The Double Life Of Neil Jordan

It’s all about the story. On a blustery Brontë-esque afternoon in his home in Dalkey, Neil Jordan, whose fifth novel Mistaken has just been published to reviews that read more like love letters, insists there is little disjunction between his work as a novelist and filmmaker.

“People never understand that,” he says. “It’s hard to explain, but I find them remarkably similar. Journalists say to me, ‘Well it’s a totally different world: if you’re making a film you’re surrounded by all these people...’ Actually it’s not like that. To make sense of a movie you have to listen to some kind of inner clarity, an area of silence in a way, but you can be that way amongst other people.”
Whenever the literati reel off their honour roll of Irish novelists – Banville, McGahern et al – Jordan the prose stylist often gets overlooked (his debut book of short stories Night In Tunisia was published a full six years before the release of his first film Angel). Mistaken should redress the balance.
“I haven’t paid attention to that stuff as much as I should have,” he admits. “I’ve been making films and traveling, I haven’t been going to literary festivals. It’s become a job now, being an Irish writer is like a career option. It’s a great thing in a way, because you used to be condemned to a sense of magnificent failure or isolation. The people that make careers out of writing here are absolutely justified in doing so, and they should do so. It’s just because I make movies people think what I write is a personal hobby, or something I used to do, but I’ve always done it.”
All Irish writers seemed compelled to struggle with history, even those who claim to ignore it. What’s interesting about Mistaken – the strange and haunting story of Marino-born Kevin Thunder and his spiritual and physical double Gerald Spain, told over four decades – is it depicts the present day in washed out sepia while painting 1960s Dublin in carnivalesque colours.
“I was just trying to remember what it actually was like,” Jordan explains. “John McGahern taught me for example, and he’s written wonderful novels, but I don’t live in that world, I don’t remember this rigid, grey, repressed world. I was thinking, ‘Maybe I’m just remembering things the way I wanted them to be’, so I had to go on the internet and check out what clubs I used to go to to hear the kind of music you could never hear on the radio at the time, early R&B stuff that was coming from England. You had to go to places like Abbey Street, attempts at coffee houses and clubs. I wasn’t trying to exclude priests and all that stuff from it, it was more a case of trying to be accurate about my own experience. But it’s an odd thing – the country’s been blessed with one of the most architecturally beautiful capital cities in the world, but there’s a melancholy air to it, it’s definitely haunting.”
Dracula author Bram Stoker is a sinister presence in the new book: Jordan admits that, 90 years after Nosferatu, he’s still intrigued by the vampire as a mythic archetype.
“I could have written a whole novel about a kid who’s followed around by a vampire who turns out to be a paedophile,” he says. “But it’s more to do with the fact that the first vampire movie I ever saw was in a scout’s hall, like in the book. It must have been one of the Bela Lugosi ones. The bat was tapping at Lucy’s window and then suddenly this caped man was inside. I remember the humming of the batwings – I think it scared me for two or three solid years, just that sound. Terrifying. Bram Stoker of course lived in the Crescent in Marino, there was a little semi-circle of decaying houses, the paint was peeling, and we used to have to cycle past it to go to the Fairview cinema.
“So I began to research Bram Stoker, this strange middle class Dublin Protestant, part of the Trinity rowing team, and there’s this cataclysmic event in the middle of his life when he hears Henry Irving talking and follows him to London like a slave and writes this extraordinary book. But it’s not so much the book as the creation. He came up with all the rules: the garb, the stake in the heart. That book never dies. Even Francis Coppola’s version I thought was marvellous, it was kind of staggeringly rococo.”
Mistaken is also driven by the kind of doppelgänger device that was a stock feature of 19th century decadent literature and German Expressionist cinema. Jordan’s prose however, integrates the supernatural and the hyper-real.
“I didn’t really want to write another spin on (Poe’s) ‘William Wilson’ or (Dostoevsky’s) The Double, but I think it’s a common feeling that if you change a few things in your life, your whole experience would have been different,” he says. “And not even pivotal decisions: if just you took another bus one day, everything would have been different, and there is another version of you out there that did that. It’s a common, haunting feeling. I began to write this boy who sensed another presence across the city.
Interesting that, as with Ondine, Jordan sometimes writes stories that begin in the realm of the fantastical and then resolve themselves in a very naturalistic way.
“To the stress of some people who wanted a fantasy! (With Ondine) I was very aware that, ‘Okay, at some stage the audience is going to be told this is not true, and they’re going to get so pissed off’. And actually they didn’t. Not many people have pulled a woman out of the sea in a net, although many people have been mistaken for other people. Especially if you go on the TV and you’re kind of well known. ‘You’re that Jim Sheridan guy! I love your work with Daniel Day Lewis!’ I don’t look anything like Jim Sheridan! (laughs).”
Once he’s dispensed with promotional duties for Mistaken, Jordan will return his attentions to the Showtime cable series The Borgias, due to be aired this year, and in-development adaptations of Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies.
“The Borgias happened almost by accident,” he explains. “I was asked if I could turn this screenplay I’d written into a whole series. That was kind of thrilling, inventing all these characters and having people fall in love with people who become nuns, and evil guys loving good people. One of them is a Cardinal and he’s learning he has to murder, he’s learning the depths of cruelty within himself that he never thought were there, but he’s still a member of the church. I designed the title sequence for it too, these rotting old paintings. I never expected to do anything like that. They just wanted to replace The Tudors, which was not very good really. They’ve got very big budgets, about five million dollars an episode, which is what you’d spend on many independent movies. Once they decide to make it, they just sign the cheques. TV has been a very productive zone for so long, I suspect every company’s trying to get in. They’re desperate cos it’s the only medium left to them.”
Asked what attracted him to Paul Murray’s opus, Jordan says simply, “The book itself. I had no idea what it was and I just went into a bookshop and bought it and read it and thought it was one of the best pieces of fiction I’d read in a long, long time. It’s absolutely contemporary and the imaginative world the kids live in was really true but also extraordinary. I sent it round to two people I work with and nobody knew about it. I asked to meet Paul, and Steve Woolley called me back the next day and said, ‘This is great’, so I said, ‘Okay let’s get the rights to it’. It’s become quite a phenomenon that book, hasn’t it? All over the world.”

Mistaken is published by John Murray.