Niall Griffiths

It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around me converse. Some would express themselves in a personal language of grunts and clicks; others would be monosyllabically gnomic; and others would make of English new and magical shapes. They’d enrapture the language (especially in oath and insult) and draw out its transformative potential. I relive that thrill whenever I come across a new book by Kevin Barry. His words address the reward centre in the brain, the neural pathways that are enlivened by nicotine, alcohol or opioids. Reading him, I am given the feeling that I’ve achieved something, done something good and am being justly remunerated. The brain lights up and grins.

This new collection of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories comes across the pond as one of four handsomely packaged volumes from Canongate. Little known in this country, he towers large in his native States; a MacArthur Genius fellow, a PEN/Faulkner Award winner twice, winner of the Prix Femina Etranger last year, endorsed by Richard Ford and Caryl Phillips.... Old now, he has a lengthy list of publications behind him, and, on this latest evidence, carries a flame of rage against American injustice and prejudice that yet burns magma-hot.

He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first in 16. And, in that time, it could be argued that Irish writers have moved away from his bare and declarative style into the wildness of, say, a Barry or a Barrett or a Baume; word-typhoons, of an affinity with the febrile and fervid times. What cannot be doubted, though, is MacLaverty’s awareness of, and wide aliveness to, the world’s flux, its writhings in the decades since his first novel Lamb; in his latest, his deep familiarity with, and angry love for, the workings of the UK, and Europe, and the globe are displayed stark and clear, the stylistic precision of their expression becoming a haven from a hot and hyper-active mediated age.

If there’s one shared characteristic of the so-called ‘new nature writing’ it is a failure, with a few notable exceptions, even to approach what up until very recently writing about the non-human had as its core ambition; that is, to dissolve the ego, to melt the self in the recognition of the other and, through that and in a wonderful paradox, to stretch the knowledge of what it is to be human. The solipsistic trait of the age is, it seems, pandemic; try consciously and ostentatiously to be a beast and you’ll succeed only in being a beast of a human being. Emblematic of this is a kind of empathetic glee in the suffering of animals, as if the evolutionary botch of Homo sapiens could ever be as pure and as perfect in its predations as, say, an otter or a sparrowhawk.