Perth Writers Festival: Lionel Shriver and Martin Amis

Martin Amis. Image by Tom Craig.

Headlining the Perth Writers Festival were featured events that included addresses from several established writers, including US writer Lionel Shriver (the McCusker Charitable Foundation Opening Address) and Martin Amis.

Lionel Shriver’s topic, ‘Literature and Religion’, was of deep personal interest to her; she was born into the family of a Christian minister. As is so often the case with such children, she was obliged to participate in regular Bible readings and attend services. She is still word-perfect in quoting the Book of Common Prayer.

Again, as is also often the case, she has grown into an atheistic adult. She claims to find religion a mystery, not in the mystical connotations of the term, but in the everyday sense of simply not comprehending religion or why people choose to practise it. One gets the feeling that perhaps her antipathy results from having religion thrust upon her for so long.

Shriver rarely includes religious characters in her novels, because she simply does not understand what makes religious people tick. On those occasions she has included a religious character, she has usually made the person ‘strange’, eccentric or just plain crazy. In the one case where the character was ‘normal’, she had him lose his faith as a result of events in the novel.

Shriver is also an activist. In her 2010 book, So Much for That, she targeted the inadequacies of the US health care system. In her latest opus, Big Brother: A Novel, she deals with morbid obesity. The best-known of her dozen or so novels, however, is still her break-out novel, the thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin, a timely work on the topic of mass shootings.

Her concluding remarks pointed out that religion and writing serve a similar purpose in that they sustain our universal need for stories, and that they both seek to investigate the human condition.

A couple of nights later, Martin Amis was onstage, in conversation with ABC TV’s Tony Jones. Amis performed much as expected and hoped, with the biting wit and sometimes almost melancholic introspection for which he has become known, if not notorious.

Here was a very comfortable and urbane dialogue, with both men patently relaxed and liberally armed with pithy sound-bites. ‘The whole impulse to write is erotic and ultimately affectionate’; ‘As Nabokov once said, writers die twice: you can see (older) great novelists going off before your eyes, they lose the ability to infuse life into the page’; ‘You don’t know what you are up to until you’ve almost completed a novel’; ‘There’s less tranquillity in women’s writing, it’s closer to the emotion’, and ‘Perth looks like Florida without the guns’.

Amis discussed his latest novel Lionel Asbo: State of England. The story dwells with some fascination on celebrity crook and debt-collector, Asbo (standing for Anti-Social Behaviour Order), who becomes a successful ‘Lotto lout’ when he wins the national lottery. Reading between the lines of what he said onstage in Perth, the audience could tell that the fascination with underworld ‘heavies’ has spilled over into Amis’s real life.

The novelist was also amusing when describing how being the writer son of a famous writer father (Kingsley Amis) had somehow de-legitimised him, ascribing his literary achievements to a genetic inheritance rather than any personal effort; he felt this made him somewhat of a kindred soul with Prince Charles.

Amis was moving when describing his deep and loving friendship with the controversial late author, essayist and atheist Christopher Hitchens—‘Our relationship was an unconsummated gay marriage’—and the fact that Hitchens’s death had left him feeling that it was now his ‘sacred duty’ to relish every moment of life precisely because Hitchens had loved life so much but could no longer indulge that passion.

The audience were left feeling that for just one night, we had been privileged to join a dining-table conversation with Amis and his closest friends, a glittering assembly of the likes of Hitchens, Clive James and Salman Rushdie.

Click here for a review of Perth Writers Festival: Day 1

Click here for a review of Perth Writers Festival: Day 2

Click here for a review of Perth Writers Festival: Day 3