RIOTS of PASSAGE

EAMONN SWEENEY S debut novel, Waiting For The Healer, has won many admirers. Pat McCabe loves it. Colm Tsibmn finds it exciting and explosive. Film companies are already bartering for options on the screen rights. But there have also been those who vehemently deplore the book. Among that rollcall are Snoop Doggy Dogg and Cat Stevens.
Waiting For The Healer is set in Brixton and in the fictional Irish everytown of Rathbawn. Its characters scrabble about in a world where spilled blood is as common as spilled beer, and where there are oceans of spilled beer because most of the cast are routinely legless by lunchtime.
Reader discretion is advised. There is much that is shocking about Waiting For The Healer. I m not talking about the strong language (though, admittedly, fans of weak language will find little to their taste between its covers) or the scenes of explicit and messy violence. What causes the jaw to drop is the fact that this is a genuinely adult novel from a young writer.
Sligo-born Eamonn Sweeney turns 29 this year but he tackles themes and tills terrains that are conventionally the preserve of authors who are called venerable and esteemed by literary critics, and old by everybody else. Irish cultural protocol expects freshmen novelists to begin their careers with a respectful nod to the traditions of their elders. Sweeney prefers digital communication; a short, sharp two-fingered gesture to be precise.
There is a tendency among young Irish male writers to write the same first novel, he asserts. There s an accepted canon. There was no accepted canon of Scottish literature when Kelman and Welsh came along and blew the whole scene apart over there. Maybe my book is a good book, maybe it s a bad book but I wanted to take on things that were worth taking on; the fear of death, the allure of physical brutality, the effect of the North on life down here, and the texture of urban life outside Dublin which is very unexplored.
The central protagonist of Waiting For The Healer is Paul Kelly, a manager of a successful Brixton pub, a man in his late-20s with a drink problem and a tragic past. Kelly returns to his native Rathbawn for the funeral of his brother who has been murdered as a result of some sort of vicious small town feud. Before the clay hits the casket, Paul is sucked beneath the scabrous surface of the Rathbawn underworld and immersed up to his neck in a mire he had originally left the country to evade.
Though often so bleak that you could use a Saint Bernard with a keg of brandy clipped to its collar to get you through to the end of the chapter, Waiting For The Healer is simultaneously ablaze with moments of manic comedy and some great wisecracks. A forceful passion for rock music also gusts from its pages, as it does from Sweeney in person.
Snatches of song-lyrics abound. As a matter of course, the use of such copyright material must be cleared in advance with its publishers. Generally, this is a mere formality. In the case of Waiting For The Healer, however, two artists were so reluctant to have even fleeting quotations from their work included in the novel that they fought against it like, well, Cat and Dogg.
I had used a quote from The First Cut Is The Deepest , by Cat Stevens, Eamonn Sweeney recounts. But Cat is a devout Muslim now and he wouldn t let us use it. And you d be as well not to fall out with anyone of the Muslim persuasion as regards books. We decided to use a Mick Flavin song instead.
I was told that Cat had a look at the book himself. I find it hard to imagine though, Cat sitting there reading away, and thinking, I wonder is Rushdie dead yet? Mind you, Sweeney s book is a cracker. Jesus, Ireland is fucking mad .
Elsewhere in his novel, Eamonn had cited a Snoop Doggy Dogg couplet, an excerpt from Who Am I? which goes Here was I, Slim with the titled brim/She wanted tha nigga wit tha biggest nuts and who was that? Snoop Doggy Dogg! Astonishingly, Warner Brothers (the label that represents the former crack-dealing rapper who, by his own admission, once ran with the Los Angeles street gang known as The Crips) denied him permission to do so.
The man from Warner Brothers said that there was too much filth and obscenity in the book, explains Sweeney.
The Healer , for whom so many of the characters in Eamonn Sweeney s novel breathlessly wait, never comes, but that doesn t deter them from waiting. The quest for the perfect painkiller engrosses their every waking hour. Some believe they ve found it in a syringe, others in a bottle, but these cures soon prove just as deadly as the initial afflictions.
Eamonn Sweeney is especially good on the boozing life, its props and splints, the elevation of the highs and the depth of the lows. He concedes that, until very recently, his own drinking habit knew neither ceiling nor cellar. In the book, Paul Kelly spoofs himself into believing that it is impossible to be an alcoholic until you re 30. It s not a theory with which the author concurs.
I ve known guys who were alcoholics when they were 23 or 24, Sweeney attests. I ve been drinking since I was about 16. Up to four months ago, there were very few days in my life when I wasn t drinking. About half of that time, I was knackered with drink.
There d be a reasonable amount of very heavy drinking in my family. I ve had my own money since I was 17. It s very different from the drinking that people are doing in college. You don t have the money to be an alcoholic when you re in college, to do it seven days a week.
I don t know what the definition of alcoholism is. I drank like an absolute hoor for fucking 13 years. I had rakes of mornings when I wasn t able to get out of the frigging bed without a bottle of wine first.
In linear plot terms, there is little autobiography in Waiting For The Healer but Sweeney was determined that, if nothing else, the passages about drink and drunkenness would have the ring of authenticity.
There are so many writers writing about heavy-drinking young men and my reaction is always, Ah, this isn t it at all , he insists. There is a tendency among young, first-time, male novelists to have a bit in the book where they go: I woke up in the morning, my tongue was like sandpaper, the room was spinning, Oh my God, never again . It s just a way of boasting about drink. Paul doesn t boast about drink; drink is absolutely killing him. A lot of the drinking society in the book is very grim. But, obviously, if you re drinking at 10.30 in the morning, the surrounds aren t going to be very sylvan or very plush.
In a way, it used to be a consolation for me when I was on the beer. I d tell myself, Ah, I ll put this in the book . It s a really sad way to be going on, convincing yourself that you re four days on the batter but you re getting some great material out of it. Of course, you get fuck all material out of it.
I can t actually write when I m drinking. I wouldn t write one line if I had even one glass of beer on me. But I was always really, really lucky in that I could write the day after. I could get up no matter how hammered I d be. I couldn t function, I couldn t talk to people, but I could do four hours writing.
Eamonn Sweeney grew up in Gurteen, a small town about 25 miles outside Sligo. In the mid- 80s, after a brief and inglorious stint at journalism college in Rathmines, he dropped out and headed for London.
I arrived in England with about #100 in my pocket, he recalls. I d read loads of The Face when I was a kid and I thought I d walk straight into nightclubs and meet Steve Strange and hang around with the New Romantic crowd. I was a bit thinner then. But, when I got there, it was Acid House time; the clubs were full of normal blokes. Fuck it, if I wanted to meet normal blokes in T-shirts, I could have stayed in Gurteen.
It didn t take long, though, before Sweeney became a dance devotee. He went on the dole, got a flat in Brixton, hooked up with dozens of like-minded citizens and became a nightly regular at The Fridge. His liquor intake increased dramatically and was supplemented by a balanced diet of E, speed, dope and whatever was going.
The dominant theme of my time in London was Whoo, party! , he laughs. We just went fucking mad. We could do anything and did everything. But, without doing a Brian Harvey on it, no drug has ever had anything like the effect that drink has had on me. The baaad effect! It s a thing people never say. They talk about the north inner city of Dublin being devastated with heroin. Look at where I m from, a very typical Irish community. Between deaths and madness and suicides from fucking drink, an area of about a four-mile radius of that town has been devastated too.
That was something I learned pretty quickly in London. The drugs are fine. The trick is managing to drink without it killing you.
When the dole could no longer fund the feeding of his ravenous appetites (in other words, when his net income could no longer underwrite his gross habits), Eamonn Sweeney decided to get a job. He became an employee of a tabloid newspaper agency. One of his first journalistic assignments was to stake out the house of Heartbeat star Nick Berry. He was to hide in the hedge with a photographer and pounce on Berry if he arrived home with a new girlfriend.
The bobs were good, #70 a night, Sweeney avers. After a couple of nights, I convinced the photographer that we should just go to the pub. So, off we went to the pub, drank away on full pay and, after three days, the photographer told on me. I was sacked the next morning.
A keen sportsman in his youth (he had represented Connacht in athletics, was a Sligo county champion in badminton and table tennis, and has numerous county medals for soccer and Gaelic), Eamonn Sweeney found it easy to parley his way into a gig with a sports news agency. Alone in the office one afternoon, he stumbled upon the Holy Grail of football journalism, the confidential book containing the players home telephone numbers.
I took down the name of every member of the Irish football squad I could find, says Sweeney. Home numbers are like fucking gold dust. A lot of these players wouldn t talk to the English press at all, no way. But they d be very sensitive about talking to an Irish reporter, especially if they d just been picked for the Irish team. I made a fortune selling interviews with people like Andy Townsend to the Evening Herald. That was great crack.
One night, the Herald sent me to cover an Arsenal/West Ham game but I went on a skite instead. Getting sacked from the Herald was funny because I got a lecture from a guy there who thought he was Ben Bradlee. He came out with a line beloved of all wankers. He actually said, We play hard in this game but I don t suffer fools gladly .
Eamonn s next position was as the cricket correspondent of an Essex newspaper. Here, he became a master of creative writing, primarily because he knew little or nothing about cricket. They sent me out to interview the Essex team and I had a really good chat with this lad. He said he was hoping for a good season. I asked was he hoping to bat well and did he hope to score lots of runs this year. It was only when Radio Essex came over to talk to him that I realised who it was. It was Graham Gooch, the most famous cricketer in the world.
Eamonn Sweeney is rare among Irish writers in that he scorns the misty-eyed view of our ex-pats in Britain as downtrodden, disenfranchised refugees. I know emigration is supposed to be terrible, he affirms. And it is, to some degree. But, for some people, it s great. You go to England, no-one knows who you are and you don t get pissed on. Like a lot of people, I went to England because I wanted to. It s a really good place to go and lose yourself. Everyone is a drifter in London and I like that. I was delighted to be away from Gurteen. The reason I came back was that I was drinking a skite and I thought if I came back I might calm down. I didn t.
I know you re supposed to get lots of anti-Irish feeling in Britain but I never got it at all. In fact, you can act the hoor a lot and get away with it. Maybe if you re a very sober and sensible Irish guy, you d get pissed off in England. But if you re out for the craic, like I was, it s great. You arrive in three hours late for work and they slap you on the back, Oh, you mad Irish bastard .
I used to love the day before every Paddy s Day. They d say to me, Oh, don t expect to see you for a couple of days, Eamonn . I used to think, Lovely, boys . It was leave to go mad. I m sure I should have said, No, to spite you, you imperialist oppressor you, I ll drink Ballygowan all day and be in in the morning with a tie on me . But I didn t mind it at all.
One of the features of Waiting For The Healer that I relished most gleefully was its forensic and unerringly accurate depiction of the sheer claustrophobic awfulness of small-town life in this country. It comes as a welcome antidote to Bord Failte s criminally fraudulent attempt to sell rural Ireland as a bucolic idyll peopled with happy-clappy, bodhran-rapping, Riverdancing rustics.
There is an idea that small-town Ireland is a very, very happy, homogenous society, declares Eamonn Sweeney. You often hear people in the small towns going on about how they re oppressed by Dublin 4. And, generally, that will come from somebody in the hierarchy of a small town. Rural towns and rural life are far more stratified and class-ridden than either Dublin or London.
A small town is an incredible hierarchy. I remember John Waters saying in Jiving At The Crossroads that a small town doesn t have a class system, instead everyone knows exactly where they belong, which is about the best definition of a class system you could ever have.
There s this dreadful small-town code of respect for the son of the fucking solicitor and the son of the fucking barrister. And there is a part in every small town and the people who come from there are treated as pariahs. There isn t even lip service paid to them. There is at least lip service paid to the idea that you should recognise the culture of the working-class in Dublin.
Funny how people reckoned the tinkers were savages for taking revenge over what happened to their relations, muses Paul Kelly in Waiting For The Healer. You were only a sound man if you killed for a bit of a flag, an idea out of a book in a Hampstead shop or the chorus of a song by Thomas Davis. Respect due to Thomas, original gangsta rapper.
The ambiguity of the Irish towards violence and the undoubted glamour of physical force are subjects that intrigue Eamonn Sweeney.
Violence interests me because people have a fascination with it, he states. People have a fascination with the Sunday Indo and The Monk. It s the frisson that surrounds Gary McMichael and David Ervine, the Prods we love to love, or Martin McGuinness. It s the same reason that guys love to hang around villains pubs in London. It s the glamour.
Those who claim to hate violence say that all bullies are cowards and that there is no such thing as a real hard man. There is. You re told in school that if you stand up to that big hoor who s picking on you, he ll run off. But, of course, he won t. He ll kick the shite out of you. There are hard men, who are violent, who are good at it and who are afraid of nothing. They don t have a cowardly streak. They wouldn t run away if the wife hit them. If the wife hit them, they d burn the house down and her inside it.
Violence is simple. It s simpler to kick the shit out of someone who s annoying you than to work something out. There s a part in all of us, especially in men, I think, which believes that violence is good and groovy and glamorous. We wouldn t mind being violent if we could always win the fight.
Though not naturally inclined towards belligerence, Eamonn Sweeney has found himself in the midst of some serious rucks, especially during his wild years in London.
One thing about being in a row is that it s fucking terrifying. There s really nothing worse than getting a couple of digs into the mouth and getting your tooth broken or getting your nose smashed. I have been in major rows and it s very, very scary.
These days, his most bellicose ire is reserved for what he sees as the complacency and corruption of many Irish writers and the docility with which they allow themselves to be co-opted into a writers establishment which is full of respect for the traditions and the past.
You have all these tedious fuckers still going on about Literary Dublin in the 1950s which I think is the most boring load of shite, Sweeney asserts. They should burn down fucking McDaid s. There is a heavy establishment here, an elite. They re still sniping at Roddy Doyle. I think the guy is a great writer. He created a completely new aesthetic, a completely new way of looking at Dublin, but there are still hoors who d say it s not writing.
Sweeney is extremely suspicious of the hoop-la which surrounds the latest generation of Irish writers, a fellowship with which he feels no affinity.
There are a lot of people from very similar backgrounds writing now, he maintains. There s all these young writers like Colum McCann and Philip McCann and Susan McCann eh, no, she s not a writer and Frank Ronan and Anne Enright and I don t want to be a part of them. I have nothing in common with them.
I ve got a different background. I don t have a degree. I haven t done creative writing courses. I don t have the earnestness that a lot of those people have. I d hate to be part of any movement. The Butcher Boy and A Goat s Song are my favourite Irish books. They re both very, very funny books, even when they re completely bleak. That kind of sense of humour is essential to me the skewed rural sense of humour that you also get in The Border Fascist. The two Irish writers that I really admire are Pat McCabe and Dermot Healy, and no-one could ever say that they were ever part of any movement.
Eamonn Sweeney s girlfriend is Antonia Logue, herself a young author of some repute and the recipient of a famously lavish advance for her first novel, which is due for publication next year. However, he is quick to refute any suggestion that, as a couple, they might constitute a literary mini-movement of their own.
I met Antonia at a Selecter gig in the Ormond Multi-Media Centre, he proclaims. It had very little to do with the difficult constraints of metaphor and language at the coalface of meaning.
Four months ago, Eamonn decided to forswear the sauce and the chemicals. Aside from a few minor tumbles from the wagon, he s been pretty clean ever since.
It s been murder actually, it really has, he sighs. Basically, I ve been trying to give it up a few times. I started thinking I was going up the walls but I don t know whether I was or not. I was just knackered with it. I hit an absolute low ebb on the drink and decided to give it up because of the physical and mental effects.
There used to be a crowd of us that drank together and some of them are on the dry now but some of them are very, very bad. Without wishing to sound like fucking Eric Clapton, I also met a very, very sound woman, Antonia, and that s been a help.
It d be very nice to get to a stage where I could have a pint without going off for 20 pints and being lost for three days. To be honest, I ve always drunk like that. We ll see what happens.
Eamonn Sweeney s immediate concern is finishing a book about what he describes as his 20-year passionate engagement with Sligo Rovers which will be published by New Island Books in September.
My mother was at a Rovers match on the Sunday and I was born on the Monday, he says. Sligo Rovers have always been part of my life. My parents are separated. I have two brothers and we re not a close family at all but we all go to Rovers games. There is an idea that if you only have sport to talk about, it s bad. But it s a real form of communication for our family. The book is about that.
Sweeney s second novel is almost completed. It sounds like another romantic blockbuster, the story of a guy who kills his girlfriend because she wants to break off their engagement.
In the meantime, he s off to Britain for a whistle-stop tour promoting Waiting For The Healer. The opinions of reviewers and the lit. crit. mob hold no fear for Eamonn Sweeney, however. He is secure in the knowledge that the novel has already been granted the imprimatur of the critic he regards as the most distinguished and perceptive. His grandmother.
Granny liked it, Sweeney revels. She said, There s lot of bad language but I suppose he knows what sells . n
Waiting For The Healer is published by Picador, at #14.99