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Irish Times - We Are Not in The World
Irish Times - We Are Not in The World
Martin Doyle
3
The author teaches at Sheffield Hallam University and first made his name
as a poet; he has five collections with Gallery Press, the first in 1993, the
latest in 2017. Fellow poet and critic John McAuliffe says: “Iconoclastic
about the more traditional subject matters of Irish poetry, Conor’s poems
travel freely between American, Italian and English locations, although
often returning to the unglamorous joys of his home town Dundalk. His
poems are often driven by a relish for ingenious and distinctive sound
effects and he likes experimenting with poetic forms, from the sonnet and
villanelle to a long sequence which began as a Twitter feed with each section
using a tweet’s 140 characters...”
Set of foxtrots
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His method is to write a first draft – not a short story; more a blueprint or a
treatment – of 5,000 words, then rewrite it as 10,000 words and keep
doubling. “A novel is a big beast of a thing, it’s like having a dragon by the
tail. What I was doing is amplifying space, pushing out the walls, a gradual
accretion. To sit down and write 70,000 words from scratch, it would be a
runaway train, with no idea where it is going.
“
I never wanted to write that weird hybrid called ‘a
poet’s novel’. They were always this lyrical handful of
fog, literary dry ice, and no narrative momentum.
“I discovered that writing nicely, elegantly, has almost nothing to do with it.
Any twit can write a lyrical sentence. A novel is a feat of imaginative
engineering. It’s an architectural structure. Up to a point, the words are the
least important bit.”
“The best books are the ones you shouldn’t write,” he says. The novel as
confessional. “Are you really going to write about this?” you ask yourself.
“All fiction starts in fact,” he goes on. “Over the process of realisation, a
story migrates from fact in fiction. You describe something that really
happened, and inevitably you come to the crossroads where you realise that
inserting something that didn’t really happen makes for a better story. You
do that once and forgive yourself for doing so. Then you do it again and
again, until the story has shed its factual basis like an old husk.
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“In the end, you have a story that feels true but is not remotely factual.
Novels start years before they get written or published. They geminate. This
one? Maybe as long ago as the mid-’70s, when I first heard the story of Oisín
and Tír na nÓg.
“An elderly priest would get wheeled in once a week to tell us stories.
Biblical parable and Irish myths. Fr Collins told us about Oisín: going home
after three years that turn out to be 300 years, to a home changed beyond
recognition and everyone gone. I was only a kid, but I remember finding the
story mind-blowing. The original dystopia.”
Ironic arrogance
“
When I came back to Ireland in the late noughties,
after the financial crash, I always felt like Oisín. All the
shops closed down, and nobody around. So the story of
the man in a truck and Oisín on his horse got sort of
superimposed in my head.
After his marriage ended in 2008, he was living alone in Manchester and
seriously considered going on the road. “But I didn’t go on the road, nor
even close. Instead, I developed in my head a story about an Irishman based
in England who goes on the road to escape his life. That’s what writers do:
we write stories in lieu of experience.
“When I came back to Ireland in the late noughties, after the financial crash,
I always felt like Oisín. All the shops closed down, and nobody around. So
the story of the man in a truck and Oisín on his horse got sort of
superimposed in my head.”
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“I come from a family of insurance brokers. My father’s family. I think on READ NOW
some level loss is a natural theme for me as a result, since that whole
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industry is predicated around the risk of loss and the assessment of loss.
This character, this exile with the stage-Irish moniker of Paddy, has lost
everything: his family, his home and his sense of belonging. He is adrift on
the road with his broken daughter, in the wake of the banking crash and in
the midst of a refugee crisis. He talks to her, and he remembers lots about
his past, particularly his relationship with his mother, after whom his
daughter was named.”
O’Callaghan’s father trained at Lloyds in the City and was in digs with the
comedian Dave Allen. “My father was a drinker and ultimately his younger
brother took over the family business. My father ended his professional life
driving a truck for Fyffes, delivering bananas around the North. Their
mother lived alone out on the coast, and after he left the family home my
father lived with her.
Border sensibility
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The past has an uncanny habit of catching up with you. O’Callaghan didn’t
get the job.
Motorway
Bridges
by Eithne
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virtual experience into a novel, so much of our lives are screen time. Part of
the job of the novelist is to embody what it is like to be alive at a certain
time, a commitment to realism.”
As the text messages that bubble through the story are a form of
disembodied speech, so is much of our lives spent in our heads, processing
events. For the bereaved, the present is a pale imitation and the past is more
precious and real, the land where they long to dwell. But for all that you can
fiddle with a lorry’s tachometer, turning back the hands of time is another
Sisyphean struggle.
O’Callaghan believes his two novels are very different tonally, yet both have
a susceptibility to the Gothic, the otherworldly.
“
Our loved ones just disappear. They were in the same
room as us yesterday, and now they’re gone, and we
have to circumnavigate their ever-diminishing
absences.
“Characters are there and then are not. I never understood why that was
considered unrealistic or fantastical. It happens all the time. Our loved ones
just disappear. They were in the same room as us yesterday, and now they’re
gone, and we have to circumnavigate their ever-diminishing absences. We
try to rationalise it with biology. We construct a grammar around it. We call
it death. But truth is we have no idea what just happened, where they went
to and if we’ll ever see them again.”
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Absolute ambiguity
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“The exchanges between the father and the daughter in most of the chapters
of this novel are like that. They speak to each other as if blowing bubbles:
lovely shiny, floating bubbles that just disappear.”
“
“It has to be possible to write about physical love in a
way that isn’t nasty or sexist. We can’t pretend desire
and sex don’t exist, for fear of being ridiculed.
We Are Not in the World is also remarkable for his frank treatment of sex. “I
have many faults,” O’Callaghan says. “Cowardice is not one of them. It is
quite explicit. Nothing on Earth has a couple of sex scenes which completely
went unnoticed, maybe because they’re too subtle. Be hard to miss them in
this novel!
“There is this received wisdom that we shouldn’t write about sex. Most sex
scenes are terrible. And now we have the tyranny of the Bad Sex Prize, which
is just small-minded, reactionary prudery dreamed up by Auberon Waugh.
“It has to be possible to write about physical love in a way that isn’t nasty or
sexist. We can’t just relinquish that to public-school satire. We can’t pretend
desire and sex don’t exist, for fear of being ridiculed. If a Martian came
down to Earth and read a fair cross-section of literary fiction to get a handle
on human life, they’d have no idea how our species procreated.
“I love Eimear McBride’s fearlessness in the face of sex. Sally Rooney too. I
thought the representations of sex in the TV adaptation of Normal People
were great. It was so refreshing to see it thought through and made original,
rather than just the usual pimply bottom between a pair of legs while the
orchestra hammers away in the background!”
Emigrant novel
“I’ve long been obsessed with the stage-Irish trope. The thing about being
Irish in England is they assume this is you – the feckless, garrulous drinker
– and it’s hard not to slip into that role. There’s a gravitational pull towards
that cliche that’s almost impossible to resist.”
“The plight of Paddy in Blighty,” his protagonist calls it, “they hear the
accent and guess salt of the earth… You realise how expedient it might be to
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let them go on thinking that.”
IT | ENERGY & RESOURCES
Rusal delivers stark
Conor
O'Callaghan. assessment of its future
Photograph:
amid Russia’s economic
John
Minihan isolation
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brings building site to a standstill and sings You’ll Never Walk Alone for the
cameras! The point is, I couldn’t have done that in Ireland. I wouldn’t have
had the nerve. Being Irish in England gives you liberties, based upon
supercilious prejudice on their part, but you take advantage all the same.
“Once you leave, there’s no going back and you never really arrive on the
other shore. You’re stuck indefinitely in between. You have to make your
peace with that. There is a fork in the road, where you go home or you make
your peace with the fact you will never live in Ireland again. I love Ireland,
love the crack, the fact people speak to each other, which doesn’t happen
anywhere else. Returned emigrants are among the saddest of folks. Lost
souls.”
Slow learners
2020 was a tough year. O’Callaghan was in Ireland promoting this novel the
week before lockdown. Slow learners, we bumped elbows when we met and
thoughtlessly shook hands when we parted. A week later the book was
bumped to 2021. He has tested positive twice for Covid and been quite sick.
“A bloody awful year, all told! Culminating with the fireworks for Brexit all
over Sheffield at 11pm on December 31st. Every once in a while history
throws its cards up in the air – wars, financial crashes, pandemics – and
we’re left to see how the cards fall.
“Just to come back to the Oisín myth: we’ve all been in exile from our lives
for most of the past year, in this weird timeless exile from the old normal.
Like home, do we really imagine that those lives will be there intact when we
are allowed to go back? I don’t think so. At least not exactly. The old normal
isn’t there waiting for us, any more than home or the past are there awaiting
our return.”
“
All 2020 I couldn’t stop thinking about Flann O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds: it was published in 1939, they sold
100 copies and then war was declared. It was lost until
the ’60s
Still, O’Callaghan was relieved that his book got pulled. “But it was printed
and sat on my shelf all year, which was weird. [His editor] Fiona Murphy
sent me a bottle of Redbreast whiskey, which was rather classy. All 2020 I
couldn’t stop thinking about Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: it was
published in 1939, they sold 100 copies and then war was declared. The
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book was stored in boxes in Longmans and then their offices got bombed
IT | ENERGY & RESOURCES
and the book was lost until the mid-’60s. Happily, that didn’t happen Rusal
here delivers stark
and mine now appears.” assessment of its future
amid Russia’s economic
When we spoke last year, he had no intention of starting a new novel
isolation
immediately, citing approvingly the example of Richard Ford taking two
years to think and makes notes before creating The Sportswriter. Then
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Covid intervened.
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“I’ve spent all last year working on a novel. I usually work very slowly. I had
no intention of starting a new big thing, but had an idea and I just blasted
into it to keep the head above water. I wanted to write about the lockdown
experience, but these things take processing and writing about it while it’s
happening seems impossible to me.
“It’s set in Ireland in the second World War. A time of weird stagnation,
when bodies from this distant conflict occasionally washed ashore. I realise
that it’s about, indirectly, what we’re going through now. Sounds grim, but
it’s actually very jolly! I’m writing about the border up in Cooley, and the
Emergency, and bodies washing ashore.”
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