As per my last post (we’ve been up north with holidaying kids for a few days since then) I popped along to see Lloyd Jones and Damien Wilkins at the NZ Book Council event in Ponsonby last week … and I must say it was most enlightening.

It was chaired very well by poet Paula Green who gave an articulate and well-researched run-down on both writers’ backgrounds and then on their most recent novels – Lloyd Jones’ Mister Pip and Damien Wilkins’ The Fainter, both of which were shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Mister Pip, as we know, won the South East Asia and South Pacific Region of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award 2007 (where’s the acronym for that?) and goes into the finals at the end of this month.

Lloyd Jones is certainly the closest thing NZ has to a real live international literary superstar right now – not only is he jetting off to Jamaica on May 20 for the Commonwealth finals, he’s also won the Creative NZ Berlin Writers Residency, which he’ll be taking up in August for a year.

Paula got straight into it, asking what the origins were of both novels. Damien began, after Paula’s listing of his frighteningly comprehensive academic achievements, with the charming, disarming statement that he sees himself ‘as the warm-up act for Lloyd, really’, having been beaten to the cigar by Mr Jones on a few occasions now. But he answered the question by saying that The Fainter for him began in 1991, when a good friend of his witnessed a murder in New York and found himself quite troubled by it for a number of years.

This friend was not a writer, but was a literary type, and Damien has waited, with the idea for The Fainter gradually taking shape in the back of his mind, for the friend to ‘do something with it’. When it became apparent that he wouldn’t, Damien began writing – and he confessed that it wasn’t until it was two-thirds done that he had a coffee with the friend and asked him if it was ok that he use the experience in a book. Rather lucky that he said yes … Damien also said that Edith Wharton was a huge inspiration for him in the writing of the book and it was her perfect characterisations, her ‘psychological accuracy combined with aesthetic pleasure’ that he most admired.

Lloyd answered the origin question by saying he is always trying to kick against traditional storytelling – and failing, going back to the classic novel tradition. In Mister Pip he wanted to tell a story of some kind of cultural tug of war and from somewhere an image came to him of a white man pulling a black man along in a car (I think I missed a bit) and then came Matilda’s voice, and it all fell together quite suddenly.

He said he admires uncertainty in fiction and cited a Calvino story (The Baron in the Trees) about a young nobleman who, having had an argument with his father, left the room and climbed out of a window into a tree – where he stayed for the rest of his life. He loves that sudden jolt of the unexpected and unknown.

With various chit-chat along the way we got to the nitty gritty with both writers, Paula having mentioned that she’d been reading bits of controversial stuff about both books on LeafSalon’s forum, ahem. She started with Damien, saying The Fainter’s main character, Luke, had been accused of (can’t remember what she said but the gist was) being a bit wet. She was possibly thinking of Paula Morris’s review in The Listener.

I thought the book was technically superb and laughed aloud more than a few times at its moments of black humour, but could not for the life of me engage properly with Luke – he just kept slipping out of my grasp. So what Damien said next was most edifying. He said that the name of the book, The Fainter, was a joke that no-one had picked up on – he had always wanted to break with tradition and write a book with no main character, a book where he could just examine all the characters equally – call it, he said, ‘a form of democracy’. But like Lloyd, he found he couldn’t make it work: he had to have some kind of main character, but he deliberately made him as ‘faint’ as possible. Eureka! In this context the book's workings are immediately more apparent, I thought. Like some visual art, you can really only get the most out of some literature when you know what was going on in the artist's head. Think Janet Frame perhaps...

I was inspired by this to stand up and ask the only question of the night in an attempt to clarify more. I really wanted to know why Damien made Luke bisexual. I thought, as Paula did, that it was rather surprising when Luke had an ‘encounter’ with a bloke at a local A&P show, and wondered how and why Damien had made that decision for this particular character. Was it, I wondered, another 'form of democracy', was he just interested in what it is to be human, or could Luke just not make up his mind?

He said, after all the heads had finally turned back to him (amazing what the word ‘bisexual’ can do in a crowded room full of warm fuzzies, crikey) that the friend who had inspired the story originally was in fact gay, and he decided to write it from that perspective to be authentic. But he couldn't be totally gay because, well, Damien isn't. He said that once he’d started he worried that he wouldn’t know how a ‘gay person’ (his air-quotes) thought, acted and felt. But then realised with some relief that he didn’t need to try and give Luke ‘gay’ attributes, as in the end we’re all just people. [I hope I've got this right, I was scribbling rather, so if anyone else was there and I've got it wrong, please feel free to comment ...]

In a similar vein (i.e. why shouldn't one write in any voice one wants to) Lloyd became quite impassioned when Paula mentioned the press (or was it that pesky LeafSalon forum again? tsk) harping on about the old ‘how does a bald, white 50-something male [Lloyd's words] write in the voice of a young black girl’ chestnut. He said, quite loudly, with a little arm-waving, that the history of literature is wholly based upon the art of imagining ‘the other’. Just think, he said, if we were only allowed to write of what we know. Novels are about what it is to be human – we all experience dread, horror, the fear of death…

I’ve got to say, in Mister Pip, a book which still haunts me on a regular basis, that what struck me the most was the clear, matter-of-fact and precise way Lloyd Jones doesn’t depict how any human being, no matter what age, colour or background, would react – and is reacting right now, all over the world – to dread, horror and the imminent fear of death. He simply paints the scene, and paints you, the reader, into it, allowing you to come up with your own gut-churning reaction.

Two extraordinary writers, two extraordinary novels, one bloody good night out.