If a book isn’t sad, what kind of book is that: Anne Enright

The Tata Literature Live which you are attending is one of the many English literary festivals in India. And yet English came in as a colonial legacy. Do you see an irony there?

You know the British killed the Irish language in the early 19th century. For me too English is a colonial language. Though I grew up with it, its not what my ancestors spoke five generations ago. English is a colonial imposition but its also a great gift (Laughs). We, Irish have taken the language and used it better than the people who obliged us to speak it. So as an Irish writer in English the urgency of the discussions around colonial legacy of English as a language in India always interest me. Having said that, you have to admit that writing in English is a boon. As one of the biggest languages in the world, when you write or speak English, your words go very far.

Your Chevening Scholarship took you to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, where you were taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury. Is formal training necessary to become a writer?

To be a writer what is needed is the ability to sit in a room for two years and write and not panic. Yet if you ask if formal training a good thing or not I’d say, yes. There are many anxieties while writing a book. These can be relieved by teachers and fellow students. They become your first readers. The availability of such an engaged audience externalises your work and can help you emotionally when you put it out. So it can be a privilege but I wouldn’t say it's absolutely necessary.

Many feel writing for television is bad for writing. What is your view considering you worked with the medium for six years?

You know when I got a job in TV, a friend of mine made me cry saying I’d come to no good. He said I’ll never write, I’ll disappear into TV and that’d be the end of me as writer. I remember breaking down. Its true that TV eats up all your time, ambition and creativity but if you can keep some part of your spirit safe (laughs), then the writer in you should be okay.

Yet, doesn’t TV make one’s writing a lot more conversational and visual... a lot more here and now.

I’d have to agree. Because TV made me a more modern writer. So much of our reading is 19th century and early 20th century prose otherwise. TV is a very ultra modern environment where everything is speedy and fragmented so it made me a very contemporary and gave my writing a lot of energy.

It took a break-down for you to plunge into full-time writing in 1993?

It was a difficult phase for me to try and mange my writing ambition and continue to do a TV job. It was very difficult to give up TV. People around me felt I was giving up what was an interesting and exciting career for taking up something that not enormously fashionable in Ireland at that time. But I had no choice. The work I was doing at that time was burning me out, killing me. I was unable to be the person I wanted to be. In a sense it proved to be a very useful nervous breakdown in the long run even if it wasn’t too pleasant at that time.

Many compare your early writing to Brian O'Nolan’s. Were his writings a big influence?

You know when people use the word influence they often mean a heavy, dark, monumental writer who you look up to and aspire to be like. Much of Brian O’Nolan’s work is so playful, funny and irreverent that it never felt like an influence, but a pleasure. I’ve reached a point where its tough to say who has been the bigger influence on me as a writer any more. But you see I don't suffer from the anxiety of influence because many of the writers I like are comic writers who make the day livelier (laughs).

Your first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, was as much about parents and love as their Roman Catholicism. Were you worried given that the Roman Catholic church in Ireland has a very strong presence?

That’s a very complex question to answer when you’re half-way across the world. I like to believe I’m very careful when I write about religion. I never satirise people’s beliefs. Yes it's true that the Roman Catholic church was still quite important but it was on a decline... sort of a hollow emptied out shell. The church may not be as integral a part of my life as my parents but that doesn’t mean I’ll set out to laugh at the church.

You won the Man Booker for The Gathering. How important are awards and recognition for you as a writer?

You see writers are very vulnerable people. They have to be so when working. While it is a privileged life, it can be an emotionally difficult one. Awards and recognition somehow makes that vulnerability that much easier. Of course the prize money has meant I can live well and send my children to good schools (Laughs)... While awards are good for writers, for books and for the industry, you have to be able to shut the door and ready to engage with the blank page. If any award gets in the way of that process, that would be dangerous.

Soon after receiving the Booker award, you called The Gathering “an intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.”

I felt very exposed and was overwhelmed with the attention. I had begun almost apologising for the dark plot of The Gathering. It's like everyone wanted to know why the book was unpleasant, dark and sad and I was trying to cover up and say smart, funny things in response. And sadness and art, I mean, God Almighty! For me, if a book isn’t sad, what kind of book is that? It can of course be a mix of both — the comic and the sad.

Your piece for the London Review of Books about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann led to a lot of outrage.

I talked about that at that time and I have said what I wanted to. I have nothing further to say on that.

Has the intense reaction come in the way of your publicly taking a political stand on issues?

We have no opinion on issues like those anymore.

Many, like Thomas Keneally, speak of parallels between Ireland and India. Your thoughts.

In my visits here, I realise India is growing into a really big entity. So it's natural to think where it wants to head from here. How are we going to manage our colonial legacy and the multiple identities? It reminds me a lot of Ireland while growing up. Ireland’s tiny and you could perhaps fit its entire population in Mumbai, but as we created a nation-state, we had to re-define ourselves. That can come with its own set of problems. I see that happening in India too. This desire for ownership of the country is part of our shared post-colonial legacy.

Why is popular and good writing getting increasingly incongruous?

I’m unsure how or why that happens. The literary tradition I’m most familiar with is the Irish and here we still have good writing as being the most popular writing. I can think of Roddy Doyle who is known for his simplicity. He’s a very good writer and also very popular. Personally, I want my work to be immediate and in people’s lives instead of being stuck in an ivory tower. But I guess this divide has been there earlier too. For example there were contemporaries publishing in the times of Charles Dickens who we haven’t heard of.

Many call this the best times for Indian writers in English. Do you follow any of their work?

Yes. It's not only the best but a rather busy time for Indian writing in English. Anita Desai, Nirad Chaudhary’s works come to mind. People like VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth are of course brilliant writers but I’m thinking of people younger than me (laughs). In Germany, when they talk of writers, they mean people who are above 60. In Ireland, it means people are in their 40s. I really like Jhumpa Lahiri’s work as also the diaspora writing or transnational fiction written by émigrés because it is often about people living in two cultures at once. This strand of writing by both Chinese and Indian writers interests me a lot.

Is there a book you’re working on now?

I just finished a book last week. Its called The Green Road. The plot unfolds in a family of which one child is in America and the other in Africa. They have to come back in the middle of the book when their mother decides to sell the house. They are coming back after living in countries very different from Ireland.