Book Interview: Better Off Red

It’s not often that a debut novel by a young writer causes publishers to get into a bun fight, especially not if the book is very definitely a work of literary fiction – or one which doesn’t feature supernatural creatures, lend itself to serialisation or include a teenage hero to appeal to the all-important tween market.

Paul Lynch’s Red Sky In Morning debut did just that. It’s the tale of Coll Coyle, a tenant farmer in Donegal who commits a rash act and flees to America. But however far he runs, Coyle cannot escape his fate. No-one is more surprised by the response to the novel than the author himself.
“I was stunned!” Lynch laughs. “I was convinced I’d written this dark, baroque novel that nobody would be interested in. I wrote it entirely on my own terms, a book I would want to read and I didn’t care a damn what anybody else would like to read. There’s a kind of temporary insanity in that but perhaps that’s the only way of doing it.
“It was tricky getting an agent but when the book went to submission to publishers, suddenly there were six of the very best ones bidding for it. I had a list of five publishers who were my dream publishers and the five of them were in the six bidding for the book. It was just surreal.
“You often hear stories that publishers don’t care anymore and that they don’t care about publishing good stories and it’s evidently not true. There’s an appetite for quality writing.”
A more serious time requires a more serious literature, he asserts.
“None of us needed to write during the boom. My generation certainly were brought up under the fear of joblessness and suddenly we all had really nice middle-class jobs with good salaries. Why would you quit that? If you look at the top tier generation of Irish writers – Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry, Anne Enright, Joseph O’Connor and Banville – they all came of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s when times were tough. There’s a paucity of writers in their 30s and 40s – there’s only a handful. I’m not surprised because nobody was writing. We didn’t need to write because we were happy. That’s changed and now there’s a rash of writing coming through. There’s a new wave of Irish writing coming out here and in America and I’ve no doubt that the changed circumstances have created that need and hunger in writers to capture what’s going on.”
Lynch’s extraordinary fortune as a writer was partly the result of suddenly finding himself out of work. Between 2007 until 2011, when the paper folded, Lynch worked as the chief film critic for the Sunday Tribune.
“When the Tribune collapsed I’d just taken a month’s leave to work on the second draft of the book and I think it was on the second day of my break that I got the phone-call to say that the paper was gone. It was a horrible and worrying time. But it was liberating because that day Ibecame a full-time writer.”
The novel had been brewing in the author’s mind for some time before seeing the light of day. Lynch was inspired by an archaeological discovery that had personal resonance.
“In 2008 I was watching a documentary on RTÉ that told the story of a bunch of immigrants that left Ireland in the spring of 1832. Most of them were from Ulster and they disappeared off the face of the earth. They were digging a railway line in Pennsylvania. What’s believed is that they died from cholera but the curious thing is the morbidity rate from cholera is 40% – 60%, but 100% of them disappeared.
“There was an excavation at the site of some of the bodies that had been buried anonymously and some of them had blunt-force trauma to the head. It’s suspected that all of them were killed to prevent the spread of cholera into the neighbouring villages. There would have been massive anti-immigrant sentiment at the time. Where these men came from was where I grew up in Donegal, so I kind of felt very moved by the story and the seeds of a novel were born there.”
Red Sky begins with a confrontation between a tenant farmer and a dissolute landlord, which says Lynch, was not subject matter he’d ever considered using in his fiction.
“One of the things that surprised me when I was writing the book was that I was suddenly going back historically into something that is effectively a romantic cliché. I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to write about this. I have no interest in any of this stuff.’ But something kept pulling me towards it and I began to realise that there was a new way of doing it.
“All of this historical romance and layers of ideology that we place on history are just ideas and people live in the ordinary moments of their lives. I wanted to go back and see what it would be like to experience these things in a way that seems like a parallel for what’s going on in our own lives today. There’s a parallel to be drawn there outside the ideas of history just as ordinary people living events. I started writing the story and Coll Coyle somehow became this proxy for my own anger about what was happening in the world around me.”
Coyle commits a violent act upon which the action hinges. He flees to America but is pursued across the Atlantic by John Faller. Lynch believes that his characters, and by extension, people, have little control over their own lives and destinies.
“One of the things I’m keen to illustrate is that there are greater forces at work that our own lives are shaped by. The book kind of lulls you into the idea that what will happen is based on the actions of Faller and the actions of Coyle, but actually other things occur that have a greater and more powerful impact on their lives than what they do.
“I’m looking at power in general, which is universal and continual. I don’t think there’s a huge difference between what happens in Red Sky and what’s happening all over the world historically at any given time. The stronger force always consumes the weaker force, whether that’s a natural force, or a cultural force or a personal force. It’s just the nature of it.”

Red Sky In Morning is out now, published by Quercus.