- Culture
- 01 Dec 15
His new novel finds Kevin Barry re-writing Irish and popular culture history by transporting John Lennon to the wild Irish west of the '70s. U2, Irvine Welsh, Roddy Doyle, hippy communes and The Beatles, natch, are all on the menu when he meets Stuart Clark
Reckoned by Irvine Welsh to be “the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in decades”, Barry spent four years assembling his new novel, Beatlebone, which makes him Usain Bolt compared to Donna Tartt, but is longer than the combined time lavished on its predecessor, City Of Bohane, and his two short story collections, There Are Little Kingdoms and Dark Lies The Island.
There was the natural pressure of literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic waiting to see if the promising rookie could step up to the major league, and the self-created one of making Beatlebone’s main protagonist John Lennon. It took over a hundred rewrites for Barry, who’s renowned for his dialogue, to get the Fabbest of the Four’s voice just right. Once nailed, he was able to tell the fantastical tale of Lennon attempting in 1978 to reach the island he owned in Clew Bay, County Mayo for a spot of screaming therapy. His driver-cum-fixer is Cornelius O’Grady, the cutest of hoors with a turn of phrase that Flann O’Brien would be proud of.
STUART CLARK: Is it fair to say that for the first time the pressures of writing really got to you?
KEVIN BARRY: Yeah, I started in this kind of glow of glee thinking, “What an amazing idea. How come nobody has done this before?” Inside of two or three weeks, that had changed to, “Fuck me, this is excruciatingly difficult!” Often I was getting really nice sentences but it would seem too literary, and I’d have to go back and rough them up a bit. I lost count of the number of times I came out of the shed I write in going, “That’s it, I’m not doing this!” When it started to work for me was when I gave him the sidekick, Cornelius O’Grady. Then I realised, “This is a very old-fashioned novel. John tilting at windmills and on his quest like Don Quixote.”
How long was it before Cornelius made his considerable presence felt?
The driver was in it all the while. He was talking a bit but suddenly after a year he wouldn’t shut up. One of the nicest of the earliest reactions to the novel was people saying to me, “We kind of forgot it was about John because we were far more interested in Cornelius!” The central comedy of the book is that Cornelius is a legend in this place and John is just tagging along with him in the van.
There’s definitely scope for a standalone Cornelius tome. You really did make a rod for your own back fictionalising somebody that pretty much everyone of our age remembers in a very specific way. If they don’t buy into your Lennon they don’t buy into the story, period.
That’s why the dialogue was so difficult because we all know his voice. The only traditional research I did was looking at YouTube clips. I didn’t do book stuff because there’s so much - where would you start? If you open that cupboard the whole fucking world falls on top of you. I obsessively re-watched the Dick Cavett Show, which devoted a whole hour to him and Yoko in 1971. He’s so fucking tricky to get down because he’s very, very capricious. His tone changes all the time. He’ll be really funny and charming and fluffy and light and inside a sentence he’s gone kind of prickly and dark.
Not to put too finer point on it, Lennon could be a right cunt when he wanted to be.
Yeah, very complicated and not an easy character. Ultimately, I fucking love him. The book is totally written out of fandom and devotion. I was always the Church of John when it came to The Beatles. If I was put on the spot to name a favourite record of theirs, I’d have to go with the White Album. That’s the one I go back to again and again.
I’m not sure that the book would have worked so well with Ringo.
No (laughs). It was important to let little bits of reality in. We do know at that time in the ’70s he was blocked and wasn’t really recording or writing. He was kind of too happy. Everything was working out with the marriage and the new kid and his visa difficulties had ended. And of course he had no fucking songs. It was great fun imagining him going down that sort of avant-garde, Scott Walker cacophonous noise road.
It would have been a very different Lennon in the early ‘70s when he was going through his infamous ‘lost weekend’ phase.
Yeah, the Laurel Canyon/LA period. You do realise, sadly, that that was the really great era in rock music. It wasn’t closed whereas it’s kind of finite now. Great music’s still being made but we don’t have those iconic figures anymore. What Lennon and The Beatles did was of world-changing import. It’s amazing how much of it came out of the Lancashire Irish. Living in Liverpool in 2004/’05 gave me some of the required confidence to have a go at this. I was very interested in how Irish heritage and pathos and sentimentality manifests itself in those cities.
When I met Paul McCartney ahead of his 2003 RDS show, I asked him, “Will playing in Ireland have any special resonance for you?” and he answered, ‘Yeah, I’ve never sung ‘Let It Be’ before in Dublin. ‘Mother Mary comes to me…’ That was my Mum and she was fiercely proud of her Irish roots. The song won’t be complete until I’ve sung it in the RDS.” Which was a pretty good answer!
Lennon considered himself a devout Irish man as well; he was kind of obsessed with it. But I love the fact that in 1910, the ‘20s and ‘30s, that singing in pubs mentality went from Ireland to the North of England, and from that vaudevillian drunkeness and sentimentality you’ve got the fucking cradle of some of the greatest 20th Century pop culture. You’ve got The Beatles and The Smiths and half of Joy Division. They all came out of that world.
Let’s not forget that Paul McCartney released ‘Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ as a response to Bloody Sunday and Lennon allegedly met with and gave money to the IRA.
There was speculation that he made donations but we don’t know. But he clearly sympathised at a time when it was potentially career suicide, in Britain anyway, to do so.
He helped bankroll the Israeli offshore pirate radio station, the Voice of Peace, I was on in the ‘80s. It was run by an Iranian Jew called Abie Nathan who was jailed for meeting Yasser Arafat at a time when it was illegal in Israel to engage with the PLO.
He was apparently very generous when it came to radical causes. What was nice is that when Beatlebone was nearly done, I read this book by a photographer close to him in New York who said that around ’77/’78 he did start to make weird little solo trips out into the world. He went to Japan on his own and - this is very poignant - booked himself into a hotel room for the first time. He almost didn’t know how to do it. He got on a ferry in some Japanese city and realised, “Fuck, they don’t know me.” It kind of retrospectively qualified Beatlebone for me. “Wow, maybe he did come back to Ireland!” If you were out in County Mayo some morning in 1987 and saw a guy sat in the square with a dog that looked like fucking Brian Wilson, the last thing you’d think is, “It’s Brian Wilson!”
It would be pretty remarkable though to see a dog in County Mayo, at any time of the day, that looks like Brian Wilson.
(Laugh) Behave yourself Clarky!
You spoke earlier of not wanting to be “too literary”. Are you actively trying to avoid being bracketed with the Martin Amis’ of this world?
I used to love bringing Martim Amis down a peg or two when I was journalist reviewing books! I have a kind of horror of repeating myself. I try to keep it fresh and interesting for myself as much as any reader. The idea for Beatlebone came from cycling round Clew Bay during the summer and wondering, “Which of those little islands did John Lennon own?” At one point I thought I was going to make a little radio documentary or maybe write an essay about it. Then one kind of dark fateful day I found myself scratching down lines of dialogue and thinking, “Oh fuck, I’m actually going to chance this as a novel.” I’ve never had to work as hard on anything to get it out. City Of Bohane was relatively easy because I’d grown up in Limerick and Cork and knew what the voices in these demented little Irish cities sounded like.
How would you feel if Richard & Judy made it their Book of the Month?
I think it’s too weird and nutty to be a huge kind of thing. When I started doing it, it struck me that I could do a standard kind of biopic version, which would have huge fucking commercial appeal. But I couldn’t think of anything worse than doing a safe novel about John Lennon. It had to be something radical and fucking wild if I were to attempt it.
A lot of the Beatlebone reviews have focused on you deciding a 175-pages in to put the novel on ‘hold’ and offer a first-person explanation as to why you wrote it. What did Cannongate make of this high-risk plot device?
I would’t have gotten away with it if this was my first novel. At some kind of subconscious level I was thinking, “I won a couple of prizes, I can get away with something weird now.” It kind of came about by accident. I’d scratched all these notes on backs of envelopes and beermats which I one day decided to gather together in a fancy notebook I’d bought. As I did so, I noticed these nice paragraphs were forming and thought, “Fuck, this is a really nice way of telling the story. Wouldn’t it be fun to walk out of this tall tale and 8,000 words later walk back in again having qualified it?" I wanted to show the workings. It’s very clear to me that the essay bit in the middle is the emotional heart of the novel, but I wasn’t so sure reviewers would see it that way. I’m not one of those writers who pretends to not read reviews. I read them all, so the fact that most of them have been positive has gladdened my heart!
When The Irish Times’ Eileen Battersby disemboweled Paul Murray’s new novel earlier in the year, did it make you less or more keen to read it?
I actually think you have to wait until five years after it’s come out to tell whether a book is any good or not. Very often novels that get rave reviews fall off the edge of the world 12 months later. I’ve been on both sides of the fence and know how the reviewer’s mood at the time can cause them to go one way or the other. A bad review of someone’s book wouldn’t necessarily put me off reading it.
It’s strange how the culture of writers reviewing other writers has evolved.
Yeah, you don’t get Ian Brown reviewing the new Morrissey album! It’s actually the only field where you’re reviewed by your peers.
Being a huge Smiths fan, I imagine you’ve braved the Morrissey novel, which is a shoo-in for the 2015 Bad Sex Award.
I haven’t read the memoir or the novel. It’s not going to add anything to my level of devotion to him.
The Guardian included you in a ‘New Irish Literary Boom’ piece that also namechecked the likes of Colin Barrett, Sara Baume, Mary Costello, Eimear McBride, Donal Ryan and the aforementioned Paul Murray. Do you feel like a member of a Hibernian Bloomsbury Set?
It doesn’t feel very Bloomsbury Set when I’m up in a fucking shed in Sligo! What’s evident is that a lot of first and second books are coming out. There’s a lot of interest, which hasn’t always been the case. I’ve been appointed to a sort of grandfatherly role; they mention me very kindly. Ireland’s literary reputation is really based on three writers in the first-half of the 20th Century - Joyce, Beckett and O’Brien. What they had in common was that they were completely prepared to go fucking mental on the page. They weren’t writing with any kind of commercial intent, they were just doing it for writing’s sake. It’d be nice to think that some of that will creep back in.
Your heart must also have been gladdened by Irvine Welsh and Roddy Doyle saying embarrassingly nice things about you.
I wasn’t embarrassed in the least! I’ve met Irvine just a couple of times and he’s the fucking loveliest guy on the planet. Complete pussycat but I don’t know him well. The thing with Ireland is that it’s a small kind of literary culture, so you meet a lot of people again and again. I don’t go to book launches every week because I live in Sligo, but it’s fun when I do. What I really admire about Roddy is his fucking work ethic. He’s someone who always has five projects on the go at the same time. I have a guilt complex because I didn’t work hard in my twenties and was 37 before a slim volume of stories appeared. I’m pretty fucking dedicated now about going to the shed seven days a week.
Have you acquired any celebrity readers along the way?
Oh man, have I got a beauty for you! I was just told that Mr. Donald Fagen of Steely Dan is a fan. He’s been passing my book around and bought tickets for the reading I’m doing in a few weeks time in New York. It makes all the fucking hard work worth it!
You told me before that your dream job is being in a smoky room with other writers sweating out an episode of something like The Wire. Have you worked out a route to the HBO/ Showtime/AMCs of this world?
You know what, I have an awful fear that the Golden Age of American TV has been and gone. Over the summer I re-watched all of The Wire, the last episode of which is eight years old, and thought, “Nothing has been this good since”. There are a couple of short films and hopefully there’ll be a City Of Bohane film or series, but it requires both luck and patience. Far, far fewer books make it to screen than are optioned. I saw an interview with Nick Hornby the other day about Brooklyn, which took years to make. I know people who are solely screenwriters and work on stuff than more often than not gets binned. I couldn’t do that. On the plus side, Irish film has improved a lot from what it was. There was a time when people could wing it a bit and fairly average stuff was made, but that’s gone now. The publishing world is starting to mirror the music industry in that you have different projects with different publishers - some of them major, some of them indie. There are very few career novelists these days writing book after book. I’m keen to mix it up by doing scripts and radio plays. Not only is it a pragmatic thing to earn you a living, but it also keeps you fresh and opens you up to new ways of working. I’m definitely a better short story writer having done a radio play, for instance.
There’s also an ‘audible audio edition’ of Beatlebone coming out.
Yep, in time for the lucrative - I hope! - Christmas market. It’s six hours 40 minutes of me wittering away. Ration yourself to an hour after dinner every day and you’ll get a week out of it. I have this theory that because we’re online so much, we’ve become very flitty and impatient readers. You’ve got ten fucking great books beside the bed, but are looking at your phone instead. We’re moving into an era where we want to have stories told to us as much as we want to read them, which explains the success of podcasts and audio books.
Bob Geldof told Hot Press that his memories of the decade in which Beatlebone is set are all monochrome. Was ‘70s Limerick similarly lacking in color?
Watching those YouTube clips of John Lennon I realised, “Jesus, this is a piece of historical fiction now!” When you see footage of late ‘70s/early ‘80s Ireland it looks so long ago. The people are different shapes, they’re far fucking skinnier than they are now. I saw a clip of the 1977 Dublin v Kerry All Ireland when the crowd ran onto the pitch at the end of the game on a really hot day with their tops off, and they were like rakes. Traditionally when the west of Ireland’s presented in literature it’s all about the farm and the small town, but actually in the ‘70s and ‘80s it was full of freaks. There were screamers and streakers and polyamorous communes and they really fucking improved the place. Even growing up in the ‘burbs I remember there being a house full of hippy naturists. We’d hide in the bushes outside looking at all these fabulous naked chicks. There is definitely a radical history of Western Ireland waiting to be written.
There’s your next book, so! This year was the 25th anniversary of the first Trip To Tipp, which I remember being at with your good self.
We were the Midwest’s finest young rock journalists, weren’t we? You were P.J. O’Rourke and I was Hunter! We managed to blag backstage passes and were terribly excited when we spotted Dave Fanning in the queue for the toilet. I remember missing Black Francis. He did an unannounced half-hour set before one of the headliners, but we were crawling around on acid under someone’s table at the time. I also remember you and an incident involving an older woman in the house we were staying in next to Semple Stadium…
Moving speedily on; this being our U2 issue, did Bono and the chaps ever strike three chords and the truth with you?
What I love about U2 is apart from about the first three weeks of their existence they were never cool. There was no convenient scene for them to piggy-back in on. I had a copy of the Unforgettable Fire, which I fucking love, but it would’ve been hidden underneath the bed when my cool friends were calling around.
You never snorted a line or rolled a joint up on it?
No, but I listened to it recently and it’s still a fucking really good record.
Kevin read's from his new novel, Beatlebone, in the Hot Press Chatroom: