A couple of years ago, Irish novelist Carlo Gébler tracked down a 19th century book called Realities Of Irish Life, and knew he'd found the catalyst text for a story that had been gestating in his subconscious for 25 years.
In Realities Of Irish Life, land agent William Stewart Trench described how he'd worked out a method of removing tenants from an Ulster estate without getting killed by the local ribbonmen, (a secret agrarian society who frequently used violence and intimidation in the 19th century Irish land war). Trench had observed that whenever a person was killed by ribbonmen, the people around immediately rushed to help the victim, time and again giving the hit-men the chance to get away. Warned of his own death sentence by the ribbonmen, Trench told the bailiffs who were always with him that if he got shot, they were to ignore him and instead run straight after the men with the gun. This threat became a successful deterrent, and Trench continued to clear tenants off the estate without getting murdered.
In How To Murder A Man, Gébler has taken this seed of an idea and transformed it into a vivid, gripping novel, exceedingly well-researched in that it builds up an instantly believable 19th century world. It's a literary page-turner with modern language that takes you out of the present into the Irish past - to a time when terrible suffering and violence haunted the land, ravaged only a few years before by the Great Irish Famine.
"I do refer to what went on," says Carlo, "but it's not a book about the famine. It's about these characters, and they've survived quite nicely. Whenever I have these conversations I think, I don't know what my family did, but they survived. My gene pool managed to get through this intact, probably by doing some pretty unpleasant things."
How To Murder A Man certainly does make you ponder how your own ancestors survived the chaos of mid-century Ireland. But it also tells a cracking good tale, and that's Gébler's primary objective.
"If you sit down to write and you think that you're going to write something that is a comment, or what you're about to produce is a metaphor for the present, or a meditation on some issue or some -ism, you end up writing crap. Because literature is all about specificity; it's not about ideas, it's not about ideology, it's not about making metaphors for the present.
"HG Wells described his brain as a second-class brain," continues Gébler. "And writers don't have the kind of laser-like, intensely quick bright brains of nuclear physicists. In order to be a writer you need to be a bit slow and a bit dim, and watchful, and keep asking the same questions, and nosy, and probably with a penchant for gossip. You need to have all these characteristics, and be very interested in the delivery of some form of slightly mesmerising, half-narcotic narrative pleasure. You get to that if you concentrate on the story and on the characters. As soon as you start trying to allow your text to argue certain propositions, you end up with propaganda, and it's rubbish.
"I can't watch TV nowadays because it seems that most drama is more and more created with the intention of promulgating what are regarded as socially progressive ideas. You can just imagine on Brookside and EastEnders, the commissioning editors sitting in their rooms and going, with this one we're going to nail the race issue. Or, we're really gonna address the gender problem. And I think, imagine Shakespeare sitting down and saying, with Macbeth, I'm really gonna nail the regicide issue this time. No - he sat down and he had a character and a story. And that is where I'm coming from. I think writers have to resist, with all energy possible, the idea that they are soothsayers or political analysts. Consumer capitalism and the mass media want to turn us into progressively correct clones. But frankly they can go fuck themselves."
HOPELESS JOURNALIST
It's refreshing indeed to meet a prolific, highly esteemed quality author who doesn't talk down from an arty pedestal.
"I'm very keen on books being readable," explains Carlo. "If the reader gives you their money, and several very valuable hours of their precious time, you have to give them something in return. Give them fun! It may not be hilarious, but engage them. We all remember what it's like to read as a child, or to be read to, and that slightly narcotic feeling of being tranced. Give it to them - that's what the reader needs! The reader shouldn't be treated as some sort of imbecile, like much modernist literature appears to do: 'Hey - see if you can get this one, sucker!'"
"I think that modernism is a cul-de-sac. I don't think that testing the malleability of language, or deconstructing narrative tropes, or any of the other mannerisms or ticks of modernism have produced fiction that is nourishing and satisfying and touches the heart. What you want to do when you read something is to be made to feel. "
A father of five, Carlo Gébler manages to make ends meet through his writing - a pretty amazing feat these days, even for the son of Edna O'Brien. Apart from How To Murder A Man, 1998 has him publishing a children's book called Frozen Out , and a book of short adult fiction,W9 ... Other Stories, published by Marion Boyers. To earn his crust, Gébler performs an amazing freelance juggling act with up to 20 different employers at any one time, writing TV documentaries and plays and reading for the Film Commission in Northern Ireland among many other jobs. He is also a member of Aosdana, and admits that he couldn't survive without the art grant money awarded to him by government, which allows him to write 1,000 words a day of his current novel-in-progress.
"I'm not a very good - no, I'll rephrase that, I'm a hopeless journalist," asserts Gébler when I ask him if he makes any cash as a hack. "I find it very difficult. I'm not a very good reviewer, either. If you locked me in a room and said, 'Right, in eight hours time I want an essay on Milton's Paradise Lost,' ooooh, I'll have to sweat blood, it'll be such a struggle. If you say you want a story on an ashtray in eight hours' time, that's different. I'll give you a story - it may not be good, but I'll come up with something. That's the way my intelligence, or semi-intelligence, works."
Gébler is also writer-in-residence in a prison, where he holds classes one day a week. It's an experience he finds so pleasurable that he doesn't see it as work. It's probably a mutually enhancing experience - a source of many diverse characters and stories for Gébler, and expert tips for prisoners learning to write fiction.
Carlo Gébler holds the admirable belief that novelists should contribute to life in a concrete way. "I think that writers should not live in their ivory towers. And if I wasn't teaching in prison I'd like to think that I'd be doing something else - manning the phones for the Samaritans one evening a week or whatever. Just put something back into society - I think that's incredibly important. And it's fantastically rewarding. It can only do you good."
* How To Murder A Man by Carlo Gébler is published by Little, Brown.