The Literarian

The Writer’s Voice

The 10^th annual Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival is over. It was, for me at least, a treasure trove. I always take copious notes when I attend a lecture or panel discussion because I know I will end up dwelling on the more interesting concepts and using some of the ideas as starting points for philosophical meanderings that could last days, weeks, even months. (Somebody’s not overly busy, I guess.) The Blue Met had these in spades.

It is a special treat meeting established authors from around the world. Two of these, James Meek and Andrew O’Hagan were featured in a panel discussion on Scottish writers and writing. Both Meek and O’Hagan have journalistic bents that have taken them to such ‘exotic’ places as Siberia and Afghanistan. (Meek’s latest book, The People’s Act of Love, is, in fact, set in Siberia.) What separates them, what serves as grist for their writing mill, is that they see “the hidden peace inside the war” and, when they are home, “the secret war inside the peace”. We are all products of our respective environments, but the image of ourselves as “porous” creatures, absorbing the esoteric as well as the banal is most intriguing. So, too, the idea of writers as “weavers of the scraps of reality”. These scraps are abundant because we live in an “underdescribed world”.

O’Hagan talked about the current Scottish renaissance, a myth really, since the true Scottish enlightenment really took place in the 18^th century when that small and impoverished nation engendered an unprecedented burst of intellectual and scientific accomplishment. It was the time of Boswell and Burns and Sir Walter Scott, of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and David Hume’s Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. O’Hagan joked about the Scottish propensity for mythological self-construction that produced Robert the Bruce and Rob Roy. Scotland is, he said, “all the clichés and more”.

I also had the good fortune to spend time with Irish writer Glenn Patterson, author of seven novels, a wonderful teacher and, clearly, a very decent human being. He explained the difference between a good novel and a good book. He talked at length about Voice. Imaginative literature, he said, is about listening to a voice… that of the author, of course. At the beginning of each novel, the writer decides on how he or she is going to tell the story and then who is going to tell it. In this way, the narrative is given shape. Patterson expounded on the omniscient narrator as well as the unreliable narrator. (For a good example of the latter, read Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal.)

It was all quite an education. Good thing I am porous.

P.S. For more on the Blue Met, check out this series of four posts by Kate Welch.

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