Sitting on the balcony of the Salthill Hotel, watching the sunlight sparkling on the ever- shifting surface of Galway Bay, Donal Ryan is recalling the genesis of his literary career. Although the award- winning, Nenagh-born author has made his name writing about rural Ireland, his very first short story was actually set in Vegas.
“It started for me when Barry McGuigan lost his belt to Steve Cruz,” he explains. “I was really heartbroken, like, I was fucking totally inconsolable. My dad was hugging me. It was really late at night because it was on in Las Vegas, but I was allowed to stay up and watch it. Barry was beaten by the heat more than he was beaten by Steve Cruz.”
He shakes his head admiringly. “God, he was so lionhearted, though. I completely loved Barry McGuigan – he was my idol. Dad kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry! There’ll be a rematch now in Dublin or Belfast, and Barry will beat the shit out of him!’ So, it never happened, but a few weeks later I wrote a story about that happening, about the comeback, and I felt this intense relief, you know?”
Such can be the redemptive power of literature. Now aged 39, Ryan wrote that boxing story almost thirty years ago, when he was growing up with his older brother and younger sister in Youghalarra, Co. Tipperary.
He recalls a very happy childhood in a house full of books. “Oh yeah, completely. Some people see a happy Irish childhood as being anathema to creativity, but it’s not. I was always really encouraged, even in school, actually.”
He went to a CBS. “I was very lucky. Not everyone is that lucky with teachers. I had more good teachers than bad teachers. I mean, there were some fucking animals there as well, like, but they left me alone.”
We’re meeting today to discuss Ryan’s third book, an accomplished short story collection entitled A Slanting of the Sun. It follows on from two virtuoso novels, A Spinning Heart and The Thing About December. A pleasant, softly-spoken and shyly self-deprecating type, he’s driven up from just outside Limerick – where he lives with his wife and two young children - especially for this interview. I’d offered to travel to him, but he’d insisted (“Any excuse to come to Galway, like!”).
He’s relatively new to the business of book promotion. Having been rejected by 47 publishers, the manuscript of The Spinning Heart was famously picked out of the slush-pile by an eagle-eyed intern at Lilliput Press [FYI: Sarah Davis-Goff has since gone on to found the well regarded Tramp Press with former Hot Presser Lisa Coen].
Published in 2012, the bestselling novel went on to win the 2013 Guardian First Book Award, amongst other prestigious prizes, and was longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the IMPAC.
Ryan still can’t quite believe his luck. While he always felt he was a writer at heart, he didn’t ever really see literature as a viable career. “I went to LIT first in Limerick to study engineering,” he explains. “I really liked it, but I realised quickly that I’d be no good because I couldn’t stand the thought of being responsible for something standing up. I couldn’t sleep at night if I had any part in a bridge being built – I couldn’t do it! Then I had a succession of jobs, and joined the civil service and did a law degree at night.”
Prior to the publication of Spinning Heart, he had been working for seven years as a labour inspector in the Workplace Relations Commission. Presumably that was a safe pensionable gig?
“Yeah, really safe,” he nods. “Well the job was safe, the work wasn’t always safe. I loved it, actually. I might have to go back. If I do it’s no tragedy. I’m on a three-year career break. I’ve got about a year left.”
The Spinning Heart – which told the story of the impact of the recession on smalltown Ireland via 21 interlinked voices – was actually his second novel. Encouraged by his wife, Anne-Marie, he had written the more conventional The Thing About December (about a damaged loner in the same fictional town) first.
“I wrote from nine to midnight every night, and actually I’m not that disciplined really,” he recalls. “I’ve become more disciplined in the last 10 years. It was my first time saying to myself, you know, ‘I really have to do this’. Do from nine o’clock till midnight every night. Unless I was working late, I wrote the book.
“I stopped about halfway through and gave up, like I always did before, because I had about ten years of a wilderness where everything I started I didn’t finish. I felt sick. Anne-Marie pushed me to keep me going because she loved the character of Johnsey so much. He did seem to mean a lot to her, he became very real for her, I think. Only for that I wouldn’t have finished it.”
He smiles. “I always say that that is what I was doing from the very start, and it’s still what I do, try to impress Anne-Marie.”
The twenty stories that make up A Slanting of the Sun largely mine the same universally human themes of loneliness, isolation and displacement as his novels. Despite the title, with rapes, murders, betrayals, physical abuse and psychological torture, there’s a lot more darkness than light here.
“Well, I don’t think that at all, really, but of course when you create anything you can’t dictate the terms of the contract that you’re creating; the person who consumes it dictates them. I always think that there’s real hope and joy in everything that I write, but it comes across as kind of dark. A lot of the characters are in dark places, and there’s darkness happening, and I’m looking at the world through their eyes.”
He has just delivered his third novel, A Drifting Smoke, which will be published next year.
“It’s actually written from a female point of view,” he reveals. “It’s in the first person and it’s about a teacher who becomes pregnant by a young traveller boy in her class. She’s been teaching him to read and write at home, and they have an affair, and it’s all in her words. Maybe I read too much about what people think about my work, but I read somewhere somebody saying, ‘All of Donal Ryan’s female characters are mothers or whores’. I think that’s very unfair. And that they are all uneducated. I think whoever said that just skim-read the two novels, maybe.”
Despite all the acclaim, there have been occasional negative reviews. “Reaction to my work is nearly always positive, and it’s great, but I’m a bit of a baby when it comes to negative things,” he admits. “People do say, ‘You say horrible things about people, you obviously…’ And I think they think I’m a horrible person because of that, you know? Some of the characters are horrible people, most of them aren’t. Most of them are slightly damaged by events that go on.”
Speaking of damaged, there was one Irish critic, in particular, who penned such a poisonous review that Ryan seriously wanted to batter them to death with a hurley (his wife talked him out of it). For the most part, though, despite cheerfully admitting to being thin-skinned, he tries not to be overly bothered by criticism.
“This woman said The Spinning Heart was the worst book ever written, which I think is unfair because the Library of Alexandria burnt down 3,000 years ago so she doesn’t know about those books!”
He taps the table defiantly as he makes his salient point. “She definitely couldn’t say for definite that it’s the worst book ever written. There could have been one there that was worse!”