Front Lines: Street Writing Man

John Kelly is sitting in the RTE canteen, frowning slightly as he considers his lengthy hiatus from the literary world. It’s been over a decade since the award-winning arts broadcaster’s last book, Sophisticated Boom Boom.

A copy of his new novel, From Out of the City, published by Dalkey Archive Press, lies on the table in front of us. Given Kelly’s hectic schedule (he presents a daily radio show on Lyric FM and hosts weekly TV arts review The Works on RTE 1), not to mention the fact he’s a father of four, it’s hardly surprising that it’s taken the Fermanagh-born 48-year-old so long to produce a new book.
”Well, it’s been 11 years, but that’s not to say I’ve been at it every day for the last 10 years,” he says, speaking in his distinctive Northern accent.
“It did take me longer than it should have, because of the day job and my domestic responsibilities. I wasn’t at liberty to work all day on it and I wasn’t at liberty to sit up all night because I have to be up to do school runs. Then, of course, once it’s written there’s lots of re-jigging and rewriting. So there were many drafts and versions.”
Much of the book was written early in the morning, with Kelly getting out of bed at 5am to get a couple of child-free scribbling hours in. “Something compels you to do it,” he sighs. “In many ways it made no sense for me to embark on writing a book. All around me everybody was saying I was wasting my time: ‘There’s no future, books are finished!’ I was getting that from all directions.”
Back in the early Noughties, Kelly was one of a wave of hip young Irish writers who signed to big UK publishing houses. A music fan, he equates it to bands signing to major record labels.
“My experience is very like that of a lot of groups, and that’s true of many writers of my generation,” he explains. “You get signed by ‘a major’ and you think you’re in business, you think you’re starting out on something – but in fact you’re not. That grinds to a halt after two books when you haven’t become a bestseller – and what’s the chance of that happening when you’re writing literary fiction? So I eventually found another way of doing it, which was more agreeable: an indie label.
“There’s a bunch of people who also reappeared after a long period of absence, like Mick McCormack, Keith Ridgeway, etc. Mike’s with Lillyput and Keith’s with Granta. There’s quite a few people that are back on the block again in a way they couldn’t have envisaged when they were with the major.”
He says he was never officially dropped by Jonathan Cape. “No, it was more that we just stopped talking to each other,” he smiles. “So it took a while for me to recover from that. It was disappointing because in the old days if you were on a major you were allowed to make mistakes, you were allowed to fail even. By book number nine maybe you’d sell some. Those days are gone. I feel sorry for writers younger than me now, who I see signed to majors – because I know what’s going to happen to them.”
Dalkey Archive Press have a solid international reputation.
“They’re an interesting bunch because there is a serious cache with being on Dalkey, and their list is fairly spectacular,” he says. “To bring it back to bands, it’s like somebody being on a major, but now being on Blue Note or Creation. There is a certain prestige about that.”
From Out of the City is set in Dublin, in or around 2040. Neither dystopia nor utopia, the capital is instead a dark, dangerous and polluted shithole, subject to frequent power and water shortages, and overrun by spies, touts and other paranoid subversive types.
Aided by technology, hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk (named after jazz pianist Thelonious) is keeping assorted neighbours under strict surveillance – amongst them Schroeder, a failed novelist recently sacked from Trinity, now stalking a glamorous TV reporter in the days leading up to the state visit of the American President. When the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering Schroeder’s unlikely connection to his death.
Stylistically, the book is a quantum leap forward for Kelly, a literary high-wire act that he somehow pulls off. The prose is poetic throughout – more than touching the hem of Banville’s Book of Evidence – but it’s also smart, funny, cynical and thought-provoking. It’s that rare thing: an intense, compelling and enjoyable literary novel.
“A lot of it is playful,” he admits. “Playing with the notion of what is expected of thrillers, for example. There’s a touch of meta-fiction about it, but it seems to survive as an ordinary read as well. I suppose that’s what you were talking about when you said it was a high-wire act: I was conscious of that. I know that some people may really love it and others might throw it away.
“So far, the readership has been mixed – and nobody has laboured the point that it’s somehow strange or experimental, because maybe it’s not really. People are more used to different kinds of writing now. The same with music. At one time Steve Reich was probably the most avant-garde music you could find, but nowadays nobody finds Steve Reich strange if they’ve heard techno or grown up with hip-hop and sampling. Things become less experimental when you get exposed to different things.”
He puts the novel’s more experimental elements down to those early morning starts.
“I don’t know how responsible for your own brain you are at five in the morning,” he laughs. “It can be a great time to write but in many ways it’s not really you doing the writing. There is an element of the subconscious being heightened. Sometimes I’d come home and see what I’d written and have no recollection of writing it. I’ll be looking at my pages and saying ‘what was that about?’ or ‘why did that character say that?’.
“I didn’t force anything in this book, I didn’t try to impose anything. The golden rule is, kind of, don’t put yourself in it, don’t try and use it to further your own agenda.”

From Out of the City is published by Dalkey Archive Press.