Suburban Homesick Blues

Most authors dream of critical and commercial success – for Justin Quinn that dream is swiftly becoming a reality. His debut novel, Mount Merrion, has been incredibly well-received and is flying out of the bookstores too.

“Oh, I’m delighted!” Quinn exclaims with a laugh. “It’s great to see that somebody else likes it apart from my editor.”
The author already has a significant reputation as a poet and critic – his first collection of poetry was published in 1995 – but he says fiction had never really been one of his ambitions.
“The idea that I would write a novel seemed hilarious,” he admits. “I tried ten or fifteen years ago and I thought the attempt was so ridiculous I didn’t try again. But I’ve always been a huge reader of novels, and then I had this idea – so I gave it a shot.”
Quinn has lived in Prague since 1992 where he works as a lecturer at Charles University. He was initially concerned that not having lived in Ireland for over 20 years would impinge on his ability to write about the Celtic Tiger years.
“That really worried me at the start. I realised I’d have to write about the Ireland of the last twenty years and I hadn’t lived through the boom and the bust or any of that. Then when I looked at it again I thought there might be an advantage to that, to see things from a distance.
“I was also aware that I’d planned to write about the ’50s and ’60s and I hadn’t been there either, so I would have to put it together by a mixture of research and talking to people of my parents’ generation. I worked more or less in the same way for the period of the 1950s and ‘60s as I did for the 2000s.”
The novel follows the fortunes of the Boyle family – and the changing fortunes of the country – over four decades, from 1959 until 2002.
“When I was I growing up, I thought of the ‘50s and ‘60s as a time set in stone. As you get older you realise that there were real people making decisions about their lives. I think the job of the novel was to catch something of that and to bring the reader into the minds of people that they wouldn’t think about generally or would have forgotten about. I wanted to capture the fluidity or malleability of that period – how it was a dead period culturally and economically, but how there were certain cores of change. There were certain people both in terms of economics and culture who were ready to move. So I hooked my man onto one of those currents of change.”
The Boyle family are pillars of society. Declan and his wife Sinéad are from wealthy, privileged backgrounds and privately educated. The choice to write about a middle-class family was not so much a conscious one as inevitable, explains Quinn, who grew up on Mount Merrion Avenue where much of the story is set.
“People talk about writers deciding stuff as though they have a choice. I didn’t have a choice at all. These were people I would have known of my parents’ generation who were around me growing up. It was just a natural movement really. Also in my mind was that I don’t have the qualifications to write about the working-class – I’d be spotted a mile off as a complete fraud.”
They do say you should write about what you know.
“It’s not an autobiographical novel and there’s nothing of the shape of my own life in it,” Quinn is quick to point out. “I fell back on the place I grew up and I tend to bring in stuff that I picked up along the way, like my experiences in post-Communist Europe – the daughter in the family goes to Berlin in the 1990s.”
Against the wishes of his father, a well-known and respected barrister, Declan begins his career as a civil servant, but soon finds that his ambition is being thwarted on all sides by mediocrity, hierarchy and the old boys network.
“That was more or less the cliché of the time and true in many respects. People couldn’t innovate or move stuff – the forces of conservatism were too much for them. But Declan is also inspired to join the civil service by a T.K. Whitaker-like figure who offers a path through this dark murky forest, and yet he gets lost along the way. I think that happens with a lot of people in their careers. They go in with ambitions and it becomes difficult after a while to remember those ambitions and that’s what prompts his jump into the private sector.”
Declan’s success as an entrepreneur and businessman is to some extent dependent on getting his hands dirty with gombeen politicians – the very feature of Irish life his younger, more idealistic self had railed against.
“I suppose what I wanted to do was, by the end of the book, land him in a situation where he can’t explain himself. He began with ambitions and ideals and to a degree he’s kept them and from a different point of view he’s compromised them. At the back of my mind I wanted to end with him facing the country.
“I was fascinated by him as a transition figure in politics. A corrupt political system, as I can see from my experience in post-communist Europe, needs characters like him, who go in with ideals and compromise themselves and sometimes get marked as corrupt. But they can often move the system along. It’s a moral question: have they done good or have they receded back into the mire of corruption? I think that’s a good question for a novelist. It’s one that’s very hard to answer.”

Mount Merrion is out now