Hot Press meets Peter Murphy

I didn’t even think consciously that I wanted to be a writer,” says Peter Murphy, reminiscing about his childhood in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. “I always loved stories. In the same way you wouldn’t think, ‘Did I always want to play with lego?’ It was a thing that completely absorbed me. You lost yourself in it. There were a few things I got lost in as a kid. Writing was one of them.”

Murphy has emerged as one of the most interesting of the new breed of Irish novelists, who have come through over the past five years. Published in 2009, his debut, John The Revelator, was widely praised. As its title – taken from the old blues classic – indicates, music ha been an important source of inspiration for the Wexford writer.
At 17, Murphy taught himself to play drums. He would go on to record and tour with bands such as The Tulips and Grasshopper. He eventually made the shift into journalism, being given a platform at Hot Press, where he consolidated his reputation as a stylist, handling some of the magazine’s biggest music stories and interviews.
This lifelong love affair with rock ’n’ roll was a major influence on his newly published second novel, Shall We Gather At The River. Set in the Wexford town of Murn, local man Enoch O’Reilly is a magnetic ‘radiovanglist’, attempting to channel not only the word of the Lord, but also his rock ’n’ roll heroes.
Though the musical references come readily to Murphy, religion is not something that he had grown up with.
“I really didn’t have a relationship with religion,” he confesses. “Mass was somewhere you just went to in order to be bored to tears. Obviously parts of it sunk in. The fact you’re parroting these words at five or six before you’ve any inkling of what they could possibly mean... and the rhythm of it and the extraordinary cadences of something like The Creed or the Mass – it must go in on some subcutaneous level that you’re not even aware of.”
While that garbled influence bubbled under the surface somewhere, a turning point came when Murphy started to take an interest in the bible.
“I started to realise the Bible was a huge influence on people I loved,” he says, “whether it was Bob Dylan or Patti Smith or Johnny Cash – or later on Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner. I began to feel deficient not knowing it, and began to read for the sake of the language.”
You could say that the exercise has paid off handsomely. Murphy’s latest yarn is rendered in slabs of gorgeously gothic and rhythmic prose that clearly draws on the bible for its language and its feel. Another big influence is the place that he grew up, with both the natural beauty of county Wexford and the dark tragedies that have befallen it feeding into the story in different ways.
“After the first book, a few things had been on my mind, boiling away for three, four, five years,” he explains. “The cluster of suicides that occurred in Enniscorthy in 2002; the phenomenon of renegade priest Fr. Sean Fortune and the BBC documentary Suing The Pope – and Alison O’Connor’s book A Message From Heaven: The Life & Crimes Of Father Sean Fortune. And then, I started going back further into the history of the place itself. Reading up on the 1798 rising: the massacres, the slaughter, the darkness. Some of the amazing characters that went through there, like Augustus Welby Pugin who designed the cathedral in the town. Guillermo Marconi’s mother came from a mile away from where I lived.
“There was a sense of a richness, and a sense that this place that was nowhere – or so I thought when I was growing up – actually had immense weight to it.”
He also became fascinated with the south-eastern part of the county.
“Around Hook Head,” he reflects, “that’s like another world. It’s quite separate from the rest of the country. It’s a wild, mystical, savage landscape. It’s incredibly beautiful, and is a kind of Deep South in its own right.”
While the place and its history were important to shaping the novel, the book has a powerful personal dimension also.
“I knew two of the suicides, just from living in the same town,” he states. “They were not friends or anything. But I started to think about how those shockwaves go through a small area and the strangeness and eeriness of it. David Lynch, Twin Peaks... this is easily on a par with all that stuff. And it’s real.”
Despite the darkness that underpins the action in the book, Shall We Gather At The River is also incredibly funny. While Enoch O’Reilly’s attempts to achieve glory and greatness yield their share of comedy gold, Murphy insists that there is a personal dimension to that too.
“A lot of it was about ripping the piss out of myself promoting the first book,” Murphy laughs. “Trying to command a room with my words. There was just endless capacity for self-pisstaking!”

Shall We Gather At The River is available now from Faber & Faber.