The Double Life Of Neil Jordan
He’s best known as a film director. Now Neil Jordan returns to his first love, the written word, and the murky Dublin of his youth in a supernatural tale with a twist
Peter Murphy, 03 Feb 2011
It’s all about the story. On a blustery Brontë-esque afternoon in his home in Dalkey, Neil Jordan, whose fifth novel Mistaken has just been published to reviews that read more like love letters, insists there is little disjunction between his work as a novelist and filmmaker.
“People never understand that,” he says. “It’s hard to explain, but I find them remarkably similar. Journalists say to me, ‘Well it’s a totally different world: if you’re making a film you’re surrounded by all these people...’ Actually it’s not like that. To make sense of a movie you have to listen to some kind of inner clarity, an area of silence in a way, but you can be that way amongst other people.”
Whenever the literati reel off their honour roll of Irish novelists – Banville, McGahern et al – Jordan the prose stylist often gets overlooked (his debut book of short stories Night In Tunisia was published a full six years before the release of his first film Angel). Mistaken should redress the balance.
“I haven’t paid attention to that stuff as much as I should have,” he admits. “I’ve been making films and traveling, I haven’t been going to literary festivals. It’s become a job now, being an Irish writer is like a career option. It’s a great thing in a way, because you used to be condemned to a sense of magnificent failure or isolation. The people that make careers out of writing here are absolutely justified in doing so, and they should do so. It’s just because I make movies people think what I write is a personal hobby, or something I used to do, but I’ve always done it.”
All Irish writers seemed compelled to struggle with history, even those who claim to ignore it. What’s interesting about Mistaken – the strange and haunting story of Marino-born Kevin Thunder and his spiritual and physical double Gerald Spain, told over four decades – is it depicts the present day in washed out sepia while painting 1960s Dublin in carnivalesque colours.
“I was just trying to remember what it actually was like,” Jordan explains. “John McGahern taught me for example, and he’s written wonderful novels, but I don’t live in that world, I don’t remember this rigid, grey, repressed world. I was thinking, ‘Maybe I’m just remembering things the way I wanted them to be’, so I had to go on the internet and check out what clubs I used to go to to hear the kind of music you could never hear on the radio at the time, early R&B stuff that was coming from England. You had to go to places like Abbey Street, attempts at coffee houses and clubs. I wasn’t trying to exclude priests and all that stuff from it, it was more a case of trying to be accurate about my own experience. But it’s an odd thing – the country’s been blessed with one of the most architecturally beautiful capital cities in the world, but there’s a melancholy air to it, it’s definitely haunting.”
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