KEY POINTS:
Presuming all goes according to plan; I'll be swanning round the 2008 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival this weekend, getting my annual fix of all things literary.
If I had a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows I would most certainly be breaking that out, just
to blend in with the whole wordy vibe of the event.
One of the main things I am hoping to get out of the 2008 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival is getting through it without having my literary ignorance too heinously exposed.
If I can escape the weekend without someone cornering me and saying, "you don't know diddly about literature at all, do you?", I shall deem it a job well done.
To this end I will employ the usual array of tactics with which I usually camouflage my staggering level of ignorance on any given subject.
I will nod knowingly, in a way that encourages whoever is talking to carry on and not ask me what I think. But if it looks like someone is about to ask my opinion on, say, the novels of J.M. Coetzee, I will spill food all over myself and have to rush to the toilet to clean it off - and re-emerge some hours later.
If the absolute worst comes to the absolute worst, I will pretend I speak only Finnish. But if all of these techniques fail (as I suspect they inevitably will - after all, there are only so many times in a day you can throw food over yourself before rumours of mental instability start to circulate) I have come up with a cunning fallback plan.
It goes like this: I need to be the one setting the conversational agenda. Instead of being cornered into commenting on novels I haven't read, until it becomes blindingly obvious that I haven't read them, I am going to comment knowledgeably about novels which, apparently, I have read, but which I haven't really - because they don't exist.
In this way I will place the conversational shoe firmly on the other foot because (according to the rules of literary conversation) the other person will have to pretend he or she has read the book, for fear of seeming like a literary ignoramus.
It will be a cunning game of double-bluff in which I will hold all the cards. Fiendish, yes, but all is fair in love and literature. Obviously to play this dangerous game, I need to invent a set of novels that sound plausible enough to be real.
To this end I have chosen, as my specialist subject, the much-less-successful sequels to great New Zealand novels. Take, for instance, Men Alone, the sequel to John Mulgan's classic Man Alone.
When the men of the title realise that because there is more than one of them, by definition they are not and cannot be alone, then the whole thing falls apart in a downward spiral of self-doubt and existential confusion.
See? Sounds plausible enough to at least buy me a few minutes before I have to resort to throwing food over myself. Then there is The Vintner's Duck, in which Elizabeth Knox tries to repeat the successful formula of The Vintner's Luck by replacing the angel with a duck.
Although the novel was critically reviled by both book critics and veterinarians, it was optioned by Disney as a way of re-launching the Donald Duck franchise to a new audience.
Keri Hulme's follow-up to The Bone People, titled The Phone People, is an interesting novel that failed to enter the literary public's consciousness, let alone land Keri a second Booker Prize (to give her what we in the literature world call a "bookend of Bookers").
This tale of the arrival of the telephone in a small West Coast white-baiting community - with the result being that the traditional communication paths of the West Coasters are swept away when people realise they can just phone each other up for a natter instead of walking for two days in the pouring rain to each other's houses - was deemed by one critic as "not that bad actually, once you get past the first 200 pages".
The Phone People actually sold quite well, though there is no known record of anyone ever finishing it. So there it is; my "Can't Miss" strategy for surviving the 2008 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival without coming across as a simpleton.
I have heaps of other fictional sequels to great works of fiction up my sleeves (Janet Frame's Owls Do Mime; Ronald Hugh Morrieson's Came a Humid Saturday; Albert Wendt's Sons Who Returned Home Decide to Go Away Again) and I feel I'm ready to go the distance this weekend.
And if that fails, I'm practising my conversational Finnish.
- NZ Herald
