Colm Tóibín

[Applause] thank you very much I feel you over the last few years I have been subletting an apartment each year from different people and it's fascinating you know it's nice to get to sleep in other people's beds without having them in the bed as well you know and but what I think the most interesting part I see of are people's books the books people have and the fact that over three months no matter what happens you end up taking something down that you yourself would not normally read and a few years ago I looked at a list a whole lot of books about American history and and they included em the biographies of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro and then I only am I know about Robert Caro because I actually met him once and I said to him you know you did more damage to my country and Cromwell and he said and he said I've never been in your country I don't have not done any damage to your country and I said well what happened was that one Irish politician who really was interested in in grasped and corruption and and getting you know all those deals done came to America found one of those early biographies about Lyndon Johnson down in Texas what he did all the deals he made brought it back to Ireland and then ordered it by the box load gave it to every politician in his party and so that for really for a decade we lived in Ireland with every politician you would ask some why did you do what you did last week Carol said it's in Cairo and so that the sort of shadow of Robert Caro's all over Ireland was but the book that about that I paid particular attention to is the book the passage to power which is what which is really the story of Johnson becoming president and then the I was reading particularly that section from the time he's appointed vice president and Robert Kennedy thought it takes against him and then once Kennedy's elected the Kennedys don't want really him around much as I was sitting outside the office with Evelyn Lincoln stopping getting inside then the assassination occurs he becomes president and then this extraordinary scene that Kerry described as such care of him suddenly realizing who he's going to become and he has a wonderful description of him silently in the corner of a room just just thinking just thinking and then you have M the but knowing he does he's thinking about the Civil Rights Act the things he's going to put through how well he knows the Senate how well he knows Congress in a way he's a great lesson his story as a rate lesson to everybody including a certain man with an Irish name called Paul Rand as to what you do when you have power in Congress you actually use it properly but that's maybe a bit late for this sort of talk anyway Who am I to preach to Paul Ryan and actually I will preach but I do that later and but and but and and then it comes to the reader knowing that the Johnson is going doesn't know that it's the Vietnam War it's going to be his undoing as Robert Kennedy and turned of coming you know that in other words he in turn will be assassinated at as his brother but as I was reading these these pages and I was thinking you know if they're a novel as good as this and people were talking about all these TV series that I can't watch TV maybe we're gonna go wire and a game of cards and house of troll all sorts of things but I just couldn't I just couldn't understand anything anyone was saying and stuff even I watched one of them with subtitles and even that was no help and so I never got to think about that because at the time I was writing a novel called Nora Webster and the novel is set in the southeast of Ireland in the late 1960s and really nothing at all happens in the I mean I made a joke about the book but it wasn't such a joke that it was Madame Bovary with no Madame and nobody you know said another word steps that is not as though there's any adultery or anything like that happening in this small town in the south east of rcent and then that that I mean the nearest thing to an adventure is when noir Webster goes out and it's a year after her husband dies and she goes out to a gramophone Society which you know people play music like classical music as they all sort of gather in a ring and that was the nearest thing to adventure I'm just trying to make drama out of this but feeling oddly guilty on why doesn't she win the lottery or go to America or something happened to her but I thought no I have to stick to this admit rules about this novel that this novel is about this sort of strange new way in which someone has been lost her anchor in a place trying to rebuild her life and then but nonetheless was on my mind as well because I interrupted the writing of Nora Webster to write the testament of Mary which is the story which is really rather more exciting in fact of Mary the mother of Jesus and and that was performed in the theater a number of times by a number of different actresses and I became a sort of M Stage Door Johnny you know I just couldn't keep away from the actresses and them was one actress in Spain blanket protea was playing the part and then she said to the director when I could could that writer guy the guy who wrote it could just get to go to the backseat some night because every time I come out as the mother of Jesus he's just staring up even in the mouth and why don't know and and afterwards you know because it was hot as she did in the summer in Spain she would want to go for beers and I don't be the guy would take her for beers and sit watching her you know trying to soak in the sort of energy that she had been exude I was trying to get some of it too if so that and all of that led to the to this story and M and Fiona Shaw had played a part of Mary em in New York and in London and it means she was talking about just other stories to write and them which she wasn't suggesting I think she didn't want me to write it but it's for her over the theatre thing she thought she'd had enough of me really in the theater you know she's had to learn my lines and it was hard and so but it was she put it into my mind to look at this story and when I looked at the story of the Oresteia and began to read different translations I read it the introductions to those books some of which are so bad so boring so dull that you'd wonder if they ever had read any Greek theater the people who wrote the introductions but some of them are so brilliant and Carson's especially are so well-written those introductions but they specifically mentioned to play called Iphigenia in Aulis and which is a play that I hadn't read and I told I should run I'm at that age where if I you know when I was younger it wouldn't bother me if I hadn't read something but I'm worried now about not reading things so I went and read it and it changes everything because it gives you the story from platted masters point of view that that so much of the time they did the center of the artist is taken up by Elektra and Elektra has all the power on the stage all the light is coming towards her and her rage and her way of expressing her rage against her mother and her waiting for her brother to return so that they can retaliate against her mother for her mother's killing of their father Agamemnon and but it tells it good it takes you back it's a late play written by Euripides and it is as though almost at the end of his life he sought to make up for all the damage they had all done to Clytemnestra making her to sort of monster mother directly seating from her side I'm from her side it's simple that M before the Trojan Wars begin and agamemnon king agamemnon that the house of Atreus he he realizes that the winds are not in his favor and he's both one sail his ships one sail and he implores the gods to do something about this and the gods say yes we will we will change the wind for you but but in turn you must sacrifice your beautiful daughter if a denier and so he contacts his wife Clytemnestra and says it's got to be a wedding bring if a denier and bring the young boy arrests days as well our son and it's going to be a wedding we're going to marry our daughter to the great warrior Achilles and there will be celebrations and they get all the seamstresses going and they get all the clothes ready and they all arrive and it's going to be marvelous and there's a a picture for a moment of happiness of the king at meeting his wife again playing his young son hugging his daughter that couldn't be more pure and beautiful he just doesn't have the courage the tells and what he has in mind what's going to happen and when his wife finds out that they planned not to marry her daughter but to but to kill her to sacrifice her she does everything to try and stop it and it cannot be stopped and there as she watches her husband she reads she sees a weakness in him she sees him as someone he knows that he shouldn't do this but he knows that he will and his wife watches this and just utter contempt for a weakness she sees in him in any case she decides that if he comes back victorious from these wars that she will be waiting for him that she will be ready to get him and she plans this meticulously and what it's going to do to him she takes a lover a justice is going to help her or so she thinks in doing this and of course he comes back with Cassandra and so she decides actually to get rid of Cassandra to boot you know just to throw Cassandra into the pot as well and just this opening that I'm going to read is her she's rather pleased with herself because she succeeded she's actually done the deed and it's it's it was difficult and a great amount of planning and strategy went into it he's dead and Cassandra is dead and this is Sodom mastery I have been acquainted with the smell of death the sickly sugary smelled that wafted in the wind towards the rooms in this palace it is easy now for me to feel peaceful and content I spend my morning looking at the sky and the changing light the birdsong begins to rise as the world fills with its own pleasures and then as day wanes the sound to wanes and fades I watch as the shadows lengthen so much has slipped away with the smell of death lingers maybe the smell has entered my body and been welcomed there like an old friend come to visit the smell of fear and panic the smell is here like the very air is here it returns in the same way as light in the morning returns it is my constant companion you just put life into my eyes eyes that grew dull with waiting but her not dull now eyes that are alive now with brightness I gave orders that the body should remain in the open under the Sun Adair - until the sweetness gave way to stench and I like the flies that came their distant bodies perplexed and brain buzzing after their feast upset by the continuing hunger they felt in themselves the hunger I had come to know - had come to appreciate we're all hungry now food merely quests our appetite had sharpened our teeth meat makes us ravenous for more meat as death his ravenous form or death murder makes us ravenous fills a soul with satisfaction that is fierce and then luscious enough to create a taste for further satisfaction a knife piercing the soft flesh under the ear but intimacy and precision and then moving across the throat as soundlessly as the Sun moves across the sky with greater speed and zeal and then his dark blood flowing with the same inevitable hush as dark night falls on familiar things and part of the problem I had after that really was what to do about the gods that there's a problem with the gods which is that the Greek gods either have their names rate of too long or too short or have too many vowel sounds are too many consonants dipthongs or something and the problem with the novel form itself as a develop from the 18th century is essentially a secular form it really loves human choices and chances human decisions what we decide to do people confronting their destiny I think it's not hard to imagine how fed up with all be if mr. Darcy for example in Pride and Prejudice pray to the gods the night before and the gods told him he should go over in the morning and they would provide him with a horse and the horse was outside provided by the gods and that he should propose to Elizabeth she was all waiting for him she to have been praying through the night and she knew he would come because the Oracle had told her he will come and you know under the gods looked with great disfavor on Lady Catherine de Bourg and he had she has in some way disobeyed the gods and they decide to smite her and you just feel a hold on a minute you know could can we just get down to what did mr. Darcy want what were his desires what if he wants at the beginning of the book you know we really jane austen's has a lot of fun making Lady Catherine de Bourg into this sort of human over you know her a monster of a human scale and the story must unfold and you know in a way for mr. Darcy's 10,000 a year was earned or well it was never earned actually but so I said hm but at least it wasn't given to him suddenly as a result of prayer or the Oracle and you know the same same to goes for Isabel Archer in portrait of a lady imagine if she prayed in Albany that her aunt would come and get her out of here and certainly her aunt was praying to she would find her long-lost niece and they met something you know every just wouldn't work and so the thing was to get the guards out of this book I'm at a very early stage and the way I thought of doing this was that um that Clytemnestra in this time where she sees the damage the gods have done she knows how wrong it is what they had done with her daughter and she's seen it happen and that she actually decides that she no longer believes in this and this is her working that heart I had spies to tell me when my husband would come back men live each fire that gave news to further Hills when other men lit fires to alert me with the fire that brought the news not to gods among the gods now there is no one who offers me assistance or oversees my actions or knows my mind there is no one among the gods to whom I appeal I live alone in a shivering solitary knowledge that the time of the Gods has passed I'm praying to no gods I'm alone among those here because I do not pray and will not pray again instead I will speak in ordinary whispers I will speak in words that come from the world and those words will be filled with regret for what has been lost I will make sounds like prayers but prayers that have no source and no destination not even a human one since my daughter is dead and cannot hear I know as no one else knows that the gods are distance they have other concerns they cared about human desires and antics in the same way that I care about the leaves of a tree I know the leaves are there they wither and grow again and wither as people come and live and then are replaced by others like them there's nothing I can do to help them or prevent their withering I do not deal with their desires I wish not to stand here and laugh hear me tittering and then howling with mirth at the idea that the gods allowed my husband to win his war that he inspired every plan he worked out and every move he made that they knew his cloudy moods in the morning and a strange and silly exhilaration he could exude it nice that they listened to his imploring x' and discussed them in their godly homes that they watched the murder of my daughter with approval the bargain was simple or so he believed or so his troops that he killed the innocent girl in return for a change in the wind take her out of the world use a knife on her flesh to ensure that she would never again walk into a room awake in the morning deprived the world at her grace as a reward the gods would make the wind blow in her father's favour the day he needed wind three sails they would hush the wind on the other days when his enemies needed it the gods would make his men alert and brave and fill his enemies with fear the gods would strengthen his swords and make them Swift and shark but he was alive he and the men around him believed that the gods follow their fates and cared about them each of them but I will say now that they did not they do not are appeal to the gods is the same as the appeal of star mix in the sky above us before it falls it is a sound we cannot hear a sound to which even if we did hear it we would be fully indifferent the gods have their own unearthly concerns on imagined by us they barely know we are alive for them if they were to hear of us we would be like the mild sound of wind in the trees a distance on persistent rustling sound I know that it was not always thus there was a time when the gods came in the morning to wake us when they combed our hair and filled our mouths with the sweetness of speech and listened to our desires and tried to still fulfill them for us when they knew our minds and when they could send us signs not long ago within our memories The Crying women could be heard in the night and the time before death came it was a way of calling the dying home hastening their fly's suffering softening their wavering journey to the place of rest my husband was with me in the days before my mother died and we both heard it and my mother heard it too and it comforted her the death was ready to lure her with its cries that noise has stopped there is no more crying like to win the dead fade in their own time no one helps them no one notices except those who have been close to them during their short spell in the world as they fade from the earth the gods do not hover over with their haunting whistling sound I notice it here the silence around death they have departed the ones who oversaw death they have gone and they will not be back my husband was lucky with the wind that was all and lucky his men were brave and lucky that he prevailed it could easily have been otherwise he did not need to sacrifice our daughter to the gods my nurse was with me from the time I was born in her last days we did not believe that she was dying i sat with her and we talked he said having a slice of sound of wailing we would have heard was nothing no sound to accompany her towards death there was silence or the usual noises from the kitchen or the barking of dogs and then she died and then she stopped breathing it was over for her I went out and looked at the sky and all I had then to help me was the leftover language of prayer what had once been possible and that had meaning to everything was now desolate strange with its own sad brittle power with its memory locked in its rhythms of a vivid past when our words rose up and found completion now our words are trapped in time they are filled with limits there are mere distractions there is fleeting and monotonous as breath they keep us alive and maybe that is something at least for the moment for which we should be grateful there is nothing else and then this I definitely of working you know that I had seen Electra being performed a number of times and I and I had some sense of where electric rage came from and where it was going but this story of her mother from her mother's side was new but in this story there's one thing completely missing and it's missing from everybody's version of the story from Safa place from ageless from Euripides and also there's no Greek scholar I'm aware of who has any explanation for it where was a rest days when he was away in other words his sister Electra you know in other words am fled a master murders her husband their daughter and the other daughter Electra is in a rage over this and that her mother had no right to do this and she's just generally in a rage and she just directs her rage against her mother and what she's going to do is wait for her brother to return and when he returns she's the both of them are going to go and get their mother in retaliation the spiral of violence within the house of Atreus and the issue is where was he and it sort of gift to a novelist because you can think well you know since there's no source for this I can do anything with this and what and you know I can big enough a mountain I can bring him into a valley I can have him alone I can have him with friends I can just let my mind loose and put anything into the story that I want to I mean I was doing that anyway actually with with some of the Greek originals but it but in the case of this I began to imagine in in there are certain versions in Homer for example he's heroic arrest case but novels another thing about the novel is the novel is not a good space for Heroes the novel loves weakness it loves flaws that loves people who are not up to much and it loves chancers it loves losers and them so that em in making the figure of arrest days I was making that idea of a younger brother who has no strategy somebody who has no plans for anything who is who follows and is and and who is very easily led but but actually inside him is a sort of rage just like his sister he actually witnessed the sacrifice of his daughter sorry up his sister intogen aya so get his family or mister he actually witnessed his sister mmm and being sacrificed and he told no one he saw this and with and his father was went off to war when he was very young and he was kidnapped later on so that in them does a sort of rage it means in a way he's a sort of he's a funny mixture there's an inner thug in him but he doesn't look like that he looks innocent so he's all the more dangerous for that he does he seem sort of Lethal Weapon he's a piece of putty and anybody can use him for any purpose and but but so that he is kidnapped and he goes to the equivalent of a sort of M I mean somebody mentioned to me who was in the same boarding school as I was in and Ireland the same Catholic boarding school that him there to me I see you finally put the school into the book you know because he's and he's kidnapped he's taken there were other boys who've been kidnapped are and if only I'd thought of it himself and two other boys escaped from the school and across the countryside and and they end up in this house and with the sea on three sides which is M has an old woman living in it and then as soon as I started to do some of this I bound that I was using Irish mythology as much as Greek mythology for example the woman has three dogs and to kill the dogs and to kill the dog one of the dogs was killed in precisely the way that cou : in Irish mythology kills one of the dogs and which you which you can read in the toy that's T AI n which is sort of our great single story within within Irish mythology there are various translations and Penguin Classics had the translation by Kieran Carson but Lady Gregory did a translation at the turn of the 19th 20th century which was a big bestseller of this warrior kou : and what in what in my novel they say to the old the old woman says I have no one to protect me and the boys say to her we will protect you we will be your dogs which is exactly what kou : says in his story and them the in this story because of course trimesters mother is leader and leader was raped by the god zeus who came in the form of a swan so that this the swan and this story is a vital element or is is it is a very important figure and we have a story in Irish mythology called the children of ler which i think is the most beautiful story we have and so that I added this story I was dreaming about this idea of a boat coming from Ireland to somewhere else you know they landing in England and or they're going to France and the story going across France down into the Mediterranean across into Greece very slowly this Irish story so it they take it as a story of theirs and one of the other boys has called me trois and they're staying in the house of the old woman often at night Mitra relayed to arrest gays the stories that the old woman had told him when he was alone with her whispering he recounted what she had said trying to remember the exact words stuffing in the same way she did when he came to some of the details there was a man or maybe a king he said who had four children one girl and three boys he loved his wife and his children and they were happy when was this arrestees asked I don't know Mitra said I and then the woman died he continued the mother of the four children and they were sad until their father sent for the sister of their mother and he married her and they were happy again until she became jealous of the four children so she ordered the children to be killed but the servants she ordered to do the killing said she could not do it because they were beautiful children and he stopped for a moment as though he'd forgotten the next part maybe the king would be angry arrested I said yeah yeah maybe yes maybe but then she came to kill them herself when they were sleeping or when they were playing but when she came to kill them she was not able so instead she turned them into swans and could they fly yes they flew away it was part of the spell that they had to fly far away but before they did they asked for one thing they asked for a silver chain so they would never be a part the chain was made for them and they flew away with the chain between them but what happened to them they flew to one place and then to another and then to another and many years past sometimes it was cold did they die they flew for 900 years and all the years they waited and talked about going home they talked about the day when they would fly I was a silver chain still between them and they would find a place there came from when that time came everyone they had known was dead there were other people there people they did not know new people who were frightened when the Swans landed and their wings fell off and then their beaks and then all their feathers fell off and they were people again there were people but there were not children anymore that there were 900 years old and all the new people ran away when they saw them what happened then they died and then the people who ran away came back and buried them under silver chain did they bury that too now the people kept the silver chain and he sold it later or they used it for something else and I'm just pathetic tier of stories moving back and forth from from thousands of years and that it struck me that when arrested goes home now as he does very soon after this piece I've just read he is a young man he is uneasy and subtly perplexed his father has been murdered his mother has taken a lover and he's wandering uneasily in a palace and I realize ah Shakespeare's Shakespeare took this and made it into Hamlet and and that part of the the thing he did in Hamlet was to mix what was almost a sense of medieval Europe with a sort of modern Europe with Hamlet as educated and playful and melancholy and ready to change his moods and and ready to be decisive or not as he should please I'm fully autonomous in his being in the play but at the same time he actually believes that his father's ghost has appeared to him and told him something that he needed to know and that had to disappear once the dawn came up so he saw his toe he's living in two worlds at the same time and once that occurred to me I realized that M that that M I could make a ghost as well in this book that if he could do that I could do this and and and so I was also a technical problem which was that arrest States finally egged on by his sister Electra actually murders his own mother and the problem is what do you do next I'd look back to see what other novelists had done with this but I couldn't find another novel where anyone had I mean it isn't didn't Jane asked and I can tell you that we're different anyone married or isn't Henry James doesn't try it either and you mean what do you do that night do you have dinner with people or do you sit on your own and what emotions are going through your mind and I mean you know in other words obvious obviously you know what some of those emotions would be so the reader sort of knows how frightened he is but what he's done himself how any easy he is and almost how proud he is how many different and then big youth emotions there are and the best thing to do sometimes with something like sense to leave it out completely it's just let the reader imagine us it is just trying to page something else and what I wanted to turn the page to was that his mother Clytemnestra has immediately come back as a ghost but she doesn't remember how she was killed and she had a sense some memory somehow that has occurred in a garden and steps down to her garden but she's not sure what it was and she doesn't know who did it and um all she's looking for is one more connection in the world to someone who she's known or who she has M who she has been close to and them she's also of course remembering her mother whose leader there will come a time when the shadows fold in on me I know that but I'm awake now or almost awake I remember some things outlines come to me in the faint sound of voices but linger most are traces traces of people presences sounds mostly I walk among the shades but sometimes a hint of someone comes close someone whose name I once knew or his voice and face real to me someone I once loved perhaps I am Not sure there's one remnant that comes and persists however it is my mother at some moment in the distant past this is leader she's helpless being held down I could hear cries her cries the shriller cries of a figure above her or lying on her then louder cries of the figure Flitz away a figure would beat with a beacon wings with the shape of wings the wings beating in the air and my mother lying breathless whimpering but I do not know what this means or why it comes to me I feel that if I remain still something more will come it is hard not to wander in these spaces when there is silence there are presences I wish to encounter presences that are close but not close enough to touch or be seen I cannot think of the names their names and I can't see the faces clearly enough although there are moments when I have inquired when I have made no effort for some time to remember or focus moments when a face approaches the face of someone I have known but it fades before it becomes anyone I can recognize I know that there was feeling and that is the difference between where I am now and the place I was once there was a time I know when I felt rage I felt sorrow but now I have lost what leads to rage and sorrow maybe the only reason I wander in these spaces has to do with some other feeling or what is left of it maybe that feeling is love there is someone whom I love still and have loved and protected but I can't be sure of that no name will come some words come but not the words I want which are the names if I can say the names I will know then whom I loved and I will find them or know how to see them I will lure them into the shadows when the time is right no one in their world knows how little there is here is all blankness strangeness silence hardly anything moves there echoes like distant water flowing under rock and then sometimes that sound comes nearer but it is still faint if I listen too eagerly it disappears maybe there are things that did not come to an end when I there and they linger now like words that need to be said or words that have escaped me and will come or might come must come as I wait here it will take time I do not know how much time I have how much time there is but I know that I must fade that I cannot persist in this state of fading would be gradual by the end I will not know anything what I'm hoping for is one more surge some hours or even moments when I will go back into the world and settle into it briefly as though I were alive in the meantime there is memory which connects and attaches and withdraws it is almost something a vague sword hovers but it's never stable like a figure with wings at edges towards what has been or was I live on the inside of what has substance I can feel some large set of pressing desires brushing past all I am left with though are the great traces the clues this must be what shadow is lighter after mass some lines or shapes that must have made sense at one time or may still make sense but seem random now if only I could follow what their intention was or whisper to whoever made them that desire is the closest I've come to pure feeling and it is not close at all I'll be left here for the hours or days or years I have been allotted no longer than that being perplexed and bewildered replaces truth and knowledge replaces what is real and tangible the space I inhabit is like a sad gift that was offered who will soon be withdrawn and a word occurred to me a word of which I was sure it was the word dreamed once the word came I knew what dream was or had been and I was certain vendor I was not dreaming in this nullus that none of what is happening is dreamed it is real it is actual in other words appeared like stars in the darkening sky I became desperate to take possession of each one but I could not hold on to them they were falling or glittering or moving further away with enough however to have seen them to get some idea of their power and know that some of them would return and like the lie from a full moon on a dark night become part of the shadowy stability that was guiding me I walked in the corridors of that palace where I had once lived I could almost remember some things that has happened there was an image of someone in a garden or on steps that led to a garden staring hard breathing hard but then nothing to stillness in the garden and then there was not even a garden there was merely a space but I was still awake I was waiting knowing that there would be changed that it would not always be like this I was aware how easy it would be once I was in those corridors again for one of the guards to notice me if I made a sound or if I moved quickly so that there would be some disturbance in the air and then slowly I began to understand why I was here and who I was looking for his name did not come to me and I was not able to picture his face when I found that he was close I could imagine the guard who had seen me or who had noticed my presence consulting one of the other guards and then both of them approaching him the one I'm searching for our his friend who looks after him my husband is dead and my daughter they have become pure shade my other daughter is here but the one I'm searching for is my son I am awake the words I knew are sleeping sometimes they turn in the night or make some sound and they're fast dreaming and then they wake too often if only for a second they open their eyes and watch me I hold their gaze so that they might remember me as they fall back into sleep I study them then in their inner space I'm alert to any movement they make I can hear their dark groanings in the night intermittent against their breathing I can see them reach their arms towards me to be lifted I can tell the difference between night and day now I know the silence that descends on the gardens and corridors at night has silence broken only by the soft movements of the guards or of cats this is my realm where I'm free to wander as I come from the garden I'm aware that the guards can see the movement in the air it would just take one more thing to let him know that I'm with him a sound a darting gesture when the time came and I knew that I would hear his name my son's name enough to whisper it like some are imploring it would come to me when I needed it harassed days I've whispered on one of those nights and then I withdrew into the shadows RS face I repeated letting my voice echo down the corridor I saw two of the guards running back and forth and then summoning the other one my son's friend who strutted up and down checking doorways and corners I waited until he had gone and then I whispered to one of the guards tell arrest days that I'm his mother he must come alone into the corridor he must be alarmed the guard made us though to run but then stopped himself speak again he said quietly he's had bad tell arrests days to come alone I said now yes soon arrests days must come soon do you mean to cause him harm no I do not mean to cause him harm [Applause] I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about why you chose to write arrestees in the third person and the two women in the first person um because I he had no voice well you know um the other two are in full possession of the facts and that Clytemnestra knows her own rage and knows why her rage is there and she needs to describe and she knows how to describe exactly what happened to her the stir cause I mean - cause then those feelings in her so that she has she's in full possession of herself Electra - even in a more minor way and actually is filled also with a sort of strategy and agency and them she's absolutely there the poor boy in the middle of them is almost nobody his shadow he has no as a said strategy and so that if he spoke it would be disjointed it would be something she had noticed which would not necessarily be the things that were important when the other to notice something it's exactly what they need to notice in other words if a rested here someone's whispering he doesn't know what they're saying but when his mother or his sister hear someone whispering they can decipher everything work everything else so also after the first 70 pages written in that heightened tongue part of the I suppose the reason for that at the beginning is that em with those Greek texts such as for example Medea M Electra and Antigone what you get is a sort of um out of powerlessness by virtue of speech you get power as though someone who has been silent or crushed or merged gets to speak only once in a theatrical space say the audience has to pay attention because they might not speak again thus the speech patterns are filled with texture whereas when the men speak when crayon speaks in Antigone for example it sounds as dry as legislation but when Antigone speaks you cannot take your eyes from her because what she's saying is has such fire in us and then the problem with that is that you can only keep it going for as long as a reader can keep going in one sitting that it's as though somebody is speaking just once and you have to create the illusion that it was done in real time to be read in real time you can keep that going for about M 20,000 20,000 words is about as much as the reader will be able to take of that without actually thinking this is actually too much coming at me I have to stop now you don't want that so the thing to do then is to stop it and and almost as though you're working with say an orchestra just to say we're now going to move into a slow movement and the slow movement might be taken over even in slowed by a single instrument that you move from full orchestra to a piano sound and you need to vary the town and the texture I mean I mean just as well as the idea that psychologically I cannot get a sound for a rest date should he speak because he will notice the wrong thing and I can you know I would need William Faulkner on one side of me and I don't quite know who at the other to get the whole thing going for everything he would tell you would be misleading you and where I would mean is leading him so by bringing him into the third person I can tell you what he sees what he notices what he remembers and out of that I'm building a character for him but I but but if he does to tell you this himself he will tell you the wrong thing he won't have a narrative of himself as his mother and sister do so so that was the reason I did that question down here in the front I certainly heard your reworking of Agamemnon and the libation bearers I'm guessing that you left the third part of the trilogy the humanities out because too many gods and Furies and also that that trial doesn't kind of fly in the in the modern sensibility when the central argument is comes down to a man's life this worth more than a father's life the male is worth more than nude mother's like and I mean I had to have to put a lot of thought into that because you can't just leave it out you know in other words he murders his mother and in the original version the Furies come after him as it were and the trial begins and so what I decided to do is to bring that down instead of the Furies being noisy to bring it down to the fact that nobody wants him near them his sister doesn't want him near her he served his purpose his best friend Leander doesn't want to see him again I just want to be near him and the elders the people who are as is where the jury don't want him in the room and so that his solitary nature becomes actually very lonely you know so instead of all the noise of the Furies it goes down to the other business of that that the Furies come in the forth of silence in the form of leaving him sadder and more undermined than he was before but the elders are there and twelve get mentioned at one point so that the jury is almost there and the jury has decided well before that all they want is this boy who murdered his mother to be kept away from them the room and then with the whole strange business at the end of the Oresteia we're a society that because and your mother's life is not valuable here because because really she was just a vessel for the seed of the man and therefore murdering your mother is not like murdering your father because really she's not quite enough that important here what I did with that was I played with it so that when when her estees em thinks it has made them Leandra sister the Andersons are pregnant by him she's able to tell him that actually it isn't him and so that's just a game I'm playing with that tiny image I'm just turning it right around so so that's what I did with that I mean it was a it did I think that for anyone even working in the theater that's the hardest thing to enact to work all that out from the drama this family to bring it down to the fisheries and but what I did with the novel was I just simply kept trying to find images that reflected us or as I've refracted us or that did something with us but but I didn't but but I brought him down that off to almost within something that things were happening in him just to make him more lonely really was what I did next question back here hi um at the other end of the story you seem to have left out the back story about a justice family relation to Agamemnon and FiOS tease and pale ops and so on could you comment on it yeah and I mean I just couldn't go right I mean I mean otherwise there because I wanted to concentrate on you know wife to husband son to mother daughter - mother mother to son if I started going backwards into the whole business of the history so when I brought a justice in there is a vague reference to the fact that he freely hates and I command and he hates this family and they have him as a prisoner and there is a history there and there is a glancing reference to what has happened between the two families but but but there's also the question that that playwrights had all the luck you know in other words that em in you know you know in a play if you want to murder your mother you just get her not my mother but you know what I mean that you just would simply have the mother walk off stage of the son get a knife follow her sound of screaming and yelling and he comes on with a knife with blood on us and that's killing you can't do that in a novel you have to build up to it you have to get what happened the day before what happened that day how slow you know and it was the same thing with fladam Esther taking a lover where I had to work on that you know how did she find him and I was more interested in a way that you know in her than in him but but I became more interested in trying trying to narrow the story dramatize the story bring it down to these four characters rather than actually telling the whole business of what happened so Helen of Troy doesn't get into the story for example either and there's no mention of her there's no mention of why the war is happening and because if you start that you end up attempting to write an epic well I was trying to write an actual intense family drama a and M so what I have to do then is with the case of a Justice M image he's got to take him as a lover but you know he's very very good-looking and she doesn't really know if this is going to happen so the reader doesn't know either so your turn to page thinking only God is going to sleep together what's going to happen he's guarding her he's watching or she's watching him it's getting late and we've all been through this and her and he look is are there aren't they oh and she thinks what she might go to bed and if she went to bed why would she do and he's at the door and so that I'm much more interested in a way with that drama than than I am in actually trying to reflect the story in India original because the story the original is there if anyone wants it but I'm trying to do is just narrow it intensified and dramatized it in a way that I suppose a contemporary novel my novel is not set in the contemporary world it is a contemporary novel it's using systems of so you're building up psychology and sort of working within with intense modes of drama between people where you can where you can see what at least one of them is thinking and and so I had to make a lot of tough decisions over the things to leave out that I thought were and we're not intrinsic to that story or would I would ruin it Wood Wood Wood Wood Wood Wood I suppose and just take away the intensity I wanted question down here in the front before I read the book I felt obliged to UM go back and get familiar with the story again just yeah so I was wondering when you conceived of the book and as you were writing it did you want people to be familiar were you expecting people to be familiar with the story or hoping they were familiar with you know not just the vague outlines but pretty a lot of details of the story and I've intruded once before with em with Henry James for a rotten novel called the master about Henry James what I was concerned about would be you know I actually there were a dwindling number of people who had any interest in Henry James at the time I wrote that book and a dwindling number of people who would even read you know say his later novels so while I had to think about was this is for anyone who can it was interested in reading a novel about a man who was in England and eggs are and you don't have to know anything about his books to read this novel to follow his story they're little jokes and little things if you do know because he's building up to writing the ambassador's winters to dub the Golden Bowl you know he hasn't written those books yet so you can see if you've read those books there are little clues put in but they don't matter I mean what matters is that I'm concentrating on these on this spirit on this character building him up and with this book is exactly the same where and if you've never heard of this story and you can open this book and and while I was planning in any case I mean I mean I've no idea whether I've succeeded or not but planning that that the characters take over and you and that you don't have to go to the originals and think oh my god I didn't my parents didn't send me to school enough you know they don't know this story and I didn't do classics but that you actually just tell the story without actually having that if not in other words it's not just for a few people who know this story to read and and that it that is actually for anyone who reads a novel to read time for one more over there in the corner coming to you when did you read these plays and when did you think of writing this and I am I've always had em I mean I saw I think I am quite late I mean you know I remember seeing an extraordinary production of Elektra and with em oh my god I going to get her name wrong and Claire Bloom playing playing fly the master and it was by it was it was translated by the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness who's a friend of mine and I saw it in New York and I was intensely moved by it and by that time I also knew the record Straus freshened but it was too wild for me you know the music sometimes and and and then because I wrote a novel called the black water light ship which is really about a daughter's intense hatred for her mother which really makes no sense I really went back over the electorate stories just looking and looking in looking and I remember even dedicating the book to someone here's my Electra of the southeast of Ireland but I didn't but and their little clues again in that book from Electra but again no one has ever noticed them I mean eyes and no and I you know I mean I did read all the reviews of that book and no one saw this I'm sort of delighted because I thought you know I've actually done this without without any with without overdoing it but and so that story was always on my mind I felt I knew that story what happened with this was that the stories I didn't know the idea of everything seen from the mothers perspective you know a switch wealthy and the lazy river displayed that I mentioned earlier on and the arrest days part so um and what happened was then that and some of it came very very quickly that that last section I read where she's a ghost I wrote that in a day and I wasn't in a day in a sort of trance for whatever was going on uh you know that it was as though bits of this story were another thing where it's are there already but that it's very very powerful this story and I can see how why it's been translated so many times why I mean particularly at the moment in London for some particular reason and considering the English were so mild in general I mean brexit might it's a mild thing they're doing and are generally mild in their habits the English but it's I think they've been for our ass tires performed in London in the last two years and there's another one going to the Edinburgh Festival they're just are so crazy at the moment and luckily I saw none of those productions and but but that what's interesting is actors love them translators love them because they're so powerful visceral and and organically dramatic so once you start in with it it is as though the story can take you and you can really you can really work with it and you can start seeing the characters very very clearly you though there thousands of years old and even though you're working from a translation and even though you're working I think most importantly from a dramatic text rather than from say a narrative text and so so it came in two big surprise I mean I'm asked what I was going to rise another melancholy Irish novel I think that that's a great note for us to end be using very much thank you all for coming thank you [Applause] you

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Length: 61min 14sec (3674 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2017