Long story short. A few months back your correspondent appeared on the RTE arts review programme The View talking about, among other items, Dermot Bolger’s new book The Family On Paradise Pier.
This was a well-crafted piece of work, but just the latest in a whole slew of genteel historical Irish novels.
Mouthing off, I complained that a whole generation of Irish writers – Joe O’Connor, Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín among them – are currently engaged in reviving imagined pasts when the social convulsions that have gripped this country over the last 10 years merit a school of fiction akin to what Amis, Wolfe and Easton Ellis were doing in the ’80s.
In other words, modern Irish writing is becoming increasingly like the British film industry of 15 years ago: beautifully made but amber-trapped Merchant-Ivory period pieces. When there’s no equivalent to Shallow Grave or Reservoir Dogs, it can all start to feel a little staid.
Soon after the programme aired I received a telephone call from Christine Monk, publicity handler for the newly revived literary magazine Stinging Fly, also in the process of launching a book imprint, the first fruits of this enterprise being a small book by Derry writer Sean O’Reilly entitled Watermark. Christine suggested this was the kind of book I should check out.
I was aware of O’Reilly and had gone so far as to buy his first book Curfew And Other Stories. His subsequent novels Love And Sleep and The Swing Of Things also came highly recommended (the former was listed as one of the Irish Times’ 50 greatest Irish novels).
I read Watermark in a couple of sittings, and was impressed enough to want to interview its author. We set up a meeting on the day of the book launch (a packed affair in CrawDaddy, Dublin with O’Reilly and Derry actress Pauline Hutton enacting excerpts from the text) in Café En Seine, a cavernous businessman’s bar that looks like a British colonial outpost in India, with complementary monsoon weather outside.
O’Reilly in person has a somewhat tyke-y look about him – a young Gerry Conlon crossed with Bap Kennedy, feral, spiky-haired and earringed. He might be any screenwriter’s first draft impression of what an Irish novelist should look like – dark, intense, eloquent.
Not unlike Watermark itself, whose central character Veronica is a highly sexualised young woman afflicted by a bad case of Bovarism.
The book betrays no interest in conventional plot structure, but O’Reilly can get away with it mainly because of the hyper-physical and at times hallucinatory quality of his writing.
His eruptive language is a fusion of prose and poetry that evokes Selby and certain Beats as well as the Scottish equivalent: Trocchi, Kelman, Welsh, Warner and more recent graduates such as Helen Walsh.
But that O’Reilly could so convincingly render a character like Veronica begs the question as to why so many Irish female novelists avoid writing funny, crude, bawdy and hyper-intelligent Irish women in favour of chick-lit ciphers. In other words, how come an Irish male in his mid-30s is writing what Irish women 10 years younger aren’t?
“What women aren’t doing always amazes me,” O’Reilly says. “Why not down tools and demand abortion rights? There’s a lot that I don’t understand that women could be doing in this country in many different ways. What they’re not writing is one part of that. Why I had to write Veronica is really the same as why I had to write the other books. Sometimes you just feel a character following you and just hear a voice, and the voice becomes more and more dominant when you’re sitting down to work.”
But the questions raised by Watermark are not confined to gender. Yes, there are gifted and imaginative Irish male writers who haven’t yet hit middle age – Mike McCormack and Keith Ridgway, to name two – but by and large the species seems to shy away from the lurid and outlandish in favour of middle-class suburban vignettes where the central character’s moral crises rarely go beyond the acquisitions of advertising accounts. Where’s the risk?
“But isn’t it like, we get the government we deserve?” O’Reilly responds. “This work is being produced by all these writers and it’s not separate from us. We are all involved in the production of that in one way or another.”
The nature of contemporary Irish writing is, he says, a reflection of Irish society. “That there’s so much of it is a symbol of something about this country. We’re supposed to live in this culture of hyper-commercial capitalism, the celebration of the individual and the satisfaction of each individual’s needs.
“If the individual is moving freely in this country, one of the prime needs they’re going to want satisfied is their sexual need – the primary need, in my opinion.”
Sexuality remains the great unacknowledged topic in Irish writing, he says.
“There’s an incredible absence of writing, thought and conversation about desire or sexuality in modern Ireland. I’m a big reader of Georges Bataille, always have been, and that fusion of philosophy and sexuality for me is one of the most exciting areas you can work or think or move in.”
True enough. For those of us that grew up reading sci-fi comics, watching horror flicks and listening to rock music, and found an entry into so-called serious literature through those channels, modern Irish fiction can seem pretty fuddy-duddy.
“Mine was through The Doors,” O’Reilly grins. “I’d never heard of poetry until I was given No One Here Gets Out Alive. Jim Morrison read Rimbaud and then that leads you up to Dylan.”
Sean O’Reilly was born in 1969 and came of age in Derry in the ’80s. It was the worst possible time to be a teenager, right in the doldrums between the glam-punk revolutions of the ’70s and the rave/Nirvana explosion of the ’90s. Recent years have seen kitsch reappraisals of the era, from The Bravery to The Darkness, but for those of us who sneaked their first drink/kiss/joint in the Band Aid era, the soundtrack was likely to be Chris De Burgh or Level fucking 42.
“There’s a lot of trauma around it that hasn’t been dealt with,” O’Reilly chuckles.
Yet there were safe havens. One of which was Channel 4, where Frankie could share a stage with The Triffids on The Tube, and where you could catch late-night screenings of films by Tarkovsky, Herzog and Fellini, groundbreaking for the time.
“Aye, creeping downstairs to watch telly, sirens going by and bombs going off and you’re sitting there watching Satyricon or something,” O’Reilly recalls. “If me ma and da had come down and caught me I’d have been fuckin’ hoofed. Channel 4 had a triangle in the corner of the screen that was the sign for sexual content and all that. It was just European art house movies and they put them on in the middle of the night. Brilliant filmmaking.”
In fact, his first ambitions lay in filmmaking. “That’s what I set out to do. I dropped out of school and made a couple of wee shorts up in Derry, kinda surrealist poetic short films with long poems of mine over images of smoking tyres. (Laughs) That really turned me on.
“I left Derry when I was 16, 17, went to London, signed on, got a wee bedsit. That was an extraordinary time, when I look back on it. That’s when I really started reading. You’re so vulnerable at that age, books are comforting, they’re really close friends with you, they see you through bad times. I read Anna Karenina without getting out of bed. There was nothing to do until the weekend, I’d no money left and I’d spent my dole. I’d half a bottle of cider under the sink for Saturday night maybe.”
So what spurred him to make the transition from reader to writer?
“I found myself living in the extreme north of Norway in the middle of winter. We used to have to hunt for our food. I was out with these two men, we were out after elk, and it was about minus 25, a two-day hunt. We used to have to do these dig-outs at night in the snow, we were sitting there drinking very strong spirits, like póitín, and both the men fell asleep, and I could see up at the sky, the northern lights, and I had a long hard think about my life and where I was going.
“There was a girl I was with, she was in Oslo and she was pregnant, she was about to have our child, so that was in the air too. And I said, ‘You’ve got a year.’ I wanted to do a book of short stories. So I basically gave myself a year to write the stories.”
After spotting an ad for the Oscar Wilde School in Trinity, O’Reilly moved to Dublin and supported his writing habit by working in a restaurant. By the end of the course he’d completed the Curfew stories.
Two days after giving the book to literary agent Jonathan Williams, he had a deal with Faber & Faber. Two more novels followed, Love And Sleep and The Swing Of Things, both of which received reviews that veered from the evangelical to the appalled.
“Reading the reviews of The Swing Of Things, I was shocked by all this ‘dark underbelly of Dublin’ stuff,” O’Reilly says. “If you were to write about the underbelly of Dublin, it’s a lot fuckin’ worse than that! That’s the surface. I cannot see what was so dark about it. I thought it had a happy ending!”
Less than satisfied with the way Faber & Faber had publicised those books in Ireland, O’Reilly decided to go with an independent Irish publisher for Watermark after a chance meeting with Stinging Fly editor Declan Meade.
The parallels with the domestic music industry are marked: artist gets disillusioned by major deal and returns to grass roots and self-determination.
“The music scene in Dublin has been a great model for me in doing this,” O’Reilly admits. “As a musician, you’ve a variety of ways of putting music out. Writers are either unpublished or you’ve got the book deal and there’s fuck all in between. So it is about starting to make space between the two things. Small publishers have kept the writing I love alive. They create that wee bit of space. If you want to get published, you can grow things from here.
“You walk into a bookshop in Dublin, our capital city, and everything is [segregated]: that’s poetry, that’s sci-fi. You can’t go into a bookshop and look for radical or small magazines that are publishing new work. You can go into a bookshop in Paris or Barcelona or Madrid and find it. With all that in mind, just try to take a risk and do that. Just test that water and see what appetites are actually there.”