 I'm John Fawsela, I look after the events programme here at the library and pleased to introduce our next session in our Irish writers weekend hosted together with current international first year literature. So this next session is called Ireland's Island of the Imagination and it's course featuring Audre Magy and Emma Donoghue. And the chair for tonight's offer this afternoon is Claire Hutton, who we got to know very well earlier in this year when she gave a wonderful talk on women in Joyce's career and then hosted, and Enright and Emma McBride on another panel on Joyce as everybody was talking about the anniversary of Ulysses. Claire is a reader in English and Digital Humanities at Loughborough University and she curated an exhibition at the University of Texas in Austin earlier this year, Women and the Making of Joyce's Ulysses, and she's also author of Cereal Encounters, Ulysses and the Little Review. But today she's not talking about Ulysses at all and she is talking to Emma Donoghue and Audre Magy. Thank you. Welcome to this session. Welcome to our in-person audience and to our audience online. We're going to have the main session for about 45 minutes and there may be about 10 minutes for questions. It's a great pleasure indeed to introduce and think about these novels, Haven by Emma Donoghue and The Colony by Audre Magy and indeed to introduce both novelists. Let me begin by saying a little about both novelists. Emma is prolific, works across many genres. I think I've counted this correctly, 10 novels for adults thus far, you can correct me. Many plays and short stories. She's a graduate of UCD and Cambridge. She was born in Dublin in 1969 and now lives in Canada except at the moment she's in Paris. Audre, The Colony is her second novel after the undertaking in 2014. She's also a UCD graduate before she launched into the world of published novel writing. She was a journalist for many years. It's been absolutely fascinating to read both of your novels. It felt to me, they gave me a very palpable sense of shared past. It feels like we all grew up in something of the same community and world. The Colony takes us to Ireland in 1979. It's set on an island. It's kind of geographically teasing. You kind of nearly tell us where it is, but not quite. I think that's deliberate. It's interwoven. This narrative about what's happening on the island, off the west of Ireland, is interwoven with a fact driven narrative about loyalist and republican atrocities. 1979, a very vivid year in our recent past reminded me just so very much of my own kind of childhood events like the papal visit. The Haven reminded me of things like the class visit to Clombe MacNoys, the slide from pagan traditions to Christianities, extreme faith, the way it breaks people, the manuscript tradition, the monastic tradition, a great deal of world building going on in both novels. So I'm going to ask both novels to read and to maybe say something about the narrative of the book. Will I start with you Emma? Is that okay? Sure, sure. Would it mess up camera angles if we stand up? No. I find I'm a bit slumty in this chair. It's more of a tele-watching chair. Hello all, thank you very much for being here and I'm so honoured to be part of this Irish Writers Weekend London, which I assumed had been going on for 20 years without my hearing of it, but no, apparently for the first time. And it has the classiest logo I've seen and the apostrophe in the right place. So I think it bodes very well for the future. Well done so far! It is the earliest set novel I've written and it's involved more months of going down internet rabbit holes in search of facts about what was the true shape of the tonture an Irish monk would have been wearing in the year 600. It involved a lot of detailed research into things I knew nothing about. So I felt a bit as if I was engrossed in a punitive, difficult and protracted task, much like my monks. It starts in Clon MacNoise where a stranger turns up, a very scholarly famous priest who has copied out dozens of books and he chooses to an old monk with a head broken by a slingshot and amazingly saved through the surgical powers of early monks, Cormac. And he chooses a young one, an odd one, a left-handed one called Trion, who's mostly hungry all the time in his 19. And Father Art brings these two with him down the Shannon looking for an island he's seen in a dream to make the ultimate pure monastic outpost because the paradox of early Irish Christianity is that they lived in tiny little isolated hard out of the way places and they were constantly leaving them to find somewhere harder. More isolated, less in the way of beef or sheets and more in the way of God and isolation. So this is a little bit where they've been literally drifting out to sea, they've shipped their oars, they've literally been spinning around hoping to spot an island that nobody's ever landed on before and they're lost in the fog basically. This bit is narrated by Art, the middle one, the visionary. As young Trion is washing the holy vessels after mass and swaddling them in the chest, the glare of sun intensifies behind the fabric of cloud. The white fog sins, lightens, finally tears. At last a spring breeze starts up. The boat slides broadside to it and lolls and rolls. Art, relieved to be moving even if only uncontrollably, watches the fog meandering off and leaving a sky only ribboned with cloud. Is that shock on young Trion's face? Art turns to look where the monk is staring. On the horizon to the south west of them, two islands side by side thrust up from the sea. One larger, both weirdly pointed. What a pair of skeligs, Trion marvels. Cormac skews around and shifts his bald head from side to side like a bird. He says, skeligs. Spikes of rock in the sea, sheer, sharp islands. I suppose our eyes must have been on the setting sun yesterday, Trion adds uncertainly, so we didn't look any further south. It's not that, says Art, and his voice comes out like a lion's roar. Christ is revealing them to us only now. Our island, the one for my dream, it must be one of those too. He makes a cross on his forehead, his mouth, his chest, and he sings out, if God is for us, who can be against us? Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will open. The monk's chorus, amen, catching his fervour. He watches the islands in a loud silence. His gaze eats up the distance. The boat rotates and drifts more or less in the right direction, but with a langer that waxed Art's nerves. Young Trion must feel the same way because he begs, can we go faster, Father? The Sabbath, Cormac reminds him gruffly. Art stares up at the two great jagged outcroppings. The small pyramid floats beneath the level of the clouds. The broader higher one rears up wrapped in vapour. It does seem ungrateful not to harness this little bit of heaven sent wind. Well, he says, I don't suppose it would count as work to drop the sail at least. The other two rush to follow his lead, unfurling the great square and strain it to the sides of the hull. A light puff fills it at once and speeds them south just where they want to go. Closer, the great shards of grey are dabbed with green as if a pair of mountains slid off the land into the sea and sailed away. Like some desert mirage, a miracle worked on a floating altar. Little by little the two skelligs grow. Their crazed cones seem to art to be merging. The less are slipping in front of the greater, the two becoming one. He wonders aloud, could that be snow on their tops? Well past Easter, so surely not unless these unique rocks have their own rarefied weather. And Trine says, bird droppings more like, ah yes. With misgiving, art jerks around to reckon how far these extraordinary islands lie from the mainland. Seven miles, eight, no more. Will they have been claimed by impure folk long ago? I see no signs of settlement yet. Nor I, father, the young man's voice is shrill with excitement. Maybe they're uninhabitable, says Cormac, and art glares at him. I only mean they seem all up and down, but my eyes aren't what they were, the old monk admits. It strikes out that the combination of the light current and the breeze is going to take their little boat right past the skelligs too far south. He grabs the steering oar and pushes it deep into the water just to nudge the boat west. He wouldn't call this sabbath-breaking work. He's only sitting, he's only holding on and feeling the pulse of the sea, his gaze on the island's splintery silhouettes. His throat is locked as the boat inches nearer the smaller island and the greater one looms behind it. They're like nothing he has ever encountered in all his travels. They're like two broken fists of rock held up in prayer. He sings out, be before me, O Lorde, and the others chant back as a bright flame. Be above me, O Lorde, as a fixed star. Be below me, O Lorde, and Cormac and Trion finish as a clear path. As they approach what art is already thinking of as the lesser skellig, it reveals itself as entirely possessed by an army of birds. He can't hear anything like a hymn of praise in the screams of these vermin. Nor can he see any spot where the monks could moor around the whole stained crag. Could it be too steep to land on? The boat has passed the small island already, gliding slowly straight towards the bigger one, which is still a mile or two off. Its rough cone is veiled in cloud, but the breeze is already beginning to wipe it clean. And now the great skellig is revealed in all its strange glory. Twice the height of its neighbour, sharply fingering the sky. Eroded by wind and water, he can see, littered with rockfall, smeared with emerald vegetation. Its crags are capped with the droppings of the wheeling flocks who keep up their harsh cacophony. O, this is the place, art proclaims, the higher up, the closer will be to heaven. On this island's peaks our prayers will be halfway to God's ears already. Amen, Father, say the other two. The great skellig is an abandoned fortress, awful in majesty. No, art tells himself, it's not abandoned, it's just lonely waiting for its commander. It's the most gigantic of cathedrals ready for its priest. Thanks very much. It's just such a vivid imagination of place. You've really, really worked so hard to give a sense of the seventh century and that tradition and psychology, a mindset. And of course it's a real place. I want to move on now to a reading from the colony, and this I think is a fictional space. I might stand too. Hi everybody. What a pleasure it is to be here at this inaugural festival, and I hope there are going to be many more because it's an ingenious idea. So yeah, here's to the future. The colony, as has been said, is my second novel. It's the second part of a triptych I'm writing on power and the ordinary person. In my first novel, The Undertaking, I explore what it was like to be an ordinary German during the Second World War. And here I explore, so in the first novel I'm exploring the concept of fascism and the ordinary person in this novel called The Colony. I'm looking at colonisation and the ordinary person and basically colonisation and us. And what does it mean to be colonised? What does it mean to be the coloniser? And to do that, I thought really the best place to go was to an imagined island off the west coast of Ireland where I could take everybody and distill all these things that I wanted to think about, all these things that I wanted to explore, all these legacies of colonisation that we inherit and we don't even realise we're inheriting, that we inherit as the colonised and that we inherit as the coloniser and that we use still in our interactions with each other. And I try on this tiny, tiny imagined island to unpick those habits, to unpick those legacies so that we can just maybe clear a space in our dialogue and in the way we interact with each other. And to do that, obviously I've made some little characters to take to my island. The novel opens with an English painter called Mr Lloyd. We only know him as Mr Lloyd. And he decides that he is going to have a very authentic experience and to take a curric to an Irish island. And the novel opens with him stepping into the curric, certain that he knows what he's going to, certain that he knows what he's doing, just a very certain character as he goes off to this Irish-speaking island. And he goes to paint, he wants to paint the cliffs and pledges that he won't paint the people but then begins to annoy the islanders because he then breaches his promises and paints them and starts to create a little bit of tension. But that tension increases when a little later on in the summer, it's the summer of 1979, and a little later on in that summer, Jean-Pierre Masson, a Frenchman, comes onto the island. And Mr Masson, known as Jean-Pierre or JP by the Islanders, has been going to this island for, this is his fifth summer on the island because he's doing this longitudinal study on the demise of the Irish language and the influence of English on this island and on this island community. And he is horrified to find an Englishman on the island because it will destroy his study and it will hasten the demise of the language that he thinks needs to be protected and he is fighting to protect. And he has his own interpretation of how the islanders should live. Mr Lloyd has his own interpretation of the islanders and how they should live. Meanwhile, you have the islanders trying to live as they might want to live. And that's principally based around four generations of the islanders whose language is being traced by Masson. And those islanders are Bani Flynn, who is kind of like a peg-like character. If anybody did peg, I will now confess to having been a closet peg lover when I was in school. I thought she was amazing. So I pay tribute to her in this novel by creating a kind of a peg character. So she's, if you like, the overall matriarch of this family. And then it's her daughter who's Bani Neal and then her daughter in turn who's Mairead. And Mairead is a beautiful young widow woman on the island. She has lost her husband and her father and her brother in a single boating accident and now lives with James, her son. And James is the only member of the family who is bilingual. The others have either a latent understanding of English or in Bani Flynn's case an absolute refusal to speak English because she is the protector of tradition and the protector of the language. So in this little section I'm going to read, it's Mairead who, I must say, I didn't expect Mairead to turn up when I started to write. She just kind of appeared. And yeah, I think she and I have become lifelong friends. So I'll read now from Mairead. He left. She washed the plates and cutlery and stoked to the fire. She sat down and lived to the charcoal grain knitting from the basket of the side of the chair. The start of a jumper for James. Dark to hide the dirt. She stretched the knitting across her lap and counted. Eight rows done. Two to go. One row plain, one row pearl. Ready in time for school, James, if you ever go back. Back to those priests and their ways. She started to knit, sliding one needle over the other and looping the wool. They're quietening of you, James. They're stilling of you and your nails chewed the quick. She finished the cuff at the base of the jumper and added six extra stitches to each side. She knitted on. Rows of plain and pearl to build the foundations of the pattern to come. Her own pattern, her design. As she knitted it for Liam, now for James. Who tells me nothing, insists only that I shouldn't worry that they don't like me because I'm an island boy. But don't worry, ma'am, because I don't like them either. She counted the stitches. 134. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. The knitter's prayer. She continued. Three more rows plain, pearl, plain. She stretched the knitting across her thighs, counted the stitches one more time and started on her pattern. Blackberry stitch, cable, moss. Diamond up the middle and out the other side and reverse. Moss, cable, blackberry. She knitted the first blackberry, building three stitches from one, gathering them, wrapping them in pearl and pushing through the birth of a berry to texture the jumper. She smiled and stroked the woolen knot. A thickening of the wool to keep James warm, as it warmed me, knitted by my mother. Though not my grandmother who still calls this the English knitting, the English scheme, their guilt for the famine, for the land theft. They take our land, she says, starve us and then to alleviate the poverty to assuage their guilt, they set us up with knitting. Make jumpers this way, they said, and sell them, they said. Earn your living that way, they said. Earn your rent that way, they said. Though we like earning our living the other way, from the land that was our land, the sea that was our sea. But they told us to knit. So now we knit. Well, I'm not knitting, says Bani Flynn, not that knitting, their knitting, their Scottish English Irish knitting. I'll do my own knitting. Knit, as my mother did, my mother knitted. My raid laughed at Bani Flynn sitting up there still by the fire with her pipe, her tea and her knitting. Defiant, making socks that nobody wants to wear anymore. Socks with patterns more intricate than these jumpers. Socks of waves and weaves, twists and turns. Socks that sit in a drawer because my father, her daughter's husband, was the last islander to wear them. Dozens of socks in that drawer waiting for him to come back from the sea. My raid smiled. At least his feet won't be cold when he comes back from the sea and opens that drawer of socks. She knitted on. Twenty plain stitches, the foundation of the cable that would run up the side of James' chest from his hip bones to his clavicle. Then the moth stitch, plain, pearl, plain, pearl. The knitting soothing in the stillness of the sleeping house, the sleeping village. Her metal needles sliding one over the other to build the base of the diamond pattern that would run up the centre of the jumper along James' chest. Still skinny, though his voice is broken and he is shaved once or twice his chin only. Surreptitiously the hair is washed away, the blade hidden. His father's blade without his father's guidance, without the guidance of a man. For the priests are of no use to him, those men in frocks. And he has no time for me hall, even less for Francis' own uncle. Though he likes the Englishman well enough. Maybe he talks to the Englishman as he would have talked to his father. A man of little use to him now under the sea in one of these jumpers, dark like this one. A bed now for fish, a blanket for crabs. The wool more enduring than his skin and flesh than his black, black hair. But what of your bones, Liam, the marrow of your bones, of you? What is left of them, of you, my love, down there, underneath in the sea grave, the grave sea? Is anything left where you're all gone, eaten, atomised, diluted and dispersed, carried from one ocean to the next, tiny particles of you travelling around the earth. My husband in Australia, in Africa, in South America, travelling the world without me, though you promised that we would go together, leave together the three of us, but you left without me, Liam, without us. She sipped at her tea and knitted on. Well, thank you very much indeed to both our readers. So, just to bring these two, in some sense the novels are quite different and in another way they have this unity which is they're both set on islands and in a way the question I'd like to ask is about why islands are so fascinating. Of course, this has quite a long history and I was thinking a bit about Yates and Singh. Yates famously gave Singh advice in 1896 when they met in Paris and he said in Yates's account of this famous story, he says, give up Paris, go to the Arran Islands, live there as if you were one of the people themselves, express a life that has never found expression. And it's that last bit that I think is fascinating, this idea of expressing that in a way digging into the stories about island life that you are, it facilitates this express a life that has never found expression. I just wondered if you could open up on that and talk a bit about what inspires and motivates this writing about an island specifically. I suppose there are a lot of good reasons why you would set a book on an island much like say the, I'm thinking of genres like the locked room murder mystery or the country house for lots of sort of practical reasons but what's different from that is when you're trying to explore the specific culture of an island and I suppose in my case, yes it all began when I, you know, I've never been on the Skellig Michael and because of COVID, my trip there was cancelled but I've been on a boat around it so tantalisingly close. So when going around it in the little boat I was looking up at the staircases, multiple staircases the monks cut, there's a richness of staircases as if they had all the time in the world to fill. Over centuries they cut these steps by hand and I remember thinking, when did they build the staircases? At what point? Because it would have been handy to have them on day one for lugging your barrels up the mountain but it couldn't have been top priority if you were trying to find fresh water and catch some fish. So I was tormented by the kind of logistics of it. At what point would you say, stop everything lads, cut a staircase, it will help us with the next task and then I thought these men weren't motivated by practical survivalism anyway because their whole enterprise was so perverse they were going there to suffer, they were going there to copy books for people who weren't there to read them. So the whole thing was a kind of absurdist exercise more than a survivalist one. So yes, I wrote Haven to answer the question of what on earth might their life there have been like. Clearly it's a community that could never have expressed itself directly to us in memoirs and so on because they were going there to shed their filthy selves and lived more purely so they would never have done some sixth century equivalent of given an interview or blog. They would have been like shush, we have work to do. So I took on the kind of impossible task of wondering what it might possibly have been like for them. And the book is entirely successful in that in terms of giving you a deeply and kind of vivid sense of the kind of psychology and lived experience of being on Scalic Michael. It certainly made me want to go. It's a place I've always wanted to go to. But to think that, yes, people went in this era so before our kind of modern conveniences and the toil and difficulty of actually doing it that's so vividly imagined in the book. So maybe I should move the island question to Audrey. What do you think? Islands are fascinating. We're all on an island. Right now we're on an island. But to do what I wanted to do, which is exploration of colonisation, I had to take us into an even smaller space and into an even smaller island because I suppose when you cut away all the superfluous things that can happen in kind of more urban areas or whatever, I think one of the things that attract us to islands attract painters, musicians, writers. For generations now we've all been attracted to these faces because they're really so elemental. Obviously the 7th century was incredibly elemental but even still you're so exposed to even the weather. So when you go to an island you're accepting that you're living at a different pace. So in the novel I kind of almost have to... It's like the reader and all of us we have to go on a trip to the island to create a space where we can explore these concepts and these legacies. And I think it... I suppose I was following the tradition of this artist going to an island and that was probably... I did it myself when I was in journalism. I was working with The Times, The London Times and I went up with Derek Hill who's an English artist who used to go every summer to Tory Island and he used to go and paint the cliffs and paint sometimes the people on the island. And I was actually probably about seven months pregnant when I did this trip so I do remember the nausea of the boat trip and I was fascinated by his desire to be so removed to create and to create a space for creation. And in a way I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to create a space for creation that would allow me to ask if you like questions about being, the being of being, that kind of Heidegger design, the being of being. What is the essence of our being now in the wake of colonisation? What happened? What is that legacy? And I found I just had to go into a very small space to create almost like a German kind of chemistry, like a theatre piece where there were very few people but very big issues and it allows you to distill and distill and distill until you're getting to an essential space. Fantastic. Thank you. I mean, one of the things that both the novels do is negotiate around this question of the Irish language and one of the things you negotiate, both of you very well, is writing in English as though the reader needs to imagine that actually all of this is being transacted off scale. And that's a difficult thing to do and again there's a tradition of doing that and that, I mean technically you handled it in quite difficult ways and different ways in the sense that your novel is kind of macaronic, there's quite a lot of Irish thrown in. None of it terribly difficult. I thought that was interesting because I don't have much Irish, I left Ireland when I was 15 so I was at a fairly basic level but I didn't have to look anything up, it was all implied. I don't think there's any Irish in your text. I think there's maybe just... Just the odd name or maybe the word cithog, which was no exact translation. The first time I've ever written English standing in for another language I was hugely self-conscious about it to start with but then I found it quite liberating because once you're doing that translation anyway you then don't have to sound old-timey and in particular I didn't need to sound kind of medieval-y like maybe from the 1300s because that wasn't going to give the flavour of the year 600 anyway. So I could afford to have them speak a fairly... I think of it as Hillary Mantel speak as an homage to her. She is a way of choosing sentences that are mostly monosyllables and they are words that Thomas Cromwell could have spoken and we could have spoken. She finds words that work for both eras. It's almost like a kind of direct tunnel to Tudor Times. Similarly I tried to go for sentences that would feel kind of plain and bare bonesy that would somehow maybe give the flavour of the mindset of the year 600 but without any kind of foamed evilism. Once I'd permitted myself to do that I actually found it very liberating not to have to stick within the idiom of say, when I've written things set in 18th century English, there are far more difficult decisions about which words you allow yourself but once you're writing a translated language anyway, just sort of go for it. Certainly it didn't come across like the medieval elements of the book is just kind of completely convincing. It didn't feel, yeah, I can see exactly the problem you were trying to get around that kind of foamed evilism issue and I can see how it was linguistically liberating to do what you did. I have another question which I want to just focus in a bit on religion and in a way if you had to stand back from the novel having kind of obviously lived that kind of very vivid descriptive detail, pulling it all together, making the story rounded, is in a way is one of the big points in the novel that it's kind of pointing to the extreme kind of psychology that organized religion creates or can create. Is that one of the kind of take-homes do you think? Yes, but I really tried to balance it by showing what an incredible motivator their faith was as well. It literally drives the plot, gets these men a monastery in which they're kind of subsumed in the group it plucks them out, it sends them down the Shannon past danger out to see it, in a way it turns them into the artist who comes up with a mad plan there's no particular need for a new novel in the world and yet you have this mad plan you have to go home and write a novel and similarly I feel religion is huge drive and source of kind of energy and ambition and creativity in the novel as well as the more obvious bad sides and so for every time when I was giving father art a kind of a mad megalomaniac moment or a colonizer moment frankly because even though there are no human inhabitants his approach to the birds is very much like kill the natives you know but I tried to balance that with many moments where say young Trion has a kind of a proto Francis of the Sissy moment where he's like oh the birds are my sister the moon is my mother you know so I tried to find as much beauty in the early Christian tradition as there is you know fascism and you know brutal asceticism and yeah what's the word I don't want to start listing all the bad things about I tried to find the good as well as the bad Absolutely but in the end I'm worried about spoilers I don't know about but when Trion's identity is kind of revealed towards the end or a more complicated kind of twist in the plot right at the end that's very interesting because in the end I think then the moral judgment at the end of art is pretty conclusive there's a judgment of art but Cormac by quoting a different bit of the Bible is able to find a way to fully accept and love the young man so you can find anything you like in the Bible so I really tried to show early Irish Christianity is a very very tradition you know there are you know I was using a lot of saints stories stories about the saints and I would find one that like the famous one Seamus Heaney wrote a poem about you know Saint Kevin allowing the bird to nest in his hand and then there are other stories where saints curse birds or freeze them and roast them for dinner you know so you can find you can find the opposites very easily Fantastic thank you very much I have a question before we just move on to open it out to the audience I thought maybe I'd ask Audrey about the implications of the kind of narrative interweave and maybe I'd just explain that the book house so the colony has quite long descriptive fictional chapters which are set on the island where there's just a handful of characters it's really at the about seven or eight characters and totally mainly focused on Lloyd the artist and on J.P. Masson the linguist that's one of the major narratives the other narrative is a kind of reportage telling us over the summer of 1979 of a kind of series of quite dramatic republican and loyalist atrocities which played out some of which are very vivid I was a child at the time and some of them I really do remember those things happening and I I just think I'm fascinated by the implications of the duality of what your novel is doing and asking really in the end is it a parable about nationalism and what nationalism or colonialism does to people I mean you know I was 13 in 1979 and it was a very important summer in my life and it's interesting that we're all kind of having similar relationships with 1979 but I was 13 in 1979 and I went to France on a French I went to stay with a French family and they was kind of at the beach in Brittany and we'd spend the morning working in a kitchen and then would spend the afternoon kind of hanging out and hanging out on the beach and playing with boats and the boys there playing with boats and it was all a very just such a mellow that was the month of June the people I stayed with had no English and I had no French so I had to learn French it was just really a huge summer for me, a huge month for me and then I came back and someone was doing its usual thing but there was this drumbeat of kind of a lot of kind of tension around the place that really exploded in that day in August on August 27th when the IRA bombed Mountbatten's boat now obviously there would have been an awful lot of violence happening up in Northern Ireland but this crossed the border into the south and the bomb killed Mountbatten and it killed an 82-year-old woman who was the mother-in-law of his daughter but it also killed two young boys one of them on Mountbatten's grandchildren and then the other a young boy working on the boat that for me was seismic because I had been in France I was 13 they were 14 and 15 other 14 and 15 year old boys in France were playing on boats and nobody was getting killed and it was quite even though I was very young it was a very kind of existential moment for me where I just realised that being Irish had a different identity to being French and that continued when I travelled and I remember as an 18-year-old going to Denmark and the pride they had and the flag and the Danish flag would be flying all over the place in their houses and I'm like wow it was just a really huge disconnect for me because we had so many issues with identifying with flag, with identifying with language with identifying with just with this legacy of violence and what it meant and how it identifies you as a teenager and I mean that's where you're asking earlier about language that the book explores the legacy of colonisation obviously but the legacy too of this this violence that was the backdrop to our lives people of my generation who would grow up with this this violence kind of puncturing into our lives we were safe in the south so it's very much a southern perspective I don't at all claim at all in any way to be writing a northern experience it's very much a southern perspective which is why also we have the distance of the island because we're away from it but it still cuts into the narrative on what's happening on this remote island it still cuts into it the daily life and it's cutting into what's happening on the island firstly at a kind of a remove but then when it starts to become about young boys being at risk the island women start to become a little bit worried and anxious about James because suddenly James is in that category too so you know suddenly James at risk what's going to happen with James so we all kind of even though we're at a distance and even though we tried to you know ignore it growing up and our parents tried to ignore it for us growing up because it was over the border it just for me as a child it didn't seem to quite stay over the border I don't know why but I ended up as a reporter spending a huge amount of time in Northern Ireland I ended up covering the Elma bomb and it was really the Elma bomb that I suppose I really realised journalism wasn't enough for me anymore I needed to go deeper I needed to try and understand this at the core of much of my work is trying to reason with violence Hannah Arendt's the banality of evil trying to understand violence the hierarchy of violence why we resort all the time violence is a tool is a weapon until it you write about puffins in your work in my work this this kind of hierarchy of violence where it goes right down through the entire society until it ends up on this tiny little baby puffin and it's so interesting in both our works the birds really do take the brunt of a lot of the this human violence so it's definitely I think a space we both end up in interesting you know that we both I think see that the birds are really the core inhabitants of these islands and yet the violence ends up on them so yeah in the sense of it but I think it is it is a struggle to try it is definitely it's a question of it's a search for an understanding of identity it's a search for understanding when you grow up in a post I don't even know what your island is postcolonial in the context of Brexit but anyway let's use these these phrases of postcolonial colonial whatever but what does that do to you it's definitely a trying to understand and how do you reclaim your flag how do you reclaim your language certainly I I'm a naturally a linguist I could wonder around Europe speak French, German, Dutch Romanian, Italian, Spanish not a bother but I couldn't speak Irish you know and I was like well why don't I speak Irish what's the baggage of that that I don't speak Irish like what is that every other language comes incredibly naturally to me so why not it so it's I don't have the answers but I'm just like digging so yeah so it's very interesting it seems to me that one of the the bridges between both books is in a way a kind of insistence on the specifics of cultural memory and of kind of recognising and coming to terms with kind of deeper aspects of a kind of collective past and seeking to really understand and kind of interrogate you know how that shapes our presence because I think there's another similarity with our books because I think we're both on islands obviously and you know if you think of the colony in Ireland you think of of English colonisation but as soon as we became independent we created a constitution we built a hospital and education system obviously we were very poor and we sought help but the help we sought was from the Vatican with incredible consequences particularly for Irish people who didn't quite fit into the perfect Catholic framework so I think this is again where our novels do marry that we are exploring the issues of the impact of religion of the impact of political structures you know that absolutely I think on that note we should probably open up to questions so I can see two microphones one at the back there and one at the back here so if you'd like to raise your hand if you'd like to ask questions have we got any yeah we've got one over here I was just wondering if you had any trouble like reconciling writing about colonisation like a colonising experience in when talking about the Irish language writing about that in English did you have any trouble reconciling that I think it's a fascinating it's a really strong question are you an Irish writer if you don't write in Irish I mean it's huge it's and it was a very interesting space to use the Irish language in my work because I don't have Irish but you know I have these lines of assistance and my first assistance was my children who had just been to the gael talk more recently than I had and who had done Irish and then I went to the to the universities to get help there but then in the end I had to find an Irish that wasn't an island Irish because I was very keen that it wasn't labelled as any particular island because it's a metaphorical space of the island of Ireland so I ended up using actually an Irish dialect from the mainland from a part of north west Mayo and it's a dialect now spoken only by 160 people so I completely really think it's a very interesting question for writing you know when we write in the English language which is the language that we now mainly use in Ireland and it is the language of the colonising country and this is a question that's been dealt with in Africa and French you know if you Francophone Africa should you be writing in French should you be writing in the regional languages what do you do, what do you, how do you so I feel I've reserved a little bit of the Ducreacol in Irish but I don't know whether I'll seek to delve further into the Irish language I don't know what I'll do next but it's a very interesting concept in terms of what language you use and I was just on a tour of Southeast Asia with the novel and one of the things we kept talking about was language one of the things we talk in Indonesia all these tiny languages, all these tiny islands each of them with their own language or dialect but mainly actually language and what do they do, do they write in Indonesian do they write in that language in their local languages like Batak what do they do, it's an international discussion and it's also a European discussion but it's absolutely international I mean Yates was quite good on this question about language nationalism and identity he says one of those kind of pity kind of almost kind of aphorisms Irish is my national language it is not my mother tongue and you look at Joyce and you look at Beckett and the debates they had within themselves Joyce when he was a student you know this but when Joyce was a student he decided he was going to learn Irish and then just couldn't actually abide to the whole kind of nationalist fervor, the national movement and you know in Stephen Hero he declares English is the language of the continent and I'm off and off he went and then Beckett found freedom from this whole question by writing in French and then wrote in English when he decided that that was now a foreign tone to him because he had distanced himself sufficiently so you know this is an age old discussion that we have in writing and as we should have in writing because language is what we do it's a new generation it's a really interesting I don't know how much more time I could get but it's such an interesting space now within the Irish language in Ireland in terms of what's happening when I talk about that because basically now the west of Ireland which is the core and the ancient language and the language linked to land and the language linked to heritage and the language linked to ancestry that's spoken now as I said the Duchy Conde dialect is 160 people there are now actually more speakers on the east coast of Ireland numerically than there are on the west coast and those principally those speakers on the east coast are second language learners in that they have learnt it from a maybe from an Irish teacher you know an originally west of Ireland teacher or maybe themselves those teachers themselves are second language learners it's a new kind of Irish but it's incredibly vibrant on the east coast and it's whether you there's some way to blend the eastern west that's another debate have we got any other questions I think there's one there I've read either of these books The Haven and the Colony I'm definitely going to read them at Christmas they're absolutely fascinating and there's an enormous parity between them somehow they're sort of similar not just by the islands but so few people and such large issues I think that's what Audrey said and the question I have is really to Emma I haven't read The Haven but I have seen The Wonder and that's the screenplay that I think you've been associated with and I wonder whether sorry can you hear me I wonder whether the monks found what they were looking for on the island on Skellig is it about spirituality is it about futility is it in the end about transience something that is for then and then is dead and gone it's like in The Wonder where you have enormous religious fervour but in the end it's futile and I wonder if you could tell us anything about that Sure I mean without going into much detail it's just it's an odd accident of timing that a novel I published in 2016 has just turned into a film on Netflix and my newest novel they both appear to show that I have some kind of obsession with or perhaps grudge against extreme Christianity and I swear I've written about many things in between and before and after but these two just seem to have come out like a double whammy this old and and they are similar I suppose in that even though The Wonder is set in 1859 Irish Midlands and Haven in the Year 600 on Skelligs they both feature extreme commitment to religion in a way which is very aesthetic embracing of pain, embracing of hunger embracing of suffering but also ecstatic and visionary and meditative and in both cases I suppose I've tried to show some of the sweetness of that tradition and the astonishing sense of meaning it would have given to your life especially if you're a nobody if you're some left-handed boy orphan or if you're some 19th century Irish child who will never have a vote unlikely to have a job unlikely even to get married these nobodies by clinging to the narrative of saintliness could find their lives suddenly buoyed up by meaning I mean remembering my childhood the idea that if you had a a sty on your lip or something I now can't remember do you only have stys on your eyes anyway some weird little facial imperfection but if you were told to offer it up that suggested that you were like doing something impressive by having this nasty spot you know I mean what other traditions can rival that I say meaning in every pimple you know so you might say it's a perverse tradition to say to a child who is suffering in some small way you know Jesus wants your pain but on the other hand it packaged your pain in a way that made you feel like I'm having this this sty for Jesus so I think it's a hugely energising and meaningful storyline to grab hold of so this is why yes I suppose I've been interested in several different stories about what it might be like to kind of jump on that boat and see where it carries you I've never jumped on the boat of extreme religion myself I'm very moderate but I like these characters who take the journey all the way to the end so on the issue of taking the journey all the way to the end I'm aware of time and I've chosen little excerpts from both the books just to kind of read us out if that's okay so I'm going to crave your permission just to read a tiny little detail from each novel just to finish us out in the end if you set a novel on an island you've got a kind of unity of place and a kind of crisis plot which is going to resolve in some way and one of the things that happens is that you know some people leave the island and some people are left behind and I'm drawn to the characters who are left behind and what sort of altered psychology is in the situation then at the end so I'm going to begin with the colony and with Merade what is it about you know Merade is this you know mother figure widowed, relatively young, attractive left behind, Lloyd has gone, Masson will go but the thing that's happened to her is she's been painted by Lloyd and there's a beautiful moment where she is posing as a model for Lloyd and she realises that she's been seen in a way which she regards as quite in a way which is quite true and as she's being painted she says I want him to unearth it this thing that is me beyond the beauty that everybody sees beyond that, beyond to what Mam sees what James sees, what Francis sees what JP sees what JP thinks he sees the truth is me, as I was then I want that unearthed, captured and taken away far from here and that is exactly what happens that she's painted in this large canvas painting and it leaves on the boat to go back to London so that is a conclusion of a kind for Merade art is left behind on Skellig Michael the lone monk, the other two who have left on the boat in the book one of the things that's very vivid to me is where you write about the kind of illuminating and illuminated manuscripts tradition and you talk in some detail about the making of the book the making of a manuscript and you said there is no end to the making of books and I think that's fascinating to see a writer writing about the act of making a book and that's where I wanted to end up and really to say thank you to both novelists for writing these wonderful novels and just I'll finish with this little bit here his left palm so she's writing about the act of writing his left palm cramps and his flexed wrist aches his right hand feels bruised where he grips the night handle too hard three fingers right the saying goes two eyes read one tongue speaks the whole body toils I'd like to say thank you to both novelists for toiling and writing these novels with such grace and energy thank you