In Goth We Trust

Poet Conor O’Callaghan’s debut novel Nothing on Earth is one of the most compelling books released this year.

On a swelteringly hot day in August, a twelve year old girl knocks on the door of a man’s house. He is a priest and the book’s narrator. The girl is strangely dressed with pen marks all over her arm. Her father, she says, has “gone too.” The girl has been living on a ghost estate with her parents and aunt. The mother and her sister have disappeared, and now her father has as well.

Nothing on Earth is a gothic novel, although the ghost estate and the unceasing summer heat are at odds with the general tropes of the genre.

“I like the gothic,” says O’Callaghan. “I like Dracula, The Turn of the Screw and even Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca – novels that are realistic but have an inexplicable element to them that create some degree of fear in the reader. I thought it would be interesting to recast that tradition. Rather than have it set in a Victorian house with bats and all that crap, to recast it in a recognisably contemporary landscape.”

The relentless summer heat was partly inspired by Francis Stuart’s novel Faillandia, but also by O’Callaghan’s past.

“The summer of 1995 was extraordinarily hot,” he remembers. “Myself and my very small family moved into a house in a new development in Dundalk. Ours was the second house and there was an elderly couple who lived down the road. For the whole summer we were the only two families living on this unfinished housing estate. In ways that I almost didn’t realise the experience of that had a profound effect on the story.”

O’Callaghan believes that all authors mine personal experiences for their creations.

“I think every novelist that’s being honest will admit that everything can be traced back to some kind of private source,” he suggests. “Everything an author writes has a basis in experience. At the end of the novel, the narrator listens to tapes of his own inquisition, that was based upon someone I had in a workshop at UCD in 1999. It became apparent to me he was doing life in Portlaoise and he was being taxied up every day. I said to him, ‘What do you do every day?’ and he said, ‘I listen to the tapes.’

“He was in prison for trying to bomb Heathrow airport and he was under surveillance for four years. His flat was completely bugged. The tapes of all the conversations he had in those four years were presented as evidence, and because of that they were obliged to give him copies of it. And that’s what he did – he listened to the tapes of himself and his former girlfriend having conversations, making love, doing all these things. I just thought it was completely weird and I carried that image in my head.”

Although O’Callaghan is well respected as a poet, he was, he says, “drawn to prose.”

“There is something about stories on a fundamental level that is sustaining,” he says. “Think of the people who were hostages like Brian Keenan and John McCarthy and Terry Waite – the way they kept each other alive and sane was through the sharing of stories. There is something fundamentally human about translating experience into stories, into narrative.”

There is, of course, a downside to stories – gossip. The girl’s mother and aunt, Helen and Martina, both have a reputation in the town, yet they disappear without anyone really being concerned or worried. In communities people may be quick to judge but unlikely to care.

“I’m interested in the idea of people disappearing,” notes O’Callaghan. “That characters just disappear and the world continues without them almost seeming not to care. People have said in reviews that the disappearance was quite surreal – characters just disappear. I take issue with that. I had a cousin who disappeared for eight years, so I have always been interested in the idea of missing persons. He returned eventually but no-one was entirely sure where he had gone.

“People disappear all the time. We give it a grammar and a language to try and pretend that we understand has happened – we call it death. In truth we have no idea what has happened to these people other than the basic biological explanation. They may have stood in the same room as us yesterday and then suddenly they are gone. Our loved ones disappear and we don’t know where they go, however much we pretend that we do.”

Like the film and book, Picnic at Hanging Rock, which O’Callaghan says influenced the composition of his novel, the disappearances in Nothing on Earth are not neatly explained. Instead there are nebulous feelings of blame and guilt, particularly attached to the priest narrator.

The priest is anxious not to be alone with the girl – at least initially. He notes that, “After a certain age, a man has to work hard to look trustworthy. That’s even truer in this vocation.” However circumstances — partly of his own making – contrive that he does. Making his narrator a priest had not been O’Callaghan original plan.

“At some point I wanted the young girl to stay with a man,” he explains. “In the back of my head I was entertaining the idea of making that man a priest. But I thought, ‘A priest is corny. Are you really going to have an Irish priest? No! It’s like Father Ted. But I found the image of the priest irresistible. We are living in this post-clerical abuse scandal era. If you are a seventy year old Irish priest, you must know that by virtue of your vocation and age, the world views you as a pervert even if you’re not.

“The interesting thing about the image of a priest – and however corny that is – he knows that the whole world views him as guilty. If I am being honest, it is a more general burden of guilt that masculinity carries. Men do terrible things — men abuse people, men rape people, men cause wars. There is a level of suspicion you carry around as a man, that you are capable of all this stuff. It is completely understandable. It is a difficult thing to articulate without sounding dodgy.”

The recently trending hashtags of #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen bear witness to this – that while only a handful of men commit these crimes, most women have experienced some level of sexual aggression.

“I don’t think it’s okay as a man to say, ‘I’ve done nothing.’ I think it is only right to accept this burden of guilt and acknowledge these thing have happened and continue to happen. But it is a difficult thing to talk about without sounding like an apologist for this behaviour. I would never want to do that.”

Nothing On Earth is out now, published by Doubleday Ireland.