Culture That Made Me: Author Jan Carson on Dylan, Zone of Interest, and the Bible
Jan Carson is one of the authors at Words by Water: Kinsale Literary Festival
Born in 1980, Jan Carson grew up in Ballymena, Co Antrim. In 2014, she published , the first of several novels and short story collections. In 2019, she was awarded the EU Prize for Literature. She is in conversation with Shane Coleman as part of the Kinsale Literary Festival, 6pm Friday, October 4, Methodist Church, Kinsale, Co Cork. For a full programme of the festival, see www.wordsbywater.ie
I was raised fundamentalist, so the big book in our house was the Bible. It's the reason I'm a magical realist because there's so many parables and explorations of the supernatural in there. The tenet of magical realism is that it's set in the real world and then strange things happen. The Bible is shot through with the supernatural. People who were blind being healed, people being resurrected from the dead – Jesus comes back from the dead – and the Red Sea splitting. It’s about angels and demons. I love the language of it.
Roald Dahl has a grasp of language. A lot of children's writers are not as aware of the possibilities of language. When he's writing a scene and there isn't a word in English that will convey what he wants to say, he makes up these fantastic, visceral words so you can almost hear or feel what he's trying to convey. is full of wonderful made-up words. I liked that irreverence with language as a kid. I like to play with turning verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs, using colloquialisms. A playfulness with language is something I love in a writer. It came from Dahl early on.
I love Bob Dylan. I spent years studying him. At one point I was going to write a novel about his childhood. I went around America for three months, interviewing people who knew him. At some stage, I will come back to it. He's an amazing lyricist. He does things with lyrics that you can tell he's a reader. He's an intelligent man, a storyteller. There's a showmanship to him I like. Also, I love the fluidity of Dylan. There are so many Dylans. In that movie – when so many different people play him – you get insight into how many different versions of himself there's been.
I was eight when I started reading Agatha Christie. She is still my go-to. She's often dismissed as a starter writer that people read when they're younger and then they mature out of. That's naïve. If you look at something like , it’s a masterwork of plotting. Her brain was fantastic. The sheer output that she produced – 66 crime novels, plus the romance novels, and the plays. She operated in a man's world – crime fiction was not a nice place for ladies in her era, and she went and she wrote the rules. I find her immensely inspiring – not just as a writer, but as a woman.
I adore Flannery O'Connor. There is a faith element to what she's wrestling with, a deep reverence for Catholicism, but also a desire to critique and call out the hypocrisies in religiosity. She's got an unflinching eye. Flannery will tell it like it is, even if it's grotesque and uncomfortable. She's one of the best ever short story writers. She died so young, leaving really only four books of fiction. So much potential there still to come. The best place to start with her is a collection called .
is a remarkable movie. I went to see it three times. I've never seen anything that upset me so much. It’s a clever cinema because when you think about it, there's nothing actually upsetting in it. It's all done through implication. If you don't know the story of what the central character was – the commandant of Auschwitz – there’s nothing sinister about it, but when you do know that, it's horrific. A lot of contemporary cinema has lost its subtlety. Hitchcock, for example, played on your worst assumptions, on what you can't see, on sound. All of that is in . The soundtrack is so menacing. Those big, long blank scenes when there was nothing on screen except sound. It’s so good.
My favourite contemporary writer is George Saunders, author of . He’s mad. He does things with language and story form that I don’t think anyone else is doing, and yet he's doing it in a deeply accessible way. Sometimes you get experimental writers who isolate their readers. He has a wide appeal. There's a deep humanity to the way he writes. He's a kind writer. He writes about the best in people as well as the worst. He’s amazing.
I'm a big Tennessee Williams fan. He pushed the boundaries of what you can get away with in how he talked about sex, gender and questioning the norms of the America of his day. I still find and provocative now. They must have been terribly provocative when first performed. As a person, he was terribly misunderstood and out of his comfort zone his whole life with his own sexuality, and the madness that was in his family and all the norms of southern gentility. He took that and put it on stage in a way that was really brave.
I love Brian Friel from this neck of the woods. is probably my favourite of the Friel plays. It's such a simple concept. It's like a monologue for the most part yet he does so much storytelling, inviting the audience to ask big questions through this simple narrative. I often look back at it when I'm writing dialogue because it's a masterpiece of dialogue.
I'm a big Alfred Hitchcock fan. does something to the viewer. It renders a physical experience in the watching of it. You're sitting in the cinema and you feel all of the tension in the story and you utterly forget that the real world exists. You’re so fixated with the urge: “Do not go into that room!” He’s so good at creating tension in his films. The camera work in it is so beautiful. is almost perfect. I've watched it many, many times.
I love rambling documentaries where the person making it hasn’t made-up their mind about the subject, so it feels like you’re going along with them. is about a family-run Massachusetts bookshop. It followed a year in the life of this tiny independent bookstore as it tried to navigate through the Covid period. It showed how important the bookstore was to the community and how people rallied, trying to keep it going when it was put under threat. The owner absolutely loves books. He can't stop talking about the best new book that he’s read when he's supposed to be trying to save his business. The documentary is gentle and gorgeous.
