Tales from the darkside

Jelly-bellied real ale enthusiasts, lesbian hipsters, OAP kiddie-snatchers, a poet-turned-publican and a terrorist Goth.

Those are just some of the people populating Dark Lies The Island, the latest short story collection by Limerick-born, Sligo-domiciled author Kevin Barry who hit the headlines recently when he won the €36,000 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award with his yarn about the aforementioned beer nuts.
Presenting him with his bank manager-pleasing cheque was Melvyn Bragg who praised Beer Trip To Llandudno for “taking a disregarded and often scorned stratum of male pals and finding wit, pathos and great energy there.”
Those sentiments were echoed by the South Bank Show man’s fellow judge Joanna Trollope who proffered, “We were especially impressed by the tiny details and conversational fragments that make this story so much of now.”
Not surprisingly, Barry’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.
“Yes, all my friends have been calling up saying, ‘Now you’ve got a few bob in your pocket you can get us back for all the pints we bought you when you were broke!’” he laughs.
Would it be fair to say he’s been suffering for his art these past few years?
“Erm, it’s been okay since the first book of stories, There Are Little Kingdoms, came out,” the affable 41-year-old reflects. “I’ve had grants and bursaries from the Film Board and Arts Council and royalties from the books themselves, but you’re certainly not getting rich. You’d be amazed by how little money even famous authors have. I know of household names who are selling in the low thousands – and you’re only getting a quid a book.”
What does a debut need to shift to be deemed successful?
“A couple of thousand is considered okay,” he suggests. “I’ve been very lucky to get the coverage and do five or six thousand here and a few thousand more in the UK.”
Good for a first outing, then?
“Yeah, but it’s getting very tough to keep going. I don’t think you can be a career novelist any more. You have to do other things.”
Those “other things” being?
“Well, my dream job is being one of the 20 writers locked in a room writing Mad Men. I’m more excited by the writing in an American TV show than I would be fiction in novels. It’s a golden age. You can buy a DVD box-set of The Wire or Mad Men or The Sopranos and it’s a masterclass in writing, in structure, in dialogue, in plotting.”
Every single word counts…
“Absolutely! It creates a problem for novelists though. It’s very hard to keep up as a one-man band. They have 20 geniuses getting it together.
“I’ve been involved in a couple of feature-y projects and hopefully one of them might happen. A lot of book writers struggle to collaborate, but I’m not precious.”
Getting to hang out with Melvyn Bragg and all those other literary luvvies at the Sunday Times award ceremony must’ve been a bit surreal?
“Baron Bragg, if you please!” he deadpans. “He’s actually a very nice guy. I’d a feeling with his working-class background – he’s from Carlisle – that he’d like a story about a bunch of beer-guzzling Scousers. The ceremony was held at Corpus Christi College in Oxford with grumpy old dons sitting around drinking sherry. My wife Olivia and I stayed in rooms afterwards, so we got the full Varsity experience!”
What was the trigger for Beer Trip To Llandudno?
“We’d lived in Liverpool for a couple of years – Olivia was working there – and I’d whinged and moaned and grizzled all the while, going, ‘I fucking hate this place!’ Typically with me, as soon as we left, I thought, ‘Oh, that was great!’ I’m always retrospectively happy.
“It’s kind of a love letter to Liverpool, and it’s also about an odd topic that’s very little discussed in literature – male friendship. Male writers tend to recoil in horror from the notion of talking about something as gooey as those friendships. I can usually tell if a short story is working by if the characters are talking to each other.
“What winning the Sunday Times prize has given me – besides lots of positive publicity – is the means to keep a roof over my head while I write my new novel.”
Will it have the same dark, futuristic, parallel universe feel as its City Of Bohane predecessor?
“It’s different, but again it’s a fucking mad thing! It’s a first-person voice, very intense and I’m doing all my language-y stuff again. There’s a draft there and I’m going to do another draft over the summer. I like to knock them out as quickly as possible. Spending three or four years on something is very hard – not just financially, but because you’re a different person at the end than you were at the start and it’s hard to get a consistent view.”
You start forgetting what you wanted to say in the first place.
“Exactly,” he laughs. “I’m from the School of Immersive – 10, 12 weeks maximum.”
City Of Bohane fans – Irvine Welsh, Roddy Doyle, Hanif Kureishi and Joseph O’Connor among them – could if things pan out be going to the cinema next year to see the celluloid version of ... Bohane.
“It’s been optioned by Parallel Productions who did Breakfast On Pluto and Intermission and a fucking awful one the other year with Brendan Gleeson, (Perrier’s Bounty). I was asked if I wanted to write the script and I thought, ‘Maybe not’, but then they started mentioning names to me of people who would write it and I said, ‘No way!’ It’s my baby. I’ve signed to do two drafts, so we’ll see what happens.”
Music obsessive that he is, I imagine Kevin already has ideas about what should be on the soundtrack.
“Completely, yeah,” he nods. “When I was writing … Bohane I was listening to ‘70s dub reggae – King Tubby and stuff like that – on a loop. They turn out to be into their dub in the book as well.”
Bypassing college – “The thing that gets me about those MFAs and masters in writing is that they lead to so few sustainable careers” – the teenage Barry earned his writing spurs in the ‘80s with first the Limerick Tribune and then the rival Limerick Post.
“Journalism is a great training-ground, and it’s the old way,” he reflects. “I covered Limerick District Court where you got to see all forms of human life, you know? I don’t think there’s any college course which prepares you for someone coming up and saying, ‘Write anything bad about my brother/sister/wife/husband in your fucking paper and I’ll kill you!’ Other than that working as a cub reporter on a weekly newspaper was such fun. It’s kind of sad that that world is fading and dying off.”
I seem to recall that the Kevin Barry I met for the first time in the late ‘80s was a complete Morrissey fan boy, right down to the fake hearing-aid in his top pocket.
“I definitely would have had a Smiths look – lots of backcombing going on for a long time. I understand photos have been put on Facebook in the last while. The hearing-aid I strenuously deny – well, you would, wouldn’t you? – but I do remember robbing flowers from the school chapel for The Smiths’ appearance in the Limerick Savoy in 1984. It was early doors when they had their second hit, ‘What Difference Does It Make?’ out. They did a tour of Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway with James as support. Other ones that stick in my mind were an early Pogues show – people were like, ‘Oh god, Shane… he’s got weeks to live!’ – and Johnny Cash with The Carter Cash Family and Kris Kristofferson in the University of Limerick Concert Hall. We were at the gig together, weren’t we?”
We were indeed. Limerick back then struck me as being quite hedonistic. Did Kevin partake in what its less salubrious hangouts had to offer?
“Oh god, absolutely,” he nods enthusiastically. “You can never underestimate the effect that hallucinogens have on your consciousness as a teenager or in your early 20s. Without sounding hippy-dippy, it does change your person.”
Does he regard drugs as a creative tool?
“I think if you stay on the safe side of it. If you’re moderate, which I wasn’t for a long time with hallucinogens. I was never so much an ecstasy person, it was always LSD. I remember going into local newspapers coming down off acid and writing editorials about Shannon Development – ‘If Des O’Malley thinks…’ – as the walls melted.
“It was great fun smoking dope and doing trips in the early ‘90s, but you’d always see a couple of guys on the fringes getting deeper and deeper and very quickly it became serious. There was dirty coke and heroin use and all sorts. Heroin is crawling now in Limerick.”
I can’t for obvious reasons name him, but there was a parish priest who’d send heavies round to abusive husbands, threatening to kneecap them.
“Yeah… it’s a bit of a stretch but sometimes when you watch Baltimore in The Wire and the workings of Limerick, they’re not a million miles apart.”
Well, as Olaf Tyaransen discovered a few weeks ago when he interviewed him, they’ve a mayor, Jim Long, who’s stranger than TV fiction. Journalism in itself can be quite hedonistic, can’t it?
“I think during my time in it, it got less so. I noticed by the late ‘90s freelancing for the Irish Times and the Examiner, you’d meet young journalists and they’d be power-walking in the evening. It really cleaned up. I remember some of the real old-school in the Examiner, they’d have the editorial meeting in the morning and then by half-ten go down to the bar, but they’re a dying breed. I’m convinced at some point I’ll do a small-town newspaper novel.”
Kevin and myself were both at the Limerick Tribune under the editorship of Frank Hamilton who ended up being jailed for seven years for having sex with an underage girl.
“It was a 14 or 15-year-old prostitute, wasn’t it? Dreadfully sad for her and his wife and kids who were understandably devastated.”
A move to London saw Barry temporarily eschewing journalism in favour of… well, I’ll let him explain!
“I was involved in a ring that was recruiting Irish nurses to marry Chinese immigrants,” he confesses. “What was the going rate? About fifteen hundred quid.”
He didn’t volunteer to walk up the aisle and say, “Ngo jyun ji!” – that’s Cantonese for “I do!” – himself?
“No, you had to be a woman to get married to the Chinese. Luckily, I wasn’t very good at it so I didn’t last long in the job!
“It was great in the mid-‘90s ducking and diving and selling tapes in Camden Market, which were just The Essential Mix which we recorded off BBC Radio 1. We’d edit all the BBC bits out and go, ‘Oh, these are just in from New York, four quid a pop!’”
Barry’s not entirely legal London sojourn provides the inspiration for Dark Lies The Island’s story about the aforementioned Goth who flirts with the idea of joining the IRA. A nod, perhaps, towards Kevin being named after an Irish patriot.
“Actually, I’m named after a dead mod! My cousin was Kevin Barry and he came off his scooter in 1968 in East Anglia. I never met him. I was born a year later and named after the poor lad. It wasn’t that we were a strong Republican family with tricolours out the top window!
“But that story, yeah, all the settings are taken from the summer I spent as a 19-year-old living in a squat off the Tottenham Court Road, except add in, ‘What would it have been like if I were an IRA bomber?’ I’m always looking back at the clips of these IRA operatives in London and thinking, ‘Fuck, they’re so young!’ Y’know, like Bobby Sands at 20 and 21. Just kids and awful haircuts – what were they thinking?”
If I’d been 20 or 21 and living on the Bogside when Bloody Sunday went down, I’d have been almightily tempted to join the Provos.
“Yeah, I was very easily lead as a kid myself.”
Was there a lot of anti-Paddy stuff when Kevin was in London?
“Ah, it was so much more evident then than it would be now – just throwaway comments like ‘Mick’ and you not really minding because it was so common. I’m always struck when you look back at the immortal Fawlty Towers, the Mr. O’Reilly episode, it’s like a hate crime!”
Talking of hate crimes, has he been subjected to any critical disembowelments yet?
“There’s been the odd sniffy review here and there, but I’ve quite a hard shell so it doesn’t bother me much. The worst review I had was of a play in Washington and it was slaughtered. It’s fine because it’s a long way away – nobody’s going to see it! But you do meet writers who take a bad review and swallow it down and don’t get over it for 20 years. Kingsley Amis once said once (adopts regal tone): ‘It’s perfectly fine to let a bad review spoil your breakfast but not lunch as well.’ Get over it, move on.”
Does he remember the female writer who committed career suicide a few years ago when she hurled online abuse at somebody who’d dared to criticise the quality of her prose?
“You can’t do that! My style is quite strong. I’m like mackerel! It’s not going to be for everyone. I’ve heard from book clubs that … Bohane tends to be very divisive. For every five readers, two will go, ‘Meh!’ and three will be evangelical. But that’s fine. Better strong reactions than mild ones.”
You can’t live in Limerick and not be aware of/influenced by the internecine gang scene, which tends to overshadow everything that’s good about the city.
“… Bohane comes out of Limerick accents and Cork accents and the way that the English language is beautifully mangled in those places,” he says appreciatively. “If I think about … Bohane geographically, I see a Cork/Galway kind of place. But speech-wise, I hear Limerick straight away. Growing up in a troubled and often very malevolent city is obviously a big influence on you.”
Did he ever get into any scrapes in Limerick?
“Not really. The odd puck in the jaw as a teenager, which would have been very much deserved. Oh, I did get a kick in the face off a rugger-bugger outside Ted’s on O’Connell Street. Again, very much deserved! Limerick was always the kind of city where you knew when to keep your eyes down and when to walk on. I had a very familiar feeling when I lived in Liverpool for a couple of years, a very similar situation in all sorts of ways. There’s a real friendliness but also a mad sentimentality and a darker edge to it. Which tends to be the case with old faded port towns.”
I don’t know if he’ll thank me for the comparison, but The City Of Bohane reminds me a lot in places of A Clockwork Orange.
“Well, as a teenager, that was a kind of bible, really. Weirdly when you go back to it now. I think the film is better than the book.”
Another bi-product of winning the Sunday Times Award is that Kevin’s now getting to share the Ireland AM sofa with Mark ‘n’ Sinéad.
“What’s scary is how easily, almost eerily, I float into breakfast TV banter.”
I do it myself…
“Well, you’re a practiced whore!”
Does he enjoy those sort of promotional chores?
“I’m sociable. When you’re writing fiction, you’re in the house a lot; it’s just the four walls so any chance to get out and yap with other people is great. That’s what I really miss about journalism, just being with people.”
While Irish readers feast on Dark Lies The Island, The City Of Bohane is only now hitting the shelves in the US where the New York Times recently adjudged Kevin to be “full of marvels.” Impressing liberal literary critics is one thing, but is the average American bookworm ready for a contemporary Irish writer who eschews all the Darby O’Gill stereotypes?
“I’m not sure Irish-Americans are, no. That’s probably damning a vast body of people with a dismissive comment but I’ve noticed from doing readings there that they’re not overly keen on urban Ireland. I remember talking to a group of students in the US who were actively dismayed to learn that most of us grew up in ordinary, unromantic suburbs with no pots of gold at the end of the rainbow or maidens dancing at the crossroads. The most dangerous thing is to try and play up to an audience in any way and present an image of something. I don’t think of myself as an ‘Irish’ writer. I don’t sit down at my desk every morning and go, ‘I’m going to do some Irish writing.’”
Is he a Kindle man?
“No, I think they’re missing a trick. The future is on phones because everybody has them. I was really intrigued to read what Brian Eno had to say – he’s a smart guy, he’s rarely wrong. He says that apps are going to swallow the world, that apps are where silent film was in the ‘20s and that ultimately musicians, actors, writers, everyone will have to exist within that.”
Is changing technology for the author or publishers to explore?
“I think it changes the way you write,” he ventures. “It changes the way books and stories are structured. It has to. If the medium’s changing, it’s going to have an effect.
“In the last while I’ve been very resolutely a one-point-zero man in terms of technology. I use email and Google and read the papers online and stop at that. I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on Twitter. I know ‘I’m not on Facebook’ is the new, ‘Actually, I don’t have a television’ but I’m very intrigued by it and interested in how it’s reforming our brains. I think people are struggling to read novels. I struggle myself and I’m supposed to be writing the bloody things! Weirdly though, we’ve created a moment for the short story because people are keen to read, but don’t have the appetite for a 500-pager.
“I was talking to Julian Gough about this,” he continues. “He was saying that one of the things it’s done, in terms of literature, is break the classics. It’s very hard to go and read Madam Bovary now.”
Their styles may be different, but Barry and Gough are definitely plowing the same maverick furrow.
“I think Julian’s a great talent who’ll do something major over the next while, whether it’s in books or films or a stage play. I’d love to see some really good Irish telly and film things happening. It’s a bit cruel to say, but because there’s so little money going around the Irish movie industry, the people who stay involved tend to be of ‘independent’ means, as in they’re all south county Dublin.”
A lot of Irish films get made, but precious few are seen outside of the art house circuit.
“You get to make something after years of trying and then it gets shown at some film festival in Bulgaria,” he rues. “You get a bronze medal and it might get screened in the IFI for a night or two. Should you bother? I hate to be turning my back in any way on the country but if I have an ambition in terms of film scripts, I’m probably better off in the UK. It’s bigger and you can conceivably get more made.”
Barry did manage to extract €80,000 from the Irish Film Board though.
“Yeah, it was for a ten-minute film called the The Ballad Of Kid Kanturk. It’s a cannibal, rockabilly epic set in West Mayo, Wicklow and Dublin – as so many cannibal, rockabilly epics are! John Butler directed it. We got a couple of prizes in Italy, ‘Best Horror Short’ or something.
“You know what?” he concludes. “It’s all about plugging away, having fun with your work and seeing what comes out of it. I don’t care about being famous, but I do want people to read and watch the stuff I do.”
I don’t think Kevin’s got any fears on that front.