Book Festival reviews: Paul Lynch | Tracy Chevalier | Harriet Constable | Karl Ove Knausgard

Paul Lynch, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, being interviewed by Nicola Sturgeon, described an epiphany in a taxi in Sicily which prompted him to “swerve” out of his job as a subeditor on a newspaper into writing fiction. The effect was immediate: he drove back to his hotel, opened his laptop and began to write.

He described the importance of intuition in his writing practice, of listening to the subconscious, “opening the door into the dark”.

Before beginning Prophet Song, he had spent six months “writing the wrong book”. But, two days after putting it aside for good, he sat down and wrote the opening page of Prophet Song, without planning or forethought, finding later that it embodied all the key themes of the book.

Intuition, however, is not enough to create a book. There must be conscious choice about form and structure, shaping the story in a way which “enters in to you, right down to the soul”.

For this book, about a woman trying to keep her family alive in an Ireland in the grip of a fascist dictatorship, the choice was to write in the present tense without paragraph breaks, making an intense, claustrophobic read. 

But more prosaic factors also make writing possible. Asked about the extraordinary explosion of creativity in Irish writing, he cited not only the important social changes of recent times in the country but also the culture of “tremendous state funding”, the fruits of which are now beginning to be published.

On the day that Creative Scotland announced the closure of its Open Fund for Individuals because of uncertainties over its budget, this seemed particularly apposite.

Next came two novelists who found their nuggets of inspiration in history.

While the master glassmakers of Murano were almost exclusively men (and still are) Tracy Chevalier discovered that the making of glass beads - used in trade throughout the world - was often done by women. Then she came across of Maria Borovie, a master glassmaker in the 15th-century, who became the mentor to Orosla Rosso, the time-travelling heroine of her 11th novel, The Glassmaker.

Debut novelist Harriet Constable also found a Venetian gem when she discovered that Vivaldi had taught music in the Ospedale della Pieta, an orphanage for girls. His students learned instruments normally reserved for men and went on to become some of the top musicians of their generation.

Further research revealed his favourite student, Anna Maria della Pieta, whose talent threatened to eclipse his, who became the heroine of her novel The Instrumentalist.

From Venice to a small town in Norway in 1986 where 19-year-old Syvert, the hero of Karl Ove Knausgard’s The Wolves of Eternity, takes a job as an undertaker’s assistant.

Thirty years later, following a trail left in his dead father’s letters, he finds himself in Russia meeting his half-sister Alevtina, a biology professior who is challenging some of the non-negotiables of life and death.

Knausgard’s Morning Star series of books were his first works of fiction after his five-volume autobiography, My Struggle, and the conversation quickly turned to the way life and literature mix.

Yes, he said, he grew up in small town Norway as Syvert did, in the same decade, and they both love football, but he took joy in the differences between them: Syvert is a practical man with no interest in literature or ideas.

Then there was the further challenge of writing Alevtina, a Russian woman and a scientist, which he described as “the most risky thing I’ve ever done… But I write to understand things, learn things, get to new places, and this happened with her.”