Sitting by the fireplace in Galway’s recently opened Sheridan’s on the Docks, Julian Gough takes a sip of black coffee and, as if for luck, briefly touches the cover of a hardback copy of his new novel Jude: Level 1.

“Everybody’s being really nice to me these days,” he declares with a satisfied smile. “Which is something of a relief.”
When Gough won Britain’s prestigious National Short Story Prize last April, it really couldn’t have come at a better time. It wasn’t just the money – though the £15,000 (€22,000) cheque presumably came in very handy for the former Toasted Heretic frontman, who’s now living in Berlin with his artist wife and baby daughter.
What mattered even more, though, was the vindication.
The judges for the world’s biggest short story competition included such literary heavyweights as Monica Ali and AS Byatt, and the shortlist featured none other than Buddha of Suburbia author Hanif Kueishi.
Gough’s hilariously surreal story ‘The Orphan and the Mob’ was actually the opening chapters of his long-awaited second novel. While he’d already found a publisher for the book, it hadn’t come easy.
“Winning that prize was a complete reversal in the tides of fortune,” he admits. “It had been a bit of a struggle up until then, even though I’d already sold the book to Old St. at that stage. I’d changed agents – and my new agent was about 40 years younger than my old agent, and my new publisher was about 40 years younger than my old American publisher.
“And they really loved the book, but everybody was wondering how do we persuade the world they want something they haven’t seen before? And then I won the biggest short story prize in the world!”
Prior to his surprise win, things hadn’t been going particularly smoothly with Gough’s literary career. Having spent almost seven years writing Jude, when he finally delivered the manuscript to his agent (the highly reputable Pat Cavanagh) she was less than convinced by her client’s change in direction.
Gough’s 2000 debut Juno & Juliet – a relatively frothy updating of Jane Austen – had been a widely translated bestseller, but Jude was an entirely different proposition altogether.
Imagine an episode of The Simpsons, set in Celtic Tiger Ireland and co-scripted by Flann O’Brien and the Monty Python team, and you’ll have some idea of just how funny, weird and unpredictable the story is.
“I’m glad you said that, because The Simpsons was actually one of the main influences on this book,” he laughs. “Anything can happen The only thing it obeys is the law of physics. You know, if someone falls down, it hurts, but otherwise anything can – and does – happen.
“Also, one of my favourite books is The Third Policeman and Flann O’Brien couldn’t get it published in his lifetime. He told everybody he’d lost the manuscript. That story was kind of haunting me a bit when I was trying to get this published.”
Unfortunately, a horrified Cavanagh felt that the new book just wasn’t for her. Although they split on reasonably good terms, Gough claims to have been devastated that she wouldn’t represent him.
“It was horrible – very horrible. Not just the fact that I was running out of money and things like that. Worse was the fact that you’re thinking this is the best thing I could possibly write and I’m really happy with it, I’m totally satisfied that I’ve written something as good as I can possibly write – and then to have your own agent being horrified by it... It’s a bit of a blow. Even if you were thinking it might happen, it’s still a blow when it does happen.”
Of course, Gough may well be protesting too much. I suspect that some part of him secretly enjoyed shocking Cavanagh. After all, this is the man who effectively sabotaged his band’s career by firing ashtrays and light-hearted abuse from the stage at the late Tony Wilson (who’d expressed an interest in signing them) during a Manchester music seminar.
He also casually mentions that when Bret Easton Ellis delivered the manuscript of American Psycho (“which was probably his greatest work”), both his agent and publisher washed their hands of it as well.
While they may both showcase fairly dark and surreal senses of humour, Jude is a very different novel from American Psycho. The eponymous hero is a Tipperary orphan who, having caused his orphanage to be burnt to the ground on his eighteenth birthday, sets off on a quest to discover the wider world and his true parentage.
His first stop is Galway: “I covered half of Eyre Square at a sprint, the next quarter of Eyre Square at a trot. I ambled through an eighth of Eyre Square, and I drifted to a halt with only a sixteenth of Eyre Square ahead of me.” (Needless to say, he eventually winds up in Supermacs).
It would be pointless even attempting to describe Jude’s various misadventures, save to say that the book’s pages may as well have been drenched in LSD.
It also features cameos from some real life characters, including Stephen Hawking, Charlie Haughey, a barely disguised Ben Dunne, and the late and much missed UCG English professor Pat Sheeran (author of the notorious Fables Of The Irish Intelligentsia).
The story revels in sheer ridiculousness. Through some improbable plastic surgery procedures, Jude winds up with the face of Leonardo DiCaprio – though, because the doctors had grafted some skin tissue from his penis, his nose occasionally gets an erection.
Behind all the literary lunacy, though, the book is quite a scathing take on contemporary Ireland (although apparently the next two instalments – already available online and due to be published in book form next year – will take Jude onwards to England and America). At one point, a Galway property developer bemoans the loss of all the beautiful white swans on the River Corrib. When asked what happened to them, he replies, “I sold them to the Yanks.”
While it’s both a very contemporary and comedic Irish tale, Gough is confident that the humour will be universal enough to guarantee Jude a long shelf life.
“If you look at the stuff the Greeks wrote, it was very local. I mean, someone like Aristophanes was taking the piss out of politicians that were sitting in the front row about decisions they made about three months earlier on some minor aspect of Athenian foreign policy. You don’t necessarily get the references – they’re certainly not topical anymore – but if jokes work, jokes work. You can’t worry too much about the future.
“In a way, actually, Jude is more future-proofed than most books in that Jude has no idea what the heck is going on. So the reader has a companion there. He kind of tries to laboriously explain things to himself and thus to the reader, so often when he’s talking about, say, Charlie Haughey, he’ll give you a brief history of who Charlie Haughey is. He assumes you know nothing because he knows nothing, and that helps you navigate it.”
He points to a recent “amazing” review in The Times as evidence that the story’s humour will appeal to a wider audience. “They can’t possibly have got all the references – but it obviously still worked. You achieve the universal through the local.”
As for Gough’s other career, don’t expect any Toasted Heretic gigs in the near future.
“We’re still together in the sense that we’ve never broken up. You know not the day nor the hour when Heretic might accidentally play a gig, but I live in Berlin so it won’t be tomorrow or the day after.”
Does he live a very literary life in Berlin?
“No, not at all” he laughs. “I never lived a literary life anywhere. I’ve always had far more friends who were drummers than writers. I always knew more people who were in pop than in literature. Actually, I almost deliberately avoided them. I mean, the trouble is in literature, even with writers I like, they often end up turning into a kind of priesthood.
“There’s a tendency to seriousness that gets encouraged if you’re an ambitious kind of writer. It probably doesn’t happen in chicklit, but if you’re writing so-called ‘serious’ novels, you’re encouraged to take yourself seriously. And I reckon that’s the one thing you shouldn’t be encouraged to do if you want to write books that will actually have an impact on people’s lives.”
While it’s certainly seriously funny, Gough could never be accused of having written a serious novel here. However, he has big hopes and ambitions for Jude...
“Obviously you want everyone to read your stuff, but the people that I think are affected the most are the 14 to 25-year-olds,” he says. “People who haven’t fully formed their character yet. You know, certain books you read in your teens and early twenties can actually change the way you live. And I hope this is one of them.”
And with that, he gives his novel another affectionate tap on its cover.b

Jude: Level 1 is published by Old St. Levels 2 and 3 are available online at www.juliangough.com. A complete hardback will be published in 2008.