GALA OPENING - 
NEW ZEALAND POST WRITERS & READERS WEEK
Report from Maggie Rainey-Smith

It was a starlight-star bright-night for the Gala Opening of Writers and Readers week with a stellar line-up, of Audrey Niffenegger, Neil Cross, Gil Adamson and Kamila Shamsie, chaired by Kate De Goldi.   As Kate said, “Four countries, four genres, four novelists” and with apologies from Chloe Hooper who was unable to be there.     The first question Kate posed to the panel was “What does the modern novel offer as a form?”   Kate De Goldi is without doubt a consummate chair.   She was thoroughly prepared and had obviously read and engaged with the work of all of the writers.   Add to that, her natural charm and her intense interest in the people she is interviewing and this allows for a fairly seamless movement and linking of ideas.   She is an exuberant person who uses her hands to good effect, so that almost without saying, the next speaker knows it is their turn.   Everyone on the panel was particularly ‘nice’ which isn’t always such a good thing, and it was a relief to me when Neil Cross  took the chatter ‘off-piste’ now and then, small humorous tangents, but at a Gala opening, you need these sort of passionate distractions.

Gil Adamson told us that her first novel ‘The Outlander' started out life as a poem, which itself was at first, just an image in her mind.    Gill said she was never entirely satisfied with the poem and the idea lingered and it then took off as a novel and took her ten years to write.   Kate de Goldi raised the topic of Margaret Atwood’s ‘Survival’ and the New Zealand equivalent ‘Man Alone’.   Gill to some hilarity, casually called Margaret Atwood, Peggy, and vehemently denied that the survival theme was relevant nowadays to Canadian literature.   But she laughed too, when it was pointed out that her own ‘Outlander’ story is pretty much a quintessential survival story.

Audrey Niffenegger (who incidentally, reminded me of Clothilde one of the “Three Incestuous Sisters” in her beautiful graphic novel  a copy of which I own and love) – I may be the only person on the planet who did not absolutely engage with the ‘Time Traveller’s Wife’ but there is no denying she is one of the stars of the festival.   Audrey is, as Kate pointed out, both a visual artist and a novelist, and Kate asked her why she choose the novel form for the ‘Time Traveller’s Wife’.   Audrey said she felt that time cannot be rendered into still images… well, not time-flow, and so she had the idea and decided it would have to be either a film or a novel.   And then added to much appreciative laughter…  “As I am poor and antisocial, I realized I’d better do a novel”.      The only minor hint of dispute came when Audrey said that being a reader was everything to her and that she loved Henry James.   Previously Gil Adamson said that no amount of reading could prepare her for writing a novel and Neil Cross had said that he loved forward movement and imagery and he didn’t want to sound like an as..hole, but he sees himself as a cinematic novelist, as opposed to the lengthy-style sentences of Henry James where you might have to re-read a paragraph to understand it.      Audrey was very humble for a super-star and indicated she would prefer to sit and talk with a small group of say ten people than to be speaking to such a big crowd (and here she raised her hand shelter her eyes from the glare of stage lights) whom she couldn’t actually see.

Kate spoke to Kamila Shamshie about the novel, like cricket, as an Imperial imposition, but Kamila said that she doesn’t see cricket or the novel in this way as they are just part of her life in Pakistan.   She said she grew up always reading novels situated other than in her country.    She saw Karachi as a blank canvas that no-one had written about and became greedy to write it.    Although Salman Rushdie had written about Karachi, she felt that it was no longer relevant to the Karachi she knew of 20 million people and she considered his Bombay (Mumbai) was more like her Karachi.   She loves playing with the English language, the elasticity of the words and has always enjoyed anagrams and thinking how a word or sentence would sound played backwards.   Kate called her work a kind of “unpacking” of English.    Kate asked Kamila about the ‘political’ in her work and Kamila explained that growing up in Pakistan the political has always been the backdrop to her life.   It isn’t something she consciously inserted into her work; it is just the landscape that she has inhabited.   She quickly also explained that this didn’t mean unhappiness, but that everyday life, from month to month or year to year, was identifiable by certain political events that you couldn’t ignore because they impacted directly – for example whether school was open or closed for the day.  She said that in Karachi, when writing she is always aware of what year, and the texture of this, is what was happening then.  There was a delightful segue when Kamila talked about being free to write on the blank canvas of Karachi, the place she knew so intimately.   Neil Cross quipped to much hilarity – “imagine how long Ulysses would have been if James Joyce had had access to Google maps.”

There was a lovely moment of real connection when Neil Cross was describing the influence of ‘Kidnapped’ as a piece of writing and a particular scene and Gil Adamson was entirely engaged and nodding in agreement – lovely to see the passion.   Audrey Niffenegger described place in her work as “ballast” and talked about her “total immersion doing research at HIghgate cemetery” and quick as a flash, catching the pun, Kate added “without actually being buried”.   It turned that because Highgate Cemetery has so many famous people buried there it is looked after by a group of people who eventually decided that as they had allowed Audrey access for her research, she could make herself useful - and Audrey was eventually asked to take tours of the cemetery.

Neil (I’ll admit I’m smitten) Cross lead writer for Spooks, long-listed for the Booker, crime novelist, memoirist, talked about the difference in writing about a baddie for the screen versus a baddie in a novel.   He said that if you cast someone that the audience loves in the role of the baddie on screen, then they’ll like them – but in a novel, you have to develop psychological depths, make them human, to make them likeable.   This, as Kate de Goldi pointed out, is the compelling aspect of Neil’s writing, the way he seduces you into caring about his characters who commit (even a multiple killer).
Neil attempted to go off-piste with a small rant about John Banville trying to have it both ways by being a “literary” novelist winning the Booker Prize with “The Sea” and at the same time writing in the crime genre under a pseudonym Benjamin Black but not being prepared to stay anonymous, his crime novel is advertised as written by John Banville, alias Benjamin Black.   Having a bet both ways so to speak, relying on his ‘literary’ reputation to sell his crime novels.
This led to the most interesting discussion by the panel around the whole idea of the ‘literary’ novel.  Which was rather interesting,  because all of them eschewed the idea of the ‘literary’ novel and felt that the novel stands by itself as a work of fiction, whether a western, crime, or historical novel.  Audrey Niffenegger went so far as to say she wished there was a section in bookshops for “the grooviest novel”.   They all seemed anti-elitist, and keen for their work to be accepted on its own terms, literary, or popular.    But of course, all of them are stars as well as popular and literary.  

So, if you haven’t already booked a session with your favourite writers, then I urge you do so, for how fortunate are we, to have access to these talented, generous and interesting authors.

Footnote:
The Bookman thanks Maggie Rainey-Smith for this report on what must have been a most interesting and entertaining Gala opening..
Maggie Rainey-Smith is a Wellington novelist/poet/bookseller and occasional guest blogger on Beattie's Book Blog.