Paul Murray might be one of Ireland’s more ambitious and interesting contemporary novelists, but he’s certainly not the most prolific. He published his 2003 debut, The Evening Of Long Goodbyes, at the age of 28.
His sophomore novel, 2010’s widely-lauded Skippy Dies, took all of seven years to write. His latest effort, The Mark And The Void, took another five.
That was three years longer than he’d anticipated.“I initially conceived it as something I could turn around quickly; a short, funny book that I could do in about two years,” the amiable, 40-year-old Dubliner explains over an afternoon coffee. “Genuinely, I would tell my friends, and the editor, and so on, that this was going to be short, and mostly just a bunch of jokes, and I’ll do it in two years.
“Skippy Dies was seven years – it paid off in that the book did well – but I was frustrated with myself that it took so long to do it. I didn’t really want to get into that kind of a process again if I could help it. But it ended up being a lot more difficult than I thought, because the material is so complicated.”
He doesn’t suffer from writer’s block; it’s more that he has a perfectionist streak. “The words are never really the problem, it’s more the revisions,” he explains.
“The reason this one and the last one took so long is that there was probably four or five pretty comprehensive re-draftings. That’s where the time goes. It might take 18 months or two years to get the first draft down, and then you’re just going through it again, and again, and again.
“It’s psychologically quite a strange job. You go in in the morning and you feel initially quite bleak about it, but by the end of the day when you’ve done a decent day’s work, and you’ve done a decent job of addressing the problems that chapter has, you feel pretty good. Then the next day you look at it and think, ‘It’s still shit!’”
Geographically, Paul is staying close to home. His debut was set in a Killiney mansion, and Skippy Dies in a south Dublin boarding school. Most of the action in The Mark And The Void takes place in the IFSC, and its surrounding bars, cafes, restaurants and clubs. A very funny and farcical tale about an oblivious French investment banker being conned into robbing his own bank by a struggling novelist (not so coincidentally named Paul), there’s a lot of financial jargon and mumbo-jumbo involved.
As a former Blackrock College pupil, presumably he turned to some old schoolmates for help with his research into the murky world of high finance“Yeah, a couple of guys,” he nods. “I’ve got one really successful friend who worked in Ulster Bank, and now he’s working in a consultancy. I mostly relied on books, but I was able to bounce things off him; ‘Does this sound right, and are these numbers right, does that sound plausible?’”
Murray first started the book in 2002 before sticking it in a drawer.
“I had the bones of it written before Skippy. I didn’t know much about banks at the time, but it was set in the IFSC and the guy was an investment banker. It was a bit light. Then, when I came back to it after Skippy, the banking crash had happened, and the world of banking was an awful lot more interesting, to me and to everybody. But I still thought it was something that I could do quickly.”
What’s most impressive about the book is that, although often laugh-out-loud funny, it still manages to better explain the banking collapse than almost anything written by an economist. While Murray doesn’t name any real names, the panicked Irish Minister for Finance – portrayed as a garlic-munching dead man walking – is very obviously the late Brian Lenihan. Did he have any qualms about writing about him so negatively?
“I felt that if someone asked me the question, I would say that it’s an alternative universe,” he says. “It’s the same as this universe, but slightly different, so you’re not necessarily meant to draw parallels. That’s my sort of exculpatory answer. I suppose I did that with a certain amount of circumspection. The garlic cloves are a giveaway, for an Irish reader anyway. I felt like he was a really interesting character.
“On the one hand, in a room of very, very dark candles he was the one bright light that Fianna Fáil had. He was the guy who was intelligent, he was honourable, had integrity, and so on. He was also the one who was completely taken to the cleaners by the banks. They fleeced him, literally, and he was hung out to dry. I don’t know the facts of his illness terribly well, but I’d imagine it certainly didn’t help. I don’t know what it would be like to carry that burden with you.
“He wasn’t like Cowen, or whoever,” he adds. “He was very aware of what was going on. I didn’t want to exploit that situation, or make him look like a caricature. But very bad things happened in this country, and that was a very clear instance of someone making a very, very serious mistake because they’re very much out of their depth, and being punished for it in the most cruel way. Everyone was punished for it, but that was quite a literal one. So I would understand if people think that character shouldn’t be in the book. I’d understand if people would object to it.”
The novelist character has stopped writing after a particularly vicious broadsheet review of his debut, and the book features a dinner party scene with an obnoxious female literary critic present. Were there any parallels with real life there?
“I’m not going to be drawn on that!” he laughs. “Again, I would come back to my alternative universe, and some people who might have strange, passing resemblances to contemporary people. Mostly, honestly, they’re composites of one kind or another. But my first book, An Evening Of Long Goodbyes, got a really bad review in The Irish Times. She’d picked quite good jokes from the book to quote, while saying that they weren’t good jokes. It was upsetting in that my parents read it, my friends read it, blah blah blah... I was very angry for a little while.
“In retrospect, I don’t know if it killed the book in Ireland in terms of sales. It didn’t do it any favours obviously, but the book didn’t sell terribly well and first novels often don’t. But that’s just the job, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
His debut mightn’t have been a bestseller, but it did well enough to keep him going financially.
“The first book got a good advance in the United States, and that basically funded the writing of Skippy. It came out when I was 28. It funded seven years – well, between the US advance, the UK advance, film options, translations, there was all those bits of money coming in. Because I was living in fairly frugal circumstances – a house full of hippies up in Ranelagh – I didn’t have a car, or a mortgage, or a kid. I have a kid now, so that changes things quite drastically. But I was lucky. I have lots of friends who work as writers, and are on book three or book four and don’t make enough to pay the bills.”
He scratches his beard and smiles.
“You’d really like to imagine that it gets easier, but it doesn’t always.”