Which are the 200 best novels written in English since 1950? That was the question Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil asked themselves when setting out to compile The Modern Library, a literary guide due from Picador next month and aiming to answer precisely that question. The hardback will, however, deliberately appear six novels short, leaving readers to come up with the last half-dozen for inclusion in the paperback edition. There'll even be a form for their submissions at the back of the original book, from which Toibin and Callil will make up the total.
I eagerly await the result, due on World Book Day and described by Picador as "passionately idiosyncratic" in its choices. Hopefully they've found room for such neglected classics as Gerald Hanley's The Consul at Sunset (1951), Penelope Mortimer's The Pumpkin Eater (1962), L. Woiwode's What I'm Going To Do, I Think (1969), Len Deighton's Bomber (1970), George V. Higgins's Cogan's Trade (1974), Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn (1975), Elmore Leonard's Split Images (1981), Patricia Highsmith's Found in the Street (1986), Lawrence Block's When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) and Charles Willeford's The Way We Die Now (1990). If not, I'll nominate six of them for the paperback.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
These are the first two stanzas of Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy, who's tipped by some to be the next Poet Laureate but who, more importantly, is one of the finest poets now writing in English. I mention her here because she'll be reading in the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Poetry Now Festival, which takes place during the last weekend of this month. Brendan Kennelly, Kerrie Hardy, Aidan Matthews, Rita Ann Higgins and Michael Coady are among the impressive Irish line-up. More details as the time approaches. Oh, and here's the rest of Carol Ann Duffy's small masterpiece:
Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.
For some reason, those haunting invocations of sea areas remind me of the way Paul Durcan, with similar resonance, invoked radio stations (Luxembourg, Athlone, Budapest, Hilversum) in the song In the Days Before Rock 'n' Roll, co-written with Van Morrison and to be found on Morrison's 1990 album, Enlightenment. Indeed, I wish he'd been kept on to write the lyrics for Golden Autumn Day, the last track on Morrison's new album, Back on Top, which was released this week. Morrison can be a dodgy lyricist, but normally the music is so exhilarating that it doesn't matter. How, though, to ignore this diatribe against muggers: "If there's such a thing as justice I could take them out and flog them/In the nearest green field/And it might be a lesson to the bleeders of the system/In this whole society."
The transcendent power of love, already explored by Niall Williams in his first novel, Four Letters of Love (soon to be a movie), is again the theme of his new novel, As It Is in Heaven, due from Picador in June. Forty-year-old Williams, who lives in Kiltumper with his wife and two children, writes this time about a shy west of Ireland schoolteacher and his tailor father, both of them in pursuit of a happiness that has so far eluded them.
Catherine Phil MacCarthy, outgoing editor of Poetry Ireland Review, will be in the Winding Stair, Ormond Quay, next Thursday at 7 p.m. to launch the 60th issue of the magazine and to present the Ted McNulty prize for the best poem it published in 1998. Katie Donovan and Gwyn Parry were the judges making the difficult choice. Mark Roper is the incoming editor for the next few issues, so send your manuscripts to him, c/o Poetry Ireland, Bermingham Tower, Upper Yard, Dublin Castle, Dublin 2.