Almost exactly a decade ago, storytelling changed my life. It was a rainy spring evening and I had been invited by an old friend to hear the Epic of Gilgamesh told at the British Museum. I didn’t particularly want to go (two hours of ancient Mesopotamian epic in an empty gallery at night? Really?) but I was loyal to my pal and set off in the rain. I expected that it would be, at best, boring, at worst, terrible.
I am glad to tell you how wrong I was. The fellow standing alone in the Assyrian rooms was Ben Haggarty, one of Britain’s finest storytellers, and hearing him tell this story, one he has never written down, that changes every time, transformed the way I thought about literature. Once upon a time, shall we say, I thought literature could be accessed only one way: between the covers of a book.
After hearing Ben, and since I had always been interested in traditional stories and ballads, I began to delve a little deeper — and came to realise this idea is false.
Think about it, books have existed for about 500 years. Human beings have existed for thousands of years — humans just as sophisticated as we like to think we are now. Humans have always loved, and needed, stories. It stands to reason that literature existed for a long time before the book
Since that time I have heard storytellers from all over the world, and nearly every experience has been a vivid transformation. Storytellers who have great epics from Gilgamesh to The Odyssey to the Arabian Nights, and storytellers who blend traditional with personal and comedy. Anything is possible in this alchemy.
When a great storyteller speaks, the tale, you must believe me, comes alive as no book or film can, alive in the listener’s heart and mind. It changed the way I thought about literature not only in the way I read but in the way I wrote.
My novel, Seizure, draws strongly on my experience of coming to understand literature through my ears as well as my eyes. When it was published in 2007 I performed parts of it with a wonderful singer/storyteller, Nick Hennessey. In a day and age when it is easier and easier for experience to be solitary rather than communal, there is an incalculable value to sitting with friends and strangers listening to a tale unfold.
So if you are wondering whether to hear a storyteller, remember me at the British Museum. You have nothing to lose but cynicism |
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