A literary approach to death

Author Lionel Shriver. Photo / Supplied

Who: Colm Toibin, (chaired by Damien Wilkins) Lionel Shriver, (chaired by Charlotte Grimshaw) Charlie Higson (chaired by David Farrier)

Colm Toibin has his upbringing as the fourth of five children to thank for much of his storytelling ability.

"Nothing was as bad as being boring," said the charming Irish writer in a session that drew many laughs. "You'd be told to shut up and go away."

This meant knowing what to leave out, divulging details at the right pace and understanding how much context needed explaining, techniques he has honed in his latest novel Brooklyn, about a timid young woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s. It's no wonder Irish literature tends toward the melancholic, Toibin mused, with so many leaving their families and never returning. His own strong sense of belonging, particularly the beach holidays with his parents, helped to inform the protagonist's pull towards home.

The session gave invaluable insight into Toibin's Cezanne-like approach to writing, "a game of texture and of time", in which the sentences read as blatantly as a painter's brush-strokes. Reading Hemingway as a 16-year-old had impressed upon him this desire to try to be "helplessly accurate." It led him to develop a prose style that has been criticised as austere but one which, he explained, gave the novel a "shimmering" depth of feeling, hidden between the words.

"It's a sense that nothing more can be said than this."

Lionel Shriver was equally as insightful and funny, only drier, more cutting. The prolific American writer was a reminder of what's in it for the authors who speak at the festival, as she endearingly pinpointed the achievements of her latest book, So Much For That. She also put slightly intimidated chair Charlotte Grimshaw in her place for introducing it as a book about death. Shriver was eager to get across that the book had done itself a disservice because of its topicality in respect to the US healthcare reforms, pointing out the entertainment value in a story that employs a black humour to tell its tale.

In what was a moving and truthful session about the alienation of dying, Shriver played missionary, encouraging those with sick friends not to abandon them.

"Go visit, pick up the phone... if you don't and they die on you, you're going to feel really really bad for a really long time."

She then read a particularly poignant passage from the book.

Grimshaw led a stimulating discussion as to why it might be that so many disappear at their friends' greatest time of need, Shriver pondering if it was perhaps an instinctive biological trait to avoid contamination, partly a tragic symptom of the way society pushes death out of sight and mind. The diagnosis of a terminal illness could also be a profound experience, she said, and yet Western cultures "medicalised" death and treated it with trepidation.

Charlie Higson had a completely different literary approach to death. The former Saturday Night Live and Fast Show comic writer, and author of the Young James Bond series delighted his audience - many of whom were young boys - by reading a gory passage from his latest book, The Enemy, in which the adult population have become zombies.

The grotesque nature of the imploding "bursters" can be blamed on the lack of squeamishness of his three children. Higson, who'd embarked somewhat blindly into writing for younger readers, was surprised to find how much his kids would tolerate. When his youngest finally succumbed to a terrible nightmare, Higson was thrilled.

A gentler figure than his gruesome tales might suggest, the softly spoken author said he'd made the transition from from comedy to horror out of a desire to recreate the thrilling terror he'd experienced watching scary movies as a teen.