for-granted
reality is invaded by the arrival of “the electricity”. Among many rich characterisations, the image
of the awful man in charge of this electrifying process is a masterly piece of
writing. But as well as this each element of the novel resonates through the
literary talent of this Irish writer.
Unsentimental
in tone - although the novel treats great themes, like identity, community,
hierarchy, love and the sense of a unique place - it is a very easy read. This,
I feel, is because the story is voiced through the young boy’s perception of
this almost vanished world. A powerful thread running through the story is the
saga of Noe’s relationship with Christy – a wonderful rendering of a relationship
between a boy and man - interweaving Noe’s story with Christy’s lifelong doomed
love affair with woman, now elderly in the village.
The
authorial voice of the storyteller – Noe in old age - occasionally brings us
back to the present, reminding us of how much the world has changed since Noe
was a boy.
Despite
its inherent complexity This Is Happiness is also an easy read because
its embedded lyricism embraces the ancient custom of stories embedded in other
stories which reaches back to the pre-literate tradition of oral storytelling.
This novel springs straight off the page into my ear through the medium of
Dermot Crowley’s narration.
Thinking
on about the novel and Anne Peacock’s observation about the Irish voice made me
think further about the way that the Irish voice has dominated the nature of
so-called English Literature. It also made me think
further about the 19th century migration Wales Scotland and - of
course – Ireland, into the newly flourishing
coalmining area of south-west Durham – another tapestry of small villages with
similar storytelling customs. My own family was part of this migration separate
branches coming from Wales and Scotland. I also had one idiosyncratic grandma
who, I think, came from Ireland. She worked as a domestic in a lunatic asylum
and once told me of the courtship with my grandfather who was an attendant, ‘He
chased me round the table till I caught him.’
Such
a background is of course very inspirational for any writer and in my case can
be can be traced in several of my novels. One of the stories actually begins
with my Welsh heroine coming North on a train from Bagillt in Wales to
Spennymoor in County Durham. In the story she is travelling under the seat
because her father could only afford tickets for four of the children and she
was the fifth and the smallest. That introduction to the novel is a true
glimpse of my own grandmother’s journey at the turn of the last century when
her own language was Welsh. This is one of the many stories I heard from my mother and her sisters whose family
history was a lapidary ediface of stories true and not so true that was a
crucial part of their identity
My
own novel is certainly not a biography but inevitably I have in my head in my
heart the stories within the stories as with Niall Williams. They are part of
my South Durham literary heritage and
the foundation of my inspiration whether the stories are set in South Durham or
not.
Anne
Peacock, who, I found, comes from this same region, told me, ‘In my family’s case it was migrating from the Welsh coal
mining industry to the Durham one I have to thank, for my lifelong love affair
with music and poetry and language in its many forms.
I have often tried to pin down the attraction to me of soft
underlying rhythms and syntax of the South Durham way of speaking and I think this
is where it lies - in the life stories and songs brought into my region by
families from villages in Wales and Scotland and Ireland, whose life
experiences chime together into a particular kind of music. This perhaps is why
the literature coming out of Ireland and surfacing in the English literary canon
holds particular appeal for people like myself and Anne Peacock.
Spurred on by these thoughts about Anne Peacock, Niall Williams and the Irish voice, I decided to check my shelves and see just how much Irish writing has been so bedded down in my writer’s consciousness to the point of actually buying the books. I recognise that in many cases the the works of these writers have been colonised and incorporated into the so called English Canon, but the Irish identity is clearly there in the work of these artists.
These days I am seen as a pretty ancient reader
and write so there are very many books on my shelves. And, sharpened by my
thoughts about Niall Williams and Anne Peacock I notice so many books which are
the work of Irish writers.
I made a list. And even I was surprised to
find just how many there are. Here you go. Happy reading!
 |
| West Cork |
As I
said happy reading!
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