Dark Souls and revelations

It would have been very disagreeable if John the Revelator had proved to be a stinker. Excuses would have needed to be manufactured. Faint praise might have been amplified through a megaphone. How very awkward things could have become.

What could I have said to Peter Murphy in this diabolical parallel universe? “Ah Peter,” I’d have whimpered ambiguously. “This first novel of yours is really something. Oh, look at the time...”
I could have lived with the lie if it were anyone else. But Peter Murphy is an exceptional case. It’s not just because I know the guy. (I do.) It’s not even that he’s a stand-up fellow. (He is.)
No. It’s the frankly heretical notion that Mr. Murphy could have ever produced anything less than a dazzling blitzkrieg that would really have rankled. This is Peter Murphy after all. The Rock Journalist Most Likely To Succeed. Most of the writing personnel here at stately Hot Press acres came because they want to be Peter Murphy when they grow up.
We are not alone in our fandom. In the line of duty, Mr. Murphy’s prose regularly attracts rave notices from people like Greil Marcus and the author formerly known as J.T. Leroy; “Peter spits,” noted the latter, “and it comes out a rainbow.”
Happily, we don’t live through the looking glass. Outside of Bizarro Land, John the Revelator is everything we had supposed it would be - accomplished, innovative, important. At the time of writing, even before the thing has officially hit the shelves, its cult status seems assured. The blurbs on the cover from Colm Toibin and Roddy Doyle (“…it was like reading for the first time”) could not be more effusive, the reviews are uniformly excellent; hell, the publishers are T.S. Eliot’s old imprint.
It hasn’t been easy. Mr. Murphy spent two years bouncing ideas off fellow-writers Sean Murray, Nadine O’Regan and Jane Ruffino in order to workshop this monster into being. The logistics were trying. He got up at 5am every morning, to eke out some writing time between sleep, the day job and the school run with his three daughters.
“I worked really hard on it,” he says. “And it’s done. And I’m happy. But there is something rough hewn and handmade about it.”
The results are sui generis, a brand spanking new sub-genre that we’re calling South-East Gothic. Set in PM’s native county of Wexford, The Revelator’s eponymous hero, John Devine, is a small-town boy struggling with the vagaries of adolescence and his ailing, chain-smoking, bible-quoting mother, Lily.
“She’s a Catholic but her strange conception of religion is far closer to Baptist belief,” says Mr. Murphy. “Catholics don’t read the Bible. What the priest says is supposed to be good enough for you. It’s Day of the Dead Catholicism. She’s not a typical Irish woman in that respect.”
Indeed, in the best possible way, there’s nothing typically Irish about John the Revelator. Its setting may have prompted facile comparisons with Pat McCabe’s more darksome moments, but in truth, the authors are pulling in opposite directions. Where Mr. McCabe prods at the seamy underbelly of his pastoral milieu, Mr. Murphy’s horrors live in plain sight. There is something of Seamus Heaney in John the Revelator’s terrible understanding of nature where everything exists as harsh binary code – decay and fucking, disease and Bacchanalian ritual – sometimes on the same page. (We’re not telling you anything else. Buy your own damned copy.)
“When I was at school we read Wordsworth and Hopkins,” recalls the author. “And they had this amazing electric use of language but because of their own proclivities, they would always try to seek the divine in nature. I loved that beautiful Blakean stuff but I was equally interested in the stuff I saw around me which was decay, dead trees, and rats in the gripe. I wanted that aspect of nature that is malign. Like something out of a science fiction film. That was a given anyway because as a kid, I lived for 2000 AD every week. So the landscape of going home from school, tripping over stones, was already Martian in my mind.”
The book’s strange marriage of old-time religion and the fantastic sets it apart – way, way apart – from the dominant realist mode of Irish writing. A forensic deconstructionist might have fun tracing its DNA through such diverse influences as Ray Bradbury, Ted Hughes and Carson McCullers – but they would have a much harder time finding genuine indigenous ancestry. Where has all the rainy realism gone?
“I have the height of respect for the rainy realists in their craft, in their technique,” says Mr. Murphy. “It’s the subject matter that bores the shit out of me. All those kitchen interiors, all those passively voiced passages about the rain falling. Once I was old enough to properly read Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers – all of whom have Irish surnames – for me the resonances were greater than with Irish writers. Even though the accents were different, the dialect, the patois, the characters, the environment were all really familiar. I joke about where I come from. I call it the Deep South East. But that’s what it’s like.”
Let’s be clear about this. Though it sticks out like flipped middle finger from the rest of the national canon, though it takes its name and apocalyptic cues from the song by Blind Willie Johnson, John the Revelator is not just Hibernian, but ecstatically so. It revels and rolls about in its dialect to a degree only practised accent chroniclers like Martin McDonagh could hope to emulate.
“Here’s the weird thing,” notes Mr. Murphy. “You transcribe the lingo from where I grew up directly and it doesn’t work. It comes across as hammy stage Irishness. You can squawk all you want about it being an accurate representation but there’s something that happens between the ear and the page that demands transformation for it to work. However, some of the language and the phraseology and the syntax is so juicy and pumped full of imagery, you preserve them as they are. Whisht, for me, isn’t just a call for silence; it sounds like a blade coming down.”
It is these small things that make John the Revelator unique. The prose is a vivid wet dream. The themes are epic. But the novel is, at heart, a traumatic coming-of-age tale spun from vaguely semi-autobiographical circumstance. Flashback to the ‘70s when a young sprite named Murphy was a kid with a vast imagination who wondered if the trees in the distance were dinosaurs. Even before he had made it into his teens, the future scribe was choked with doomsday dread. He wrote poems about the end of the world and the dark secrets of the Book of Revelations. His mother, like John Devine’s in turn, would get rid of the television in the hope that her son would stop having nightmares. It was, alas, too late to harness Master Murphy’s fertile, diseased fancies. He had already watched The Omega Man.
This sense of impending disaster, of encircling zombies, informs the book, but in the intervening years, God’s wrath and the undead have lost their potency. John the Revelator doesn’t need zombies. Its language is fantastical but its drama is in the details.
“It’s a much simpler, human story than I ever thought I’d be able to write,” says Mr. Murphy. “The earlier draughts were much more apocalyptic, much more gothic. But as the characters began to assert themselves, as they became much more human, it became apparent that the apocalypse in the book would be much more commonplace. Without giving anything away, I knew it had to become a story about processing bereavement or loss.”
Bereavement is how we got here. Peter started the book in 2000 shortly after the death of his father; “It’s classic Eliot’s catastrophic event stuff,” he says. “I had written stuff before. I wrote a novel when I was 25, purely as a mechanical exercise. I threw it away and never read it. The most powerful impulse came from something I hadn’t seen before in fiction. In the months after my dad died I had at least two unnaturally vivid dreams about him that felt more like visitations. He told me that I was right to stop playing music and start writing. That was the only substance of anything he said that I can remember but it was more his presence that mattered. It was incredibly real. On both occasions I woke up with a wet face but strangely happy, like I’d actually met him again. I’ve spoken to people since and found out that this is very common.”
Unsurprisingly, mortality looms large in John the Revelator. To reinforce the point, the young narrator is obsessed with worms and parasites, a subject Mr. Murphy knows far too much about.
“My dad was a kind of dog whisperer and he kept greyhounds,” he recalls. “If he was at work, it was my job to walk these highly strung, nervous, sometimes disturbed animals. One day, he neglected to mention that he’d wormed the dogs the night before. So one of them got down on his haunches, trembling gracefully – as they do – they’re probably the only animal in the kingdom that looks graceful taking a crap – and I looked down to check it had finished its business. And I saw what it had created and what was living in what it had created. It was one of those Naked Lunch moments. It was always going to show up in the book. I’ve had a problem with spaghetti ever since.”
If you think that’s hair-raising, consider, dear reader, the following freaky knowledge from the Inside Track. Peter Murphy is only clearing his throat.