Cathedral belles

It may not have The Elmwood Hall, The Opera House, or The Ulster Hall at its disposal, but since its launch three years ago, The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival has established itself as one of the highlights of the Belfast year. Through crafty deployment of unlikely venues (the Harbour Commissioner’s Office, The Lagan Lookout, the old Northern Bank building on Waring St), the festival has managed to provide an imaginative platform in the under-lit streets around St Anne’s Cathedral for a host of international names and developing homegrown talent.

This year is especially tasty. The Sun Ra Orchestra show up with David Holmes, David Kitt is in town for a gig. There’s the second annual Van Morrison theme day. And lots of guerrilla sessions in pubs. Plus Zadie Smith is in town.

Rather like The Strokes album, her debut novel White Teeth was one of those ubiquitous and critically canonised works that you desperately didn’t want to like, but couldn’t help falling for once you took the time to get to know it. It’s a terrific book. On one hand, a big-hearted attempt to trace links between families, races and generations in the cultural melting pot of North London; on the other, a welcome (and self-consciously) novelistic riposte to the anaemic ‘New Puritan’ strain of young British writing that was ascendant at the turn of the decade. On its release it won literary prizes galore, the likes of Rushdie and Self took turns to sing its praises, Channel 4 optioned the rights for an upcoming adaptation, while the London Underground seemed to adopt it as its novel of choice.

Not bad for an extended short story by a 21-year-old undergraduate.

But how do you follow it up?

Well, rather effortlessly, if the section Smith reads from her next novel The Autograph Man is anything to go by. A section that takes place at the ringside of a Big Daddy – Giant Haystacks wrestling bout and which manages, by means of an audacious narrative body-swerve, to convince that what’s actually being described is the struggle between near-mythical elemental forces. Seems she finished the novel the night before. So, a world premier at the Lagan Lookout. Result.

In another potential exclusive, Irvine Welsh is due to read from Porno – his soon-to-be-finished follow up to Trainspotting. However, getting to his feet at the Catalyst Arts centre, he informs us sheepishly that – and following on from a session in Dublin with Alan Warner – he has, in fact, “bottled it”, and will read instead a few sections from his previous novel Glue.

The sense of disappointment around the room is palpable.

Especially when his chosen excerpts are very much boil-in-the-bag Welsh perennials fixated on bad sex, bad words, and bad clubs. Trainspotting had a bleaching effect on British fiction when it was first published – coming in through the front window with all the howling menace of a dispossessed and vengeful prole. As his celebrity has risen Welsh’s books have carried less of an ideological punch, and now read like extended episodes of Club Reps – all be it with more dog burnings and mentions of Hibs.

Far better is Martin Lynch’s new play A History Of The Troubles (Accordin’ To My Da). The title may well suggest all your worst Jimmy Young nightmares about to come true, but – while there is a strong element of the soda farls and Semtex school of Northern Irish drama – Lynch’s voice remains caustically discordant throughout. Equally impressive is his performance at the ‘Cobblestones or Culture…?’ debate in the Waterfront Hall complex, where he roasts the Laganside corporation over their handling of the redevelopment of the city’s docklands.

Another unexpected highlight comes in the shape of an exhibition from Belfast photographer Gareth Pyper at North Arcade. Pyper has been hanging around with the young skateboarders, Goths, nu metal kids, and punks who have spent the last two years stealthily annexing the city centre for their own. It’s a witty, warm collection of photographs that, like this endearingly mongrel festival itself, seems to have a take on modern Belfast that somehow rings true.