Thursday, January 10, 2008

By Hook Or By Rook

Chess fans wondering if Ronan Bennett was just dabbling in the dark arts of chess for the sake of some hoity-toity backdrop to ZUGZWANG can relax – according to a very nice piece over at Chess Base, the guy’s very serious about it all. Quoth Ronan:
“Chess was, to some degree, my saviour at a certain point in my life. I was on remand awaiting trial in Brixton prison in London. It was a tough prison and there were very few facilities. We were locked up for 23 hours a day. The boredom was excruciating. I read a lot, of course, but after a while, in those conditions, it was hard to enter the mental worlds the novels were trying to invite me into. The contradiction between my reality and the author’s imagined world was just too great. My lawyer was a Jewish man named Larry Grant, a keen amateur player and actually quite strong. Larry and I played a correspondence game, a King’s Gambit – he crushed me! But he gave me my first chess book – Irving Chernev’s THE MOST INSTRUCTIVE GAMES OF CHESS EVER PLAYED. Before that I didn’t realise that you could record the moves of games. From that moment on, chess captured me.”
So there it is, chess fans – hands up anyone else who can say chess kept them sane in prison. Hmmm, thought so … and no, Ludo doesn't count.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Declan -

    I love Chess - and in fact it was thanks to my love of Chess that I managed to get the reclusive Robert Littell to agree to do an interview. He only agreed due to our mutual love of Chess and during the meeting, we talked about Chess [as well as his life and work]

    http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/littell.html

    Chess is a wonderful game, and perhaps more......

    Ali

    ReplyDelete

Declan Burke has published a number of novels, the most recent of which is ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. As a journalist and critic, he writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent. He has an unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person. All views expressed here are his own and are very likely to be contrary.