From a page-turner to a dial-turner

CONSIDERING they are media that depend on language, radio and books can make for awkward bedfellows. It is tricky to convey the appeal of the printed page, with its set structure and considered text, on the airwaves, where spontaneity and flexibility rule. Yet it is a problem that an arts show such as Arena(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays) cannot avoid.

The programme regularly has to grapple with how to cover books in a way that is engaging for the listener. As often as not, a satisfactory solution proves elusive. Last Monday saw Sean Rocks, its presenter, take the route-one approach, the review, when he assessed Paul Soye’s new novel,

The Boy in the Gap

, with the journalist Eithne Shortall and the academic Eibhear Walshe.

The slot lacked spark. The book was analysed thematically and drew favourable verdicts, but the discussion was hamstrung by the need not to reveal the plot, rendering it frustratingly abstract. The guests, meanwhile, started to click only as the segment ended, a perennial pitfall with this format.

On Wednesday Rocks took an alternative tack, talking directly to authors. When he spoke to the veteran Irish writer Dermot Healy, however, the perils of the interview approach became apparent. Rocks's questions focused mainly on the characters and motifs of Healy's new novel, Long Time, No See, which may have been enlightening for those who have read the book but was otherwise like being thrown in at the deep end of an English literature tutorial.

There was little about Healy himself, either his career evolution or his deeper motivations. In fairness, when Rocks attempted a broader question, drawing a parallel between building stone walls (a recurring image in the book) and writing novels, the author had little to say. “I didn’t think of that,” Healy said. “But I suppose you could say that about the structure of a novel.”

Rocks's next attempt to inject life into proceedings, by asking about the ding-dong on the Irish Timesletters page about Eileen Battersby's unfavourable review of the novel on these pages last Saturday, was similarly unsuccessful, with the writer offering no opinion, as he had only just heard about the spat. Healy's language was as controlled on air as on the page. Rocks had more joy with his next guest, the US crime writer Urban Waite, drawing out a gory anecdote about butchering hogs, but again spent too much time analysing the featured book's inner workings.

Arenais capable of arresting radio: Richie Beirne's segment on a Wicklow blacksmithing couple evoked the heat, noise and alchemic atmosphere of the forge with some nicely judged sound editing. When it comes to literature, however, Rocks could be less in thrall to the text and more aware of his audience.

Sean Moncrieff ( Moncrieff, Newstalk, weekdays) took a much less reverent attitude when he discussed George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Fouras part of his regular 100 Books to Read Before You Die slot. Always adept at intelligent populism, Moncrieff uses the book-club format, inviting interested amateurs to dissect his chosen volume. The results are by turns cringeworthy and illuminating.

His guests Orla and Michelle, from Sligo, were not the most subtle readers at first. Orla found the novel hard going – “I wouldn’t read any more of his books unless it was for an exam” – while Michelle thought it “scarily relevant”. But the women, and by extension the listeners, had now been made aware of the book’s immense impact, from the continued currency of Orwellian terms such as Big Brother and Room 101, to the resonance of its message about information manipulation. Michelle, under the sympathetic guiding hand of Moncrieff, compared the book’s stripped-down Newspeak to the nuance-bashing language of Twitter and text messaging. It was not highbrow stuff, but Moncrieff brought a new vitality to an old classic.

Sometimes, however, it is best to let a book speak for itself. This has long been the ethos of The Book on One(RTÉ Radio 1, weekdays), which brings an eclectic variety of novels, memoirs and non-fiction to the airwaves in an unadorned fashion, with the text read by actors or authors. Last week's offering (which continues next week) featured American writer Amy Bloom's short-story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, focusing on its series of tales about an adulterous couple, William and Clare.

These wry vignettes of advancing middle age, when afflictions such as gout and heart disease are no barrier to the enduring eroticism of bored spouses in their “autumnal splendour”, were read with aplomb by Karen Cogan, who caught Bloom’s mix of humour and gentle melancholia. The nightly instalments not only brought the fictional characters to life, leaving the listener wanting to encounter them again, but also introduced them to an audience that might otherwise have missed Bloom’s work.

Sometimes radio can be a book’s best friend.

radioreview@irishtimes.com

Radio moment of the week

Roving reporter Paddy O'Gorman found himself in a potentially sticky spot on Monday's Today with Pat Kenny(RTE Radio 1, weekdays) when he solicited views in Belfast's loyalist and republican heartlands on Queen Elizabeth's visit and this month's British royal wedding. Despite the divisions there were some common characteristics, notably the spirit of the women he encountered. On the Shankill he met a lively female group who were "royalist but not loyalist" and were planning a street party. More surprisingly, the women on the Falls cheerily admitted they would watch the wedding, if only to nosy at the dress. But when, in a Falls pub with two sisters, O'Gorman showed a shopping bag containing a souvenir Union Jack, any high spirits evaporated. "Don't take that out," one whispered urgently. "They would kill you." Clearly, the old fault lines remain as strong as ever.