Everything in This Country Must Interview

The stories in Everything in this Country Must convey the horrors of what we euphemistically call "The Troubles" through the eyes of children. What brought you to use this very effective device?

It's strange. You never initially know why certain voices or certain textures appear in your work. Sometimes it's better not to be too acutely conscious. It's only afterwards – when the stories are written, finished – that you have to take a sort of intellectual stock. In other words I work in a sort of emotional blizzard. Nothing is mapped out and I try to move forward to the place, sometimes blindly. It's almost a tactile thing, feeling for the right word. Generally I know the first line and the last line, but I know absolutely nothing in between. This is a curious way to work, but to me it becomes an act of discovery – you go forward on a sort of adventure, constantly surprised and often disenchanted. When you reach the end of a story you say to yourself, Jesus what a journey that was!

At first I didn't set out to write from the point of view of children in Northern Ireland. It just happened that way. Now I have rationalised it to the point where I can say: I am writing about children in war and the glancing blows that they receive from political situations they don't quite understand . At the time I was the one who didn't quite understand.

There were, of course, a few things that were clear to me. I wanted to write about the North. I wanted to write about the moral complexity of life there. I wanted to talk about love and sadness and family. These were my goals. How I was going to get there, or if I would get there, was a mystery to me. Finally it came through the voices of children. They had not made up their minds about the world in much the same way that Northern Ireland has not entirely made up its mind about itself.

There are many recurring images of helplessness throughout the book. The father in the first story is paralyzed by the proximity of the soldiers, the husband in "Wood" is sick in bed, and the young boy in "Hunger Strike" resents adults' control over his life and clearly feels his helplessness in the face of his uncle's hunger strike. Is this reflective of the experience of everyday people in Northern Ireland?

My mother, who is from Derry, would often look at the footage of the North on television and she would simply shake her head and talk about the sadness of it all, how unbearable it was to watch. I think she represents a majority of Northern Irish people – they are stunned, saddened, sickened by what is done in their name. This is a sort of paralysis. That said, the people of the North are wonderfully strong and resilient. They have not, and I don't think they ever will, abandon a sense of hope. I certainly hold hope for the area.

What drew you to write about the hunger strikes of the late '70s and early '80s?

The poets had written about it – and they had written about it well. The filmmakers had turned their cameras to it (“Some Mother's Son”). The journalists had forced the spotlight on the situation (David Beresford's “Ten Men Dead”). But as far as I know there has been no fictional examination of the wound that the Hunger Strikes left on all of us. Twenty years have passed, perhaps just long enough for us to begin to see this history a new light. I believe that fiction can capture the moment when the thorn enters the skin.

At first I tried to write the story very close to the prisoner. I spent months finding out what happens to a body on hunger strike, what the conditions were like inside the prison, and so on. I sat in libraries and read endless medical accounts of hunger strikes. I wanted to set it as close to the body as possible. But in the end I couldn't write it this way. I wasn't being honest. I was conjuring up all sorts of strange scenarios. And then I remembered what it was like to be a teenager during those years (I was 16 at the time) – and so this teenager came to me and he seemed to be the correct vessel to carry all the grief and loss and contradiction. I wrote it first as a short story and then re-wrote it as a novella.

You describe setting amazingly well; the seaside town of "Hunger Strike" is exactly like any of a dozen small coastal towns on the North West Atlantic coast. Did you base it on any one place in particular?

It is, in fact, a dozen small coastal towns with bits and pieces stolen from each! In a way it's a mythical place based on very specific truths. I am interested in evoking the feeling of a place, its tactility. I would like a reader to be there – to smell the salt wind – even if he/she has never been to Ireland. In the back of my head though I was always thinking of the town of Clifden, though the details are changed. One of my favourite Irish writers, Des Hogan, was once living in a house along a pier in Clifden and I visited him, a sort of pilgrimage for me. I literally walked across Ireland to see him. Ten days on the road. I ended up staying with him and his landlady. The house had a profound and anarchic beauty. It was right by the pier and the smell of the water was astonishing. We went swimming in the harbour together. In the story I put my Lithuanian couple in that house and they seemed to fit quite nicely.

" Wood" shows how even seemingly simple things can take on a larger meaning, and cause friction within families, in the charged atmosphere of sectarian politics. Why did you come to focus on this element of marching season, the cutting of the poles for the banners?

I once heard someone in the North: “Even a piece of wood has politics.” It was a snatched piece of conversation that played and re-played itself in my imagination for years. What could it mean? In the end it meant for me that everything – literally everything – in the North has a political implication. I wanted to try to turn some of the traditional elements on their head – the father is a quiet peaceful man rather than some sort of rabid Orangeman; the mother is a rural woman discovering herself; the boy is the confusion between them. The story, which is set in 1971, also has a quite overt sexual implication – for the mother who cuts the poles it is the chrysalis of a feminist agenda. For the boy it becomes a political act. For the father it is an act of betrayal within the family.

The story took a long time to write, perhaps four months of visions and revisions. The only way to attempt to reach simplicity is with great difficulty. I am reminded of the Russian poet, Mandlestam, who talked about “the painstaking tar of hard work.” I am also reminded of Irish writers such as John McGahern and Colm Toibin who have developed a lovely silence and humility in their work. I envy that.

What part of writing comes most naturally to you, the overall plotting or the actual construction of place, dialogue, the words themselves? Or, do you notice any difference?

I honestly don't know. If pushed I would say that a sense of place comes most naturally to me. I tend to write in cinemagraphic strokes. In other words I create pictures. From these pictures people emerge. The landscape gives birth to the people and gradually the people take over.

There are certain parts of my work that I don't explore since I don't want to lose them. Dostoyevsky says that “to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased.”

You are concerned it seems with redemption.

It's true that much of my work is concerned with death and the redemption that might or might not come from it. I can't locate a specific personal reason for this. The only significant death I've experienced is that of my grandfather. He died when I was eight. I only met him twice. He had no interest in me until I gave him the bottle of whiskey that I had smuggled into the hospital for him. Then he held me in his arms, a smell I will never forget. He died a few months later. He was happy for that whiskey. Apart from that my parents are still alive and my own family is healthy and intact. This has helped, in many respects, to write. My wife, Allison, is a tremendous help and a great editor for me too.

While we're on the subject, what drove you to become a writer in the first place?

My father – who is deeply important to me, as is my mother, my whole family – well, he wrote almost 30 books, although no fiction except for a series of kids soccer books. I can blame him and embrace him for it all! Funnily enough, though, I only became a writer when I left home. I travelled around America on a bicycle and began to realise the value of stories.

You were a wilderness guide for troubled kids some time ago. I notice a presence of children suffering some kind of loss in your stories, as in Hunger Strike, Stolen Child, Everything In This Country Must, etc. Did your experiences as a guide have an impact on the way you treat children in your writing?

Absolutely. In the late 1980's I worked with kids from the ages of 11 and 12 on, some of whom were terribly emotionally scarred. I would go out into the boondocks with them for three months and we would literally build our own world – tree houses, outdoor latrines, gravity-fed showers, gardens. I learned so much during that time and it was an incredible experience both for me and for them. At the end of one of my sessions the kids gave me a bamboo pipe as a present. I still have it sitting on my shelf. Occasionally (perhaps inevitably) I get letters from prison where some of the kids have ended up, but most of them did very well in the world and the wilderness experience helped them out. In addition I have my own young kids now and they are the scaffolds to my heart.

Do you find writing about the US a different proposition to writing about Ireland?

I find both of them equally difficult. Like my character in Hunger Strike, I sometimes feel like a man of two countries. But more and more I find that I am a bit of a mongrel. My next novel starts off in the Soviet Union in the 1940's. It will probably go to Paris, London, Italy and New York. Go figure. I certainly can't understand it!

You've proven yourself equally adept at novels and short stories. Do you have a personal preference between them?

Short stories are implosive moments – the whole world is generally narrowed down to a single moment of fierce and original energy. Novels are generally more explosive and they send their shrapnel in all directions. Ultimately both however have the same aim – to try and say something good or decent or profound about the human heart. They don't always succeed, but I am heartened by the words of Beckett – “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

What do you recommend people should read in order to “understand” the North?

All the poets! Heaney, Longely, Montague, Muldoon, Carson, the list is endless and enevitably I'll leave people out. And there is lots of great fiction written about Northern Ireland – Robert McLiam Wilson, Glenn Patterson, Antonia Logue and Eoin McNamee come to mind among the younger writers. And one I just came across very recently – Sean O'Reilly, he's great. But there are two books that anyone interested in the North should read. The first is Seamus Deane's “Reading in the Dark,” probably the best Irish novel of the last ten years. And then there is a gorgeous novella by Ben Kiely called “Proxopera” which is all about an old man who is forced into a proxy operation where he must drive a bomb into his hometown – it's a stunning and deeply complex piece of work.

What is it about you Irish writers?

You mean, where's the madness come from?!

Where does the language come from?

I suppose the Irish writer has always had a peculiar home in the world. By a combination of strategies -- going into exile, subverting the language, twisting the fictional form – he or she has consistently remained provocative.

Being an artist of a colonised nation always helped. We took the language foisted upon us and twisted it into our own form of joyful Hiberno-English. Our writers have always reveled in a willed linguistic ambiguity. The English language was a weapon our colonisers gave us and then we whipped them all the way back home with it! Of course we're not the only country to do this. The Indians, for example, have been tremendously successful at using language as a weapon.

The British still tend to see the Irish as either torturously poetic or insufferably comic – but they simply didn't have Joyce or Beckett or Wilde or Yeats or indeed Flann O'Brien. My favourite British-born writer of all time – the great John Berger – happens to have an Irish soul and lives in the south of France. He says he's a citizen – no -- a patriot of elsewhere. Isn't that wonderful? A patriot of elsewhere!

The times they are changing for the Irish of course. The question is, can Irish writing survive the brave new economy? Has our sense of language changed? With a prominent internationalism is it possible, or even necessary, that there is an “abroad” in the soul of the Irish writer?

Being Irish, of course, we don't have the answers, we just keep changing the questions!

It used to be said, tongue in cheek, that the Irish believed in stories because we had to go to Confession every week. We had seven days in which to make up a whole new plot and a whole new manner in which to tell the story. But the priest no longer sits in the confessional. You pull aside the grating and you're more likely to be sitting in the snug of your local pub. Bless me, Father, for I have chinned.

Do you consider yourself in exile in New York?

Joyce once said, in a letter: “I have lived so long abroad and in so many countries that I can feel at once the voice of Ireland in everything.” It's a wonderful quote, and I've tacked up on my wall, just to remind me that I'm never really away. I'm not so sure that an Irish writer can claim to be in “exile” anymore. Not in the way that Beckett or Joyce needed to be in exile, anyway. Ireland has become so thoroughly part of the international community that what you run from will be almost exactly the same as what you run towards.

The Catholic church has lost its stranglehold; censorship is now basically non-existent; we have a higher national wage than that of the British; we are on the cusp of our very first sense of ongoing peace; and emigration is for all intents and purposes a thing of the past. There's not many reasons to be in exile from Ireland – except perhaps the stunning arrogance of the new money and a business mentality (“the Celtic tiger”) that is rather sickening.

I return back for or five times a year – enough to continue to both love my homeland and also hate it and not become sentimental about it. I still call it “home” even though I've lived away for the best part of fifteen years. I see myself more as an international bastard, a mongrel. I think this is a peculiarly 20 th and 21 st century condition – the person who wanders through different geographies and cultures, somewhat lost, and yet invigorated by curiousity.

Like Kerouac, you have wandered.

Oh I used to adore Kerouac! He's a young man's obsession. I went back to him recently and it wasn't the same. I had to close the book and just remember what it was like to read at 16, 17. And, yes, I think my bicycle journey across America, when I was 21, put me in touch with an unacknowledged part of myself. I began to learn that I could operate in the world as a storyteller, not just of my own stories, but also of people with different backgrounds to my own. Essentially, it is the life of others that interest me. I love listening to others (and here I am, rambling away, shooting my mouth off about myself!). I've never directly written about myself – virtually none of my stories, for example, are set in Dublin. I love living these alter egos. It keeps me alive. I see it as a form of ventriloquism.

Are there different forms of exile?

Absolutely there's an interior exile that is perhaps even more significant than a geographical one. The stories in the collection are about the glancing blows that children receive from a politics they don't entirely understand and how those glancing blows force them into an interior exile. Perhaps significantly, the happiest characters in the novella “Hunger Strike” are a Lithuanian Jewish couple in exile in the West of Ireland. They have learned that pain is no longer a surprise. They live their lives in full acknowledgment of this and, thus, they have a sort of joy and peace.

All good writers have the ability to write in the voices of both sexes. You do this particularly well as in ‘Sisters' and ‘Everything In This Country Must'. Were you blessed with an innate sense of the female experience or do you remember moments of a learning process?

I have no idea! I am glad when people say that I have captured the voice correctly, but it's still a mystery to me where it comes from. Perhaps it's better for me not to think about it!

Your stories deal with what is left unsaid. Can you speak of the power of the unspoken and the role it plays in your writing?

I suppose I believe in the art of creative reading as much as I believe in creative writing. I don't really wish to act as judge and jury, or to moralise. A lot of the time people ask me about the endings of my stories, what happened after the last sentence, but the truth is that they know as much as I do.

Is writing a struggle for you?

I feel blessed that I can do it. I am one of the lucky ones. Yes, sure, I labour as a writer. I work hard. I try to search for the correct sentence. I don't always get it, but I search. But so what? Everyone struggles. Everyone. Mine is no more or less valuable than that of others. I have a great regard for those who do the physical work of the world – builders, farmers, carpenters and so on. But, jesus, don't try to get me to build anything! I once tried to mend a chair with a packet of Lifesavers. I kid you not. It's a long story. It worked for a while …. It's still a joke amongst us. My wife cracks every time she thinks about it.