"I'D LOVE to buy your book," the woman in the Spiegeltent's front row said to Sebastian Barry, pictured, "but really love to buy you with it."
And to be sure, you could see what she meant: handsome, hugely talented Irish playwright, soft Irish words, passionate Irish reading. Convincing too, so that half the Spiegeltent, eyes closed over coffee and croissants, was with Roseanne from The Se
cret Scripture in Salthill, Co Galway in that summer of 1929, that hot, dusty August (ha!) when the new dancehall lured out the mountain men on Friday nights and the local priest had his work cut out watching out for wandering hands, and the boys smelt of sweat, soap, turf and Brilliantine, and the girls...
The girls were like Roseanne McNulty, cranked up like a car engine, ready for life, for love. Now she is old and in the asylum, sent there decades ago when the state was young too, for a crime that wasn't a crime, just something that had to be covered up; out of sight, out of mind and all that.
Barry actually had such a relative, a great-aunt he never knew. His mother told him about her one day, how she'd been sent to the asylum – "the Leitrim hotel, they called it, because half of Leitrim was in it", and he'd asked why and she'd said "because she was no good", which had got him wondering. He'd tried to write a play about her, but it didn't work, the voice was still too faint, so he let the years pass. Yet here she was: an innocent, locked away; a story of the old, inconvenient Ireland that needed telling. And if you've read A Long, Long Way, you'll already know that he's good at those.
So even before Hugo Hamilton starts reading, the bar's already set so high that you just know it's going to come clattering down. Except it doesn't, because Hamilton was talking about an equally fascinating lost soul – Gregor, the protagonist of his novel Disguise, a three-year-old Jewish boy rescued from a train in Second World War Germany, brought up to replace another three-year-old killed in the Allied bombing of Berlin, and who only realises his identity years later.
Such themes of mixed-up identity fascinate Hamilton, who was brought up in Ireland by a German mother and an Irish nationalist father who forbade the use of English in the house. The new, more comfortable and self-confident Ireland, he said, is looking at its past in more inclusive ways. And if you wonder why peace came at last to Ireland, perhaps you've also got to look at stirringly honest and engaging writers such as these.
The full article contains 464 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
