ANTHOLOGY: The Quiet Quarter: Ten Years of Great Irish WritingEdited by Máire Nic Gearailt New Island/ RTÉ Lyric FM, 365pp, €12.99
THE QUIET QUARTER, as Máire Nic Gearailt points out in her excellent introduction, ran from May 1999 to September 2009, on Lyric FM. She describes the well-known and much loved slot as "a few minutes of quiet reflection in the morning". Guidelines asked writers to make "a personal response to an experience, a person or an event . . . rather than the event itself".
The anthology is a selection of 131 of the pieces broadcast between 2004 and the last programme in September of this year. Many of the items are, in fact, descriptions of “the event itself” – the personal response being knit into the style, the choice of content, and often, indeed, summed up succinctly in the title. Most take the form of very short, personal stories, complete with protagonist, event and very good closing moments of illumination, what Joyce called “epiphanies”.
Some, such as Celia De Fréine's Hester, are perfect, tiny short stories.
"Epiphany" would be a good catch-all title for the genre which the Quiet Quarterwritings represent, and which has evolved in response to the requirement of radio for thoughtful writing in miniature ( Sunday Miscellany, of course, has also played a key role in the evolution of literary prose for Irish radio).
Máire Nic Gearailt has classified her selection under various headings, some predictable, such as ‘People’, or ‘Travel and Place’, and some strange, such as ‘Fur, Feathers, and Leaves’. (Trees predominate).
The variety of categories is itself an indication of the freedom the writers had to talk about whatever they liked – or write about whatever they liked (only one contributor, John Moriarty, chose not to write his script but to extemporise orally. Kerry people can do things like that.)
The sounds we heard on the radio were, of course, the actual voices of the writers, and we can still hear lots of them, on the Lyric FM website. But their literary voices emerge strongly in every one of these scripts. Brevity proves to be a great asset, obliging the writers to distil the essence of their experiences and personalities into the allotted timeframe.
There is no question of selecting a few favourites for comment in this similarly limited space – so, a few general comments.
Most of the talks are in the first person singular, naturally enough given the rubric. Eight are in the first person plural; the “we” refers to siblings or tourist groups. “We” covers spouses/partners in only four instances, which may reveal something, possibly appalling, about the Irish psyche in pensive mood. Three are in the second person (singular – nobody made a speech!). Most of the writing takes a memoir type form, although there are some pieces giving “information” – often about foreign places, and very seldom about historical events or figures (by contrast with Sunday Miscellany).
A mild tone of what I would term nostalgia prevails. Almost all writers convey a sense of wonder at the beauty or unexpectedness of the world. In other words, the mood is generally poetic, although prose is the predominant medium. Perhaps a consequence is that humour is infrequent but it certainly occurs more than once, as for instance in Louis De Paor's delightful Inspiration, a story about his Latin teacher, Mr Dennis. Fifteen years after he left school the author met Mr Dennis in a pub. By way of greeting:
"' Conjugate Tango, boy,' he said.
' Tango, tangere, taxi, tactum,' I said, delighted. And wrong."
It's tetigi, not taxi, as Mr Dennis was quick to point out. Tango is one of the hardest ones, I seem to recall. But the verb "to touch" is apposite in the context of this book.
What all the writing has in common is that it is touching – it moves the heart, the memory, and the mind, and offers fresh perspectives and insights on a cornucopia of topics. That was the purpose of the series, and those of us who loved to listen to it – often as we were stuck in city traffic or driving across the country – regret its demise on the airwaves and welcome this wonderful anthology with open arms. It’s not for reading at one go – its offerings are rich and condensed, and the book is one to keep in an accessible place and dip into whenever you are in need of a mental fillip. Or a quiet moment. (Though not while driving.)
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest novels are Dún an Airgid(Cois Life) and Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow(Blackstaff Press). She is Writer Fellow in UCD, teaching on the MA in Creative Writing
