One of the delights of a literature festival is that of hearing the writer’s voice. This is not blank adoration, nor an effect of the cultish wish to be close to the talented or famous, but a stranger and rather more subtle pleasure. When one hears the writer’s voice, particularly as they read or recite their work, there’s an odd internal residue effect, so that the voice can be summoned when one returns to the prose itself. No doubt the auditory nerve that enables us to recall music - and also, in Jonathon Sacks’ view, to replay maddening jingles with lunatic repetitiousness – also registers memory of the reading voice.
The minute Edna O’Brien began her husky Irish speaking, there it was; the necessary music. She opened her session with a joke: at eighty, she has just won the Frank O’Connor Prize for her new book of stories, Saints and Sinners ; her first book, the famous Country Girls, was negatively reviewed by Frank O’Connor and he claimed among other things that the author had poor choice in men. The claim was “clairvoyant”, O’Brien said, and she was pleased now with the irony of being awarded the prize in his name. From that moment on her lovely voice enchanted: she spoke of the literary enchantment linked to song (and to Joyce in particular); and indeed her first novel is about to reappear as a kind of ‘semi-musical’ stage version, She spoke too of the dreamy in-between state that writing both performs and engages – Sebald was her model here. But it was when O”Brien recited her own prose from memory, with a kind of sumptuous fulsomeness and aesthetic dedication, that the audience was invaded - in my imagination anyway - by the tones and timbre of her utterly particular voice.
Gail Jones
Writer-in-Residence
Edna O'Brien is an enchantress and she captured my spirit.
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