For a man who is widely regarded as a rising literary superstar, Donal Ryan is very modest. Polite, well spoken and diffident, you’d never know that his first novel The Spinning Heart was an impressive critical success – winner of both the Guardian First Book Award and ‘Book of the Year’ at last year’s Irish Book Awards, as well as longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. His new tome, The Thing About December, has recently been released and again the reviews have not stinted with praise.
The modesty can perhaps be attributed to the fact that both novels were initially rejected multiple times, before a talented reader picked The Spinning Heart out of the slush pile.
“Forty-seven times between both novels,” Ryan says ruefully. “It would have been over about two-and-a-half years. But I would have thought that’s fairly average for someone unknown trying to flog two novels, you know. I was sending queries everywhere, over Ireland, the UK and America. I fully expected to be rejected a lot.”
The deluge of no letters did not put him off, he explains. “I knew the books were good and they had a good chance of being published if I could just get someone to actually read them. That’s the hard thing. I’m not surprised – imagine a
mountain of unsolicited manuscripts in your office. It would be nearly impossible to read them all.
“The whole thing with form rejections is understandable and most rejections are form rejections, so they don’t hurt that much because you know they haven’t read it. They can’t really.”
Although The Spinning Heart was published first, The Thing About December was written earlier.
“I signed a two-book deal and the original intention was to publish this first and The Spinning Heart a few months later. It was decided in the end to publish The Spinning Heart first and I realise now that was a great idea. It seems to have worked very well.”
Given the critical acclaim for his first novel, Ryan must surely have been curious about how The Thing About December would be received.
“It’s funny – I worried more about The Spinning Heart. To be honest, I don’t really care about bad reviews for this book because I love it so much and I put so much of myself into it. When I finished it, I felt this huge relief and even if it was never, ever going to be published, I had done it and I was happy with it.”
The Thing About December is the story of Johnsey Cunliffe, a young man with awkward social skills and perhaps a slight intellectual disability. When Johnsey’s parents die, he’s left the family farm. It’s part of a large area rezoned
for commercial purposes and his reluctance sell off the land that has been part of his family for generations sets Johnsey at odds with his neighbours, who see him as a barrier to a once-in-a-lifetime chance at millions of euros.
This novel was the first one he completed that he was happy with, explains Ryan.
“I always feel a bit foolish saying this, but the idea I have always had of myself is as a writer. I couldn’t back that up for years except with a pile of crap, you know, half done things – things I started and didn’t finish and things I started and hated. When I was writing I either had no confidence in what I was doing or I thought it was brilliant, and then I read back a few minutes later and realised I wasn’t happy
with it.
“You can rewrite a sentence a million times because there are infinite ways of putting a group of words together. There is no way of saying, ‘This is perfect.’ I had to get the whole idea of perfection out of my head completely. My wife Anne Marie knew about this crazy notion I had in my head of myself as a writer and she said to me, ‘You’re a writer, so write a novel. Please, just go and do it.’ She made me do it. She told me I could do it, which is the most important thing and she made me finish. Half-way through the first draft of this I stopped. I got lost in my lack of confidence and she said I had to finish it.”
Sometimes you need a bit of a kick in the backside?
“Oh God, yes! Exactly!” Ryan laughs.
Both novels deal with aspects of Ireland’s boom and bust. Was he particularly attracted to contemporary Irish history?
“I wouldn’t say I was attracted to it,” he says thoughtfully. “The Spinning Heart I wrote in 2010 and it’s set in 2010 so the recession was always going to be a huge backdrop and invade the story. I remember years ago thinking about the form of a novel made up of disparate but linked narratives and I decided to do it and I set it in a village in Ireland in 2010. I knew there wouldn’t be huge resolution at the end of it because in a four or five month period in an Irish village things aren’t going to be resolved.”
Unlike The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December is told exclusively from Johnsey Cunliffe’s experience. Was writing from the perspective of one, possibly intellectually disabled character, easier or more difficult than creating twenty-one distinct voices?
“When I was writing Johnsey I never thought of him as having any kind of handicap except socially, you know, where his lack of experience and lack of knowledge about the world almost became a handicap. There is a bit of ambiguity for the reader – what’s wrong with him or what’s up with this guy? I found it hard to maintain the character. I put him on every night. I became kind of misanthropic while writing it – I got a little too deeply into it.”
The Thing About December is out now, published by Doubleday Ireland