Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor is the author of 18 books, including the bestselling Star of the Sea. His most recent, Shadowplay, won novel of the year at the Irish Book awards for 2019 and is also on the shortlist for the Costa novel award (the winner will be announced later this month). He is currently adapting the book for film.
Congratulations on being shortlisted. How does it feel?
I would love to tell you that I’m totally cool about it and it doesn’t matter at all. And in some ways, prizes don’t matter, and they mustn’t, and we must be grown up about writing and keep our eye on the work. But the problem is the prize nomination comes along and it brings out your inner Gollum. And suddenly you go: I want it, I would love to have that glittery thing. And so it’s a lovely affirmation, but also it’s an illusion.
How did you become a writer?
When I was a kid, in the 70s in Dublin, there wasn’t any literary culture in terms of festivals or readings or writers’ groups. There was nothing at all; it was a very silent place. But there’s just more and more now. The Irish are great readers: if you look at our bestsellers lists, week after week, you see serious, sometimes difficult books, vying with the typical bestsellers there in the top 10. It’s genuinely a part of the culture. And the publishing scene here has changed in such a radical way. When I was a kid, your only option really was to go to London and try and be published there.
So it didn’t immediately seem a welcoming environment…
When I say there wasn’t any literary culture, I suppose what I mean is that the ghosts of Irish writing were around. There were statues of Joyce and Yeats, and Yeats’s face was on the 10 punt note. And even though the books weren’t really read, there was some kind of sense that the only Irish people who had ever achieved anything were great writers, and that they were figures of reverence, and they stood around your childhood like prehistoric ruins.
So if you were going to join them, you had to be really good…
You’d have to have something new to say. You’d have to have your windmills to tilt at. That was the other wonderful thing about growing up with the legacy of the pantheon of Irish writers: you could always point out what they had got wrong or what in their work was now irrelevant. It’s one of the great things about Roddy Doyle’s debut novel, The Commitments, that it’s set not in the city or in the countryside, the two great places of Irish literature, but in the suburbs, and people are not listening to colleens playing harps. It was useful to have that; it gives the Irish writing of around that time, from people like Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger, a sort of punk energy.
And you persevered…
One of the things that happened to me as a kid in terms of my writing life was there was a John McGahern story that I really loved called Sierra Leone, in a book called Getting Through. It was published in the late 70s and there was a copy in the house. I was 14 or 15 then and I was messing around with the idea of writing, and I had nothing to write about. Nothing had ever happened to me. And one night, in desperate frustration with nothing to write about, I just wrote it out. I just wrote out that short story word by word in a copybook. A couple of nights later, I did it again and I changed a bit of the punctuation, and a couple of nights later I did it again and I changed the characters’ names and they became the names of people I knew and neighbours up the road.
What happened in the end?
Over the course of a couple of years, at some point the balance tilted and it became mine. And this once beautiful McGahern short story, I took the bulldozer of teenage writerly ambition to it and destroyed it. But somewhere in the ashes is my story. I once had the chance to tell the great McGahern, to make my confession to him, and he looked at me very gravely and said: I think you owe me a pint.
Shadowplay centres on Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and his relationship with the actor-manager Henry Irving and actor Ellen Terry. How did it take root?
Bram has been with me my whole life, for such a long time that I sometimes don’t quite remember how he came to me first. But it’s something to do with my late maternal grandmother, who was from the Liberties, the oldest part of the city of Dublin, and was a great storyteller.
The most fascinating story she used to tell was about an ancestor of her own, a young man who had been around in Victorian Dublin. He was a lamplighter, and one night he had been on his rounds in Church Street, on the north quays of the Liffey, and there is St Michael’s church there, where there are bodies preserved in the crypt. He notices this well-dressed, prosperous young man standing outside the church and looking up at the steeple. It’s a very poor neighbourhood and he’s thinking this man is lost, so he goes over and the man says he’s not lost. He’s interested in the story of the bodies in the crypt. And they get chatting and it turns out that he’s Bram Stoker. Well, I loved the notion, even though I suspected it was made up, that a relative of mine might have met the great man. I first heard it when I was about five or six. I last heard it in my teens and it was exaggerated each time; by the end it was practically that Bram Stoker had been round to the house for tea.
Stoker’s Dracula has never been out of print and, as we know, the gothic novel has recently enjoyed a resurgence. Why do you think that is?
Count Dracula’s probably got a case for being the most filmed fictional character in history. But the big opponent would be Sherlock Holmes. And from exactly the same era; in fact, Stoker and Conan Doyle were good mates. It’s really interesting that these are the two central figures, because Victorian fiction is full of evil twins: Jekyll and Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. But, in fact, Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are kind of evil twins too. Because the notion of Sherlock Holmes is that everything can be solved. All we need is logic. All we need is intelligence and that English, Victorian ability to measure things and apply focus. There is no mystery so inscrutable that it can’t be solved, which we really admire about the books, but we know that’s not true. We know that from our own lives. We know that every day of the week there are things about other people, things about ourselves that we find so strange and that we will never understand and that’s why we have the gothic ...I think when Sherlock Holmes looks in the mirror, it’s Count Dracula staring back at him.
What did you enjoy reading as you were growing up?
The writers I loved when I was a kid were Americans. I loved John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, and the first time I read JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, that was probably the book that made me want to be a writer. And then just discovering someone like Toni Morrison. I remember when Beloved came out – I was in my late 20s – and being besotted with it. I still am. The things she’s able to achieve in her writing in terms of musicality and feeling, as well as storytelling. Some of my touchstone writers were Americans and I still think of them a lot every day.
Which books are on your bedside table?
Lydia Davis’s Essays, a blissful collection, Nicole Flattery’s remarkable short stories, Show Them a Good Time, and Against the Clock, poems by Derek Mahon. I’m also revisiting a beloved book, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.
