No Ordinary Joe

Joseph O’Connor is a rare breed among authors. Having initially made his name as a writer of contemporary fiction, O’Connor turned his hand to comic essays, travel writing, biography and stage plays before finding international critical acclaim and commercial success with his first historical novel, Star of the Sea.

“It was the first time I’d written a novel that I was totally in control of. It was my fifth novel, but really, I kind of think of it as my first one in a way – it was the first book that I’d ever written that I was completely happy with. I felt I could get into the architecture of that story and walk around and touch the roof and the walls of it. It was a gamble doing it, because I didn’t think it would be successful at all. When it was, it was like getting a clap on the back from the universe and thinking, ‘Maybe this writing thing is something I can be good at.’ It settled something in me. Every writer, every storyteller wants an audience and to acquire one was just really lovely. It was like a strange, incredibly happy dream.”
The success of Star Of The Sea, a multi-layered book, which employs a variety of styles, such as newspaper articles, historical documents, letters and a sea captain’s log, as well as first and third person narratives, announced to the world that O’Connor was a serious man of letters. More importantly, as a writer who likes to push his own boundaries and try different genres, this success freed O’Connor to wander wherever a story takes him.
“I felt so liberated by having written that book, I just felt I was going to do whatever I wanted. My publishers have been wonderful about that. No one has asked me to do Star Of The Sea: The Return Voyage, although who knows? They might! There is always a pressure, you know, you always want your next book to be the best book you can write. You always try and go forward and not do the same thing over again.”
The third and final book, Ghostlight, is due to be published in June 2010.
“Well, it’s a very loose trilogy,” O’Connor laughs. “There’s an old theatrical superstition that they always leave one light burning on the stage, even in the middle of the night, so that the ghosts can perform their own plays. It’s about a love affair between an Irish playwright and a much younger woman who is an actress. It’s set in the 1920s and it’s very loosely based on the real-life story of John [Millington] Synge and Molly Allgood, an actress who worked at the Abbey.”
“After Synge’s death, Molly Allgood had a great career on Broadway, and the novel moves backwards and forwards between London, Broadway and California and the great open spaces of the American west where she is on tour. I guess it’s how America dealt with Ireland, in the end, by putting us on the stage. If you become part of the circus of national stereotypes, which America is so interested in, it means that the Star Of The Sea stories never happened and the Redemption Falls stories, and the stories of toughness and grittiness and survival all get wiped away and are replaced with a different myth, which is the Statue of Liberty myth that everyone was welcomed with open arms. But readers of Star Of The Sea and Redemption Falls will know that that isn’t quite the case.”
Although O’Connor is most admired as a writer of historical fiction, his next project should see him returning to a more contemporary setting.
“I’d like to write about Ireland now. I’ve really enjoyed writing these three big historical books and I’d like to do that again sometime, but it’s been a while since I’ve written any fiction about now, and now is an interesting time. I’ve two or three ideas but I have a feeling I’d like to write a novel set in Ireland over the last ten years or so.”
While any Irish novel set in that time period would obviously need to touch on the Celtic Tiger years, O’Connor does not believe that authors should start with an overarching message in mind.
“I don’t think novels should be about themes, you know. If I have an idea for a novel that is suggested to me by a character I always follow that. I think novels need to be about people and wherever they are set; and the reader needs to acquire that by osmosis.
“I think anyone who sets out to write a novel about the Celtic Tiger era would fail inasmuch as anyone who tried to write a novel about the Irish famine would fail. Novels need to be about people and recognisable human struggles. They acquire themes in the process of being written, but they always need to start with the human. We don’t want to be lectured about the Celtic Tiger in a novel. Christ, no! We’ve had enough of it in the press.”
While the Celtic Tiger years may leave the country with one hell of a social and economic hangover, the last ten years have been kind to O’Connor.
“My son was born around the same time as Star Of The Sea and he’s brought me nothing but good luck really. Up until now, with the depression and despair of the whole country I haven’t had any low points work-wise. I tempt fate by saying it – I’ll probably be fucking hit by a bus now!”
Let’s hope not! After all, O’Connor has been chosen as Hot Press’ Irish Writer of the Decade.
“Isn’t that just the nicest thing? I can remember growing up in Ireland in the late seventies and early eighties. It was a pretty miserable place culturally, and one of the fantastic things that happened in the late 1970s was when Hot Press came along and it accompanied the great burgeoning of music in the city.
“I think music saved Dublin, and that it was music that opened a space for people in the other arts to get going again. Hot Press was an important part of that. The thought that one day that they would be aware of my miserable existence – if anyone had told me that at sixteen I would have been delighted, and I’m still delighted.”
Choosing the Irish Writer of the Decade was no easy task. Ireland’s authors have produced some fine work in the past ten years – a fact acknowledged by the country’s overwhelming presence on the nomination lists for various international literary awards.
O’Connor’s literary hero is the great John McGahern, but as he notes, Irish writing has been having a golden moment.
“I love William Trevor; I love Roddy Doyle’s work; I love Colm Tóibín’s work; Dermot Bolger is someone who has meant an awful lot to me; Anne Enright is great; Peter Murphy has a fantastic first novel – it’s so much better than my first novel was. I think in the last ten years in particular, the health of Irish writing has never been better.
“I think if you take them as a group, it’s probably the best generation ever, and that’s before you get into other modes of storytelling – Irish playwrights, cinema, and stand-up comedy, which is a very interesting form of Irish storytelling. It’s just a wonderful moment in Irish writing.
“Back in the twenties and thirties, Irish writing really was dominated by a couple of key worldwide figures who were like Easter Island statues dominating the landscape so sternly. Imagine trying to write a novel in the years after Joyce’s Ulysses? You’d just want to fucking cut your throat!”