Review > Book Festival: Patrick McCabe & Colm Toibin | Catherine Hall & Eleanor Thom | G J Moffat & Yrsa Sigurdardottir
PUT two of the great men of Irish letters on the same menu and what do you get? A main course of literary heavyweights, with a complimentary side dish of deadpan humour. Colm Toibin and Patrick McCabe clearly know each other well enough to sit back and let the sparks fly.
Both writers were born in 1955 and grew up in small Irish towns, Toibin in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, McCabe in Clones, Co Monaghan. But there the similarities end. While Toibin’s prose tends to be lingering and elegiac, McCabe’s is visceral, violent, often very funny.
Their latest novels have little common ground, except that both look towards the past. McCabe’s The Holy City, which he describes as an “impishly serious parody”, is a memoir of a sexagenarian boulevardier looking back on the Ireland of the 1960s, fresh with the arrival of Herman’s Hermits and Lulu, sex, drugs and rock‘n’roll.
Toibin’s Brooklyn explores the life of a young Irishwoman who emigrates to New York in 1951 and finds herself homesick and isolated on the heels of the American dream. He described it as “riffing on” books such as Henry James’s Washington Square and George Moore’s Esther Waters, books about women who have little say in their own destiny.
But there was also another, more political, motivation. He spoke of his anger at how Ireland treated the immigrants who arrived there looking for work in the early 1990s. He had hoped for better, he said, as his country had sent its own immigrants all over the world. While he was determined that no politics would touch the book itself, he believes that Brooklyn is a timely reminder of how it feels to be alone and far from home.
A spark of rage is no bad thing in a writer. Debut novelist Eleanor Thom described how “a flame of anger” burned in her when she heard her colleagues at the planning agency where she worked discussing the Travelling People. In a sense, that began her journey to discover the history of her mother’s family, who were travellers, which inspired her novel The Tin-Kin, set in Elgin in the 1950s and the 1990s.
She shared the stage with another debut novelist, Catherine Hall, whose book Days of Grace also moves between past and present. Her protagonist is an elderly woman looking back on the days when, as a teenager, she was sent as an evacuee from London to live with a vicar’s family in Kent, and how her experiences there would shape the rest of her life.
The shadows cast by the past on the present were also a feature of work by two crime writers, Glasgow’s G J Moffat and Iceland’s Yrsa Sigurdardottir, both of whom have lawyers as their protagonists. While Moffat’s Logan Finch encounters adventures in a large Glasgow law firm, Sigurdardottir’s heroine, a single mother, investigates complex mysteries “dark, deep and icy, like an Icelandic fjord”.
