Marlon James at AWF 2016: Fascinating and free-flowing

Liz from Collections Insights went to hear the Jamaican-born novelist, now resident in the U.S., mostly from curiosity. She's now on not one but two wait lists for his book -- the print and the e-book version, a "whichever comes sooner attitude" which already tells us much about the session. Here's her full account:

When Noelle McCarthy introduced Marlon James, who won the Booker Prize last year with his A Brief History of Seven Killings, as the writer of a “bloody great book in every sense of the work” we knew were in for a treat – if for no other reason that we would be listening to two of the most attractive accents in the world – Irish and Jamaican.

As it turned out, the content as well as the delivery made the session fascinating. The rapport between McCarthy and James led to an hour of free-flowing conversation and covered a vast range of topics, from the music of Prince and space break sex to getting through writer’s block and the history of Jamaica.

The conversation started with a discussion of the recent death of Prince as James lives in Minneapolis and is a huge Prince fan. Purple Rain was the first record he bought and in his high school year book he was described as the person “most likely to work for Prince”. James’s regret was that he had never quite got round to seeing Prince live.

A Brief History of Seven Killings explores the abortive attempt to assassinate Bob Marley in 1976 and the impact that had both in Jamaica and in the US. The book is told by what McCarthy described as a “polyphony of characters”, each with their own distinct voice. James describes all his novels as being driven by voice, and finding the right voice as essential to telling the story. “The only voice I am not interested in is my own”. When he first started A Brief History he tried out different voices, searching for the “magic one” to tell the story. When a friend asked why he thought it was only one person’s story, he realised the number of voices he needed was actually 76.

The novel is notable for its graphic sex and violence – visceral was a word that came up a lot. James felt that in order to nail the character or “the voice” you sometimes had to risk going too far, to get to what was wanted. When it came up again later, he said “You’d be surprised how prudish and how squeamish I am”, but that his characters demanded more of him. What he described as “space break sex” was not enough. To explain he gave us an example:


     Tom said to Harry, “I have always loved you.”

     The next morning……


James said he found starting a novel terribly hard, with many false starts, but that he would read his way out of writer's block. Marguerite Duras’s The North China Lover was especially praised for its sparse format – “stage director's notes rather than a novel”. He also said he had read the entire script of the TV series Breaking Bad, although he had yet to actually see an episode.

Talking more about the central theme of his novel, he described 1976, the year of the attack on Bob Marley, as a pivotal year in Jamaican history, when the hopes and dreams born of Jamaica's independence began to unravel. James was six at the time -- his mother a cop, his father a lawyer. While he was aware of their heightened fear, he didn’t understand why. Writing A Brief History was a way to find out what 1976 was like for adults who, like his parents, had lived through it.

It was one of those discussions you wished could just keep on going. James obviously thinks deeply about the process of writing, the role of the novel and how history is perceived, and you could see he enjoyed sharing his ideas in this sort of forum. I hope we will see him at the Auckland Writers’ Festival again.

-- Liz

Jane Smiley at AWF 2016: "A life's work"

Liz from Regional Collections made a long-time good intention into a reality when she went to hear Jane Smiley, and she was not disappointed. Exactly the opposite! Here she tells us about why:

I first heard Jane Smiley talk on the BBC World Service Book Club discussing her Pulitzer Prize- winning A Thousand Acres, a version of the King Lear story set in Iowa. I’ve been meaning to read it ever since, but as is so often the way, never got around to it. I jumped at the chance to hear her in person at the Writers Festival, and thought I’d better make a start on reading at least one of her works, if there were any available with the Festival fast approaching. Saved by an e-book, by the time her session came round I was well immersed in the life of Iowa farmers in the 1920s, as depicted in Some Luck, the first book in her ongoing "Last One Hundred Years" trilogy.

Jane Smiley is tall – “you should see me in my 2 inch heels” she said, but the thing that caught my eye was the somewhat retro jumper she was wearing. It turned out that she had knitted it herself, using what she said was a typically Iowan product – knitting wool made out of soy husks. Her wide-ranging literary output includes among other things, an essay on knitting, "Why Bother?", in Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting.

Interviewed by Paula Morris, Jane Smiley gave us many fascinating insights both about her personal life and also about reading, writing and the novel. It is tempting to try to list them all, but that would not capture the wry, laconic delivery that made her so entertaining.

Paula Morris’s praise of Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel led to a discussion of the role of the novel. Smiley said one of the things she truly loved about the novel is the sense of freedom it gives -- “The more novels you read, the greater your inner life is…. you are more likely to think for yourself, and less likely to follow others”. She saw Richardson’s Pamela as a breakthrough work because it gave women a voice for the first time.

"One Hundred Years" has a large cast of characters and the story is told from a variety of points of view. In answering the question of how she managed to achieve these many voices, Smiley said she belonged to a large gossipy family, and there was nothing she and her siblings liked better than getting her aunts and uncles to tell stories of their childhood. Each would tell the stories from a different perspective – “No,that’s not how it happened - it really happened this way… ” and would also have their own theories on what made others in the family tick. “Your mother always thinks that….” Smiley saw this environment, where the description of an event changed with the storyteller, as a natural upbringing of a novelist.

While she thought listening was the first step in being a story-teller, she felt the first step in becoming a novelist was reading. However, for her the motivation to write came from her insatiable curiosity to find out why things happened the way they did. Only one of her 60 books was written from her own experience (presumably Moo, the novel set in an American university in the midwest). The rest cover a staggering range of subjects and styles – a novel about medieval Greenland, Horse heaven, set in the world of horse racing, young adult novels and a number of non-fiction works including The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasof.
The extent of her love of “finding out things” is revealed by her praise for a weather site which gives a hundred years of daily weather readings for the Midwest. Just the thing you need if you are writing a year by year account of farming life in Iowa.

Jane finished her session with a reading from Golden Age, letting us hear the voices of the modern day members of that Iowa farming family. It was evident from her reading how much she loved her characters, with all their quirks and flaws.

If, like me, you haven’t quite got round to reading something by Jane Smiley, don’t put it off anymore. You are bound to find something in her prodigious range that you will enjoy. And if you don’t like the way the author thinks, you have the freedom, as Jane advocates, to quietly put the book aside, and leave it.

-- Liz