When Irish tunes set the pace of a story

A fiddle starts on the off-beat, holds a note longer than you expect, and then tumbles into a gallop that seems to chase its own tail. Writers who grow up around that sound often carry its internal metronome into their prose, the way a surfer carries the rhythm of a swell even while standing on sand. Pacing, like tempo, is rarely a matter of speed alone. It is the placement of silences, the breath between phrases, the lift before a chorus, and the way a tune knows when to slow for a story.

Howard G. Franklin worked from that intuition in both Gideon's Children and An Irish Experience, treating each chapter as a set in a pub session, complete with head arrangements, solo breaks, and the occasional moment when everyone stops and listens to one player. The result is prose that moves the way a trad session moves, with shifts in tempo that feel earned rather than imposed.

Pacing borrowed from music is not a gimmick. It is one of the oldest collaborations humans have, and any writer working in English, whether scribbling in a Melbourne laneway café or drafting in a verandah studio in Adelaide, can borrow the toolkit without leaving home. The question is how to listen closely enough that the borrowed pulse feels earned rather than ornamental.

The jig behind the paragraph

A jig is built on a 6/8 lilt that leans on the first beat of each group. Sentences written in its shadow tend to open long, gather three or four clauses, and resolve on a verb that arrives just when the reader has stopped expecting it. The trick is the upbeat, that little phrase that pulls the reader forward before the main thought lands. In Franklin's prose, this often shows up as a short scene-setting clause followed by a longer reflective one, the way a bodhrán player taps a quieter beat under a fiddle's line.

Writers working in this register must guard against ornamentation that does not earn its place. A jig played too fast becomes noise; a paragraph written in too many decorative clauses becomes an obstacle course for the eye. The solution is restraint, the same restraint a piper shows when leaving space around a phrase. Each ornament should answer a need in the sentence. Otherwise the music thins into cleverness, and the reader, like a listener at a Galway pub table, politely turns back to their pint.

Australian writers who want to try this cadence in their own drafts can listen for it in the trad sessions at the Landsdowne Hotel in Sydney or at the quiet Monday gatherings in Brunswick. The ear learns what the eye cannot invent. Sit through three sets, and the lilt starts to feel less like a borrowed device and more like a rhythm you recognise in your own breathing.

Reels and the pulse of plot

Reels move in 4/4 and run at a tempo that leaves no room for rumination. The melody doubles back on itself, lifting, dropping, lifting again, and the effect on the listener is closer to a fast walk than a dance. In narrative terms, a reel is a chase, a confession, a courtroom scene, a train pulling out of a station. Each eight-bar phrase is a beat the reader must cross before the next arrives, and the writer's task is to keep the road under their feet.

Franklin understood this when he wrote the courtroom chapters in Gideon's Children. The reader does not pause to admire the chandelier; the prose keeps its shoulder down and pushes through the door. Dialogue comes short and percussive, paragraphs shrink, and the white space at the bottom of the page grows wider as the reader catches up. By the time the gavel falls, both characters and reader are slightly out of breath, and that breathlessness is the point.

The discipline of a reel can also rescue writers who mistake slowness for lyricism. A meditative scene benefits from compression, from choosing which moments earn a long sentence and which deserve a clean stop. Australian readers who grew up listening to bush bands know this instinctively; a verse of bush poetry delivered too slowly loses its dry wit. The reel, in any tradition, reminds the writer that momentum is its own kind of beauty.

Airs that stretch a scene to listening length

An Irish air moves at the speed of a held breath. Notes hang in the air long after the bow has changed direction, and the room, even in a crowded pub, goes quiet. Prose written in the shadow of an air is the opposite of reel-writing. Sentences stretch, subordinate clauses unwind in slow spirals, and the writer trusts the reader to wait. The risk is indulgence, but the reward is a kind of attention that the contemporary novel often forgets to ask for.

Franklin's travelogue sections in An Irish Experience lean on this. He writes the way a piper plays a slow air after a set, with the awareness that the listener has been moving quickly and now needs somewhere to land. A description of a coastline, a pub interior, a stranger's face can stretch across a paragraph because the surrounding chapters have already paid for that stretch with their faster tempos. The reader accepts the pause because the music has earned it.

Writers drafting in this mode should read their work aloud, slowly, in a room with no distractions. If a sentence survives the slow reading and still feels necessary, it belongs. If it merely sounds pretty, it is probably rest. Australian writers who take long walks along the cliffs of the Great Ocean Road often find the same settling that an air demands of a session; the landscape teaches the pace.

Trad sessions and the choreography of voices

The pub session is not a performance so much as a conversation. One player starts a tune, another picks up the harmony, a third adds a counter-melody, and a fourth holds the groove underneath. Nobody cues, nobody leads with a baton, and the music moves because everyone is listening to everyone else. Prose written in this spirit has multiple interiorities in play at once, each aware of the others, none dominating.

This is the hardest of the borrowed forms to manage, because it requires the writer to hold several voices in mind without flattening any of them. Franklin manages it in the family scenes of Gideon's Children, where each character speaks in a slightly different cadence, and the paragraphs shift register the way a session shifts when the next tune begins. The reader feels the room turn, even when no one in the room has moved.

Australian writers who have spent time at folk festivals in Port Fairy or at the Woodford gathering know this choreography. The trick is restraint: knowing when your voice should step forward, knowing when it should drop to a low accompaniment, knowing when to let someone else carry the melody for a bar or two. A novel that respects this discipline leaves the reader with the same warm exhaustion that a four-hour Saturday session leaves on the players.

A writer's listening kit

What unites an Irish trad session and an Australian writers' festival is the willingness to listen across distance. Readers in Sydney, Perth, or Hobart often pick up Franklin's work expecting an American voice in an Irish setting, and find instead a third thing, a sensibility shaped by both sides of the Atlantic and by the long Irish-Australian conversation that runs through pubs in The Rocks and through libraries in Fitzroy. The two lists below pair the listening side with the drafting side, the way a session pairs the band with the dancers on the floor.

Tunes worth studying for narrative tempo

• The Dingle Regatta, a slow air that shows how a single held phrase can carry an entire paragraph
• The Kesh Jig, whose upbeat phrasing models how to open a scene without announcing it
• The Sailor's Bonnet, a reel whose internal returns teach how to braid subplots into a single chapter
• The Blarney Pilgrim, with its modal shifts, a lesson in changing register without warning the reader
• The Cliffs of Dooneen, an air whose restraint reminds the writer when to leave a moment alone

Practices that keep the pulse honest

• Read every draft aloud at session tempo, slightly faster than feels natural, and mark every place where the breath catches
• Cut every ornamental clause that does not change what the reader knows about the scene
• Switch cadence deliberately between scenes, the way a set-list changes between reels and airs
• Let at least one character carry the air while others hold the reel in dialogue
• Listen to a full trad album in one sitting before drafting the next chapter, and let the ear set the meter for the wrist

Settle into a quiet chair with a cup of tea, put on an album from the Chieftains or Altan, and open the pages of Gideon's Children or An Irish Experience. Order copies through your favourite Australian bookseller, knowing that under the Australian Consumer Law you are guaranteed a refund or replacement if a book arrives damaged, and that your purchase supports the local indie shop on your street rather than an overseas warehouse. Read with a pen in hand, and when you are ready to trace the symbols hidden beneath the prose, follow the thread that Franklin left behind in his guide to hidden symbols and see how the music shows through.