The Write Stuff

Joseph O’Connor has achieved the kind of literary success most Irish writers can only dream about. His last two novels, Star Of The Sea and Redemption Falls, have not only been best-sellers but have also received widespread literary acclaim. But his success was far from being an overnight one. In fact, the 44-year-old author had written almost a dozen books before, as he puts it himself, his “lotto numbers came up” when Star Of The Sea was selected as a title for the Richard & Judy book club on Channel 4. The exposure brought O’Connor’s work to a much wider audience and propelled his historical novel to the top of the best-seller lists, as it went on to shift over a million copies. Before this big break, O’Connor’s books just weren’t getting the breaks – despite the fact that he was producing highly rated page-turners like The Salesman and Inishowen. At one stage, he was probably better known in his home country as being the big brother of Sinéad O’Connor.

But after the disappointing sales of the aforementioned tomes, O’Connor decided to take a calculated gamble. He opted to write Star Of The Sea as the final installment of his three-book deal with Random House, simply because he felt he mightn’t get the opportunity again.
“I wrote Star Of The Sea because I thought no publisher would allow me to write it,” he admits. “I’d been signed to Random on the basis that my early books had been funny, short, contemporary books about young people in London. I think that was the deal. That’s what they wanted. But the books became progressively darker, and then finally I have this 450-page novel about the Irish famine and there’s no jokes and people die at the end of every chapter. I thought the reviews would be good. I thought that it would sell okay, but it certainly wouldn’t be a best-seller. It was a nice thing to have a huge best-seller – selling 30 or 40,000 copies a week at one point. I’ve had novels that wouldn’t have sold that throughout their entire life.”
O’Connor says he learned a valuable lesson: always try to write the book you want to write. “You should never dream of writing down to the audience,” he declares. “Never try to write a best-seller because it’s not going to work – and the readers can sniff that out. They know when they’re being patronised. But if you discover the book you want to read yourself, and if you write that, and if you give it your best shot, the book will find an audience. People will go on the journey with you. That was a good lesson because I had tried to write very self-conscious, commercial books before and they hadn’t really worked. So now I just do what I want to do.”
O’Connor has followed through on this vow with his latest opus, Redemption Falls, a sequel to Star Of The Sea, but even more ambitious in its composition. He describes it as “effectively being a scrapbook” of different voices – with one sequence even being told entirely in Irish and American ballads. It has cemented his reputation as one of the most exciting voices not just in Irish but international literature.

JASON O’TOOLE: Star Of The Sea was a phenomenal success. Do you think a large part of this can be attributed to the sheer good luck of being selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club?
JOSEPH O’CONNOR: There’s no doubt about it – it was when the Lotto numbers came up. Star Of The Sea ended up having this life that I’d never imagined for it. It was the first year of the Richard & Judy Book Club and my book was very early on – mine was the second or third – and there was a lot of media interest in whether the book club would have the kind of Oprah effect. I wasn’t convinced that Star Of The Sea would be the type of book that would do well in Britain, but it ended up selling a million copies. I think it was the third highest selling novel of the year, which was the same year as The Da Vinci Code. It just went totally mad. Everybody in Britain seemed to read it. I remember my father-in-law – a lovely man who died last year – telling me that he was driving along through Slough in the south of England and his car broke down. He went into the garage and the guy in greasy overalls came out with this oily, thumbed copy of Star Of The Sea. So, mechanics in Slough were reading it! So, yeah, it had a lot of luck.
Was it a having to pinch yourself type of thing?
Yeah, it was. Bob Geldof was one of the reviewers (on Richard & Judy). He raved about it. If I’d known when I was 16 that Geldof would ever be aware of my fucking miserable, pimply existence – never mind be recommending a book of mine – that would have been enough! So, it was great fun. There was a kind of sweetness about that time. Our second child was born around those months and it was just a lovely, warm, glowing, happy time. You’ve got to enjoy all that and then the day comes when you switch on your computer and start again.
Your latest book Redemption Falls is far more experimental in terms of structure, which could easily have been a commercial risk.
I was conscious that it’s a book that takes a risk. It would have been easier to do Star Of The Sea Returns (laughs). I always try to go forward or to do something new. And also the subject matter dictated that – it’s a book set at the end of a war; it’s a very confused America; it’s very divided; the president is very unpopular – a bit like the world we live in now. I tried to come up with a structure that would do justice to the world of the book, but also that would be playful. I knew it would be another big, long book, and I have a horror, as a reader, of 400-page books narrated by one voice. You need variety and texture and juice. I tried to construct the book in that way. I had an image of the readers in a circle around the action – rather than in a theatre or a church waiting for troops to come down from up high – and as the circle revolves, you see the action again from different points of view. Or like a piece of music – that it has different movements and some chapters are told in a minor key. There’s a lot of music in the book, as you know. I had to trust the reader to do it in that way. It’s a big, noisy, jangling, rattlebag of a book. You take your chances doing that. I’m very pleased that the book has had any sort of life because it’s a very challenging book.
Obviously, a lot of research goes into writing these historical books?
Yeah, but there’s always a lot of research – if you write something contemporary it has to be researched.
But isn’t it easier to write a contemporary novel?
People love you to get the facts right. I had a book come out a few years ago called Inishowen, which is largely set in the Inishowen peninsula and I had a scene where the two characters are walking down the streets of the town – it might be Green Castle – and they pass by the church and turn left and come to O’Donoghue’s pub. This woman wrote to me: “I used to really like your books! I was so thrilled reading Inishowen, but halfway through it I came to this scene and everybody knows if you walk down that street and turn left you don’t come to O’Donohue’s, you come to Murphy’s! And it completely destroyed my faith in the book. I had believed everything in the book up until then and the whole book fell to bits.” So, people like you to get the background right.
Did you have any such nightmare scenarios with your recent historical books?
I had one at the beginning of Star Of The Sea where a character named Pius Mulvey is on the deck of the ship and it’s leaving Ireland for the last time. It’s a very, very sad scene. And just to kind of sophisticate the scene a bit I wanted to give him one pleasant, bittersweet memory of Ireland. So, I decided that when Pius was a little lad going to school in Connemara, the headmaster taught them a little device to remember the sequence of the planets from the sun. He’s on the ship, looking up at the stars and he remembers this thing, which was: “Mary’s Violet Eyes Make Joe Sit Up Nights Praying.” And the initial letters of each is the initial letter of a planet. So, the book comes out and a guy writes to me from the Irish Astrological Society, saying, “We have a problem here. P in ‘praying’ is for Pluto – and Pluto wasn’t discovered until 1920!” I took out ‘praying’ when it was reprinted. The same guy writes again – very cruelly, not having told me the first time – that ‘nights’ is for Neptune but it was only discovered in 1847 – the year in which the book is set! So, you have this poor, illiterate guy going to America – is he reading the fucking scientific journals?! It seemed every time the book was reprinted that the solar system was getting smaller.
You have two sisters. One is a painter and the other is a famous singer. Where does all this creativity come from?
My parents got us interested in art and culture, but not in any kind of pushy way. My dad, who was from Francis Street in Dublin – from a big family with not much money to spare – left school at the age of 13 and was working to support his family. But I think he got from them, as my mother got from hers, some notion that to be an authentic person, to be a whole person, that you should have some interest in the arts. You know, you should be able to sing a song; you should have read a poem by Yeats. When they married it was important to them – because they had little formal education – just to open the doors of that world to us. They would feel kind of sorry for people who had no music at all in them, or had no love of poetry. They would take us to the theatre the odd time; there were books in the house. I can remember books by James Joyce; that great novel Strumpet City; John McGahern and Lee Dunne’s books being around as well.
The latter authors would have had some of their books banned in Ireland when you were growing up.
My parents liked banned books. They’d inherited the notion from somewhere that a banned book was worth reading and books shouldn’t be banned. I can remember them saying they admired McGahern because he had suffered because of his work – he’d lost his job and so on. So, there was some kind of pleasurable notion that literature was worth banning, so therefore worth reading, you know? I owe my parents a lot. I owe them that much anyway and I’m very grateful for it. So, books would be just lying around the house and I think they felt that it was as important as doing your geography or mathematics homework. I think it’s an Irish thing too. I now have conversations with English or American friends who talk about the horror story of the day they went home and told mum and dad they wanted to be a novelist – and the fucking smelling salts had to be called for and the vicar had to come round! There wasn’t that in my family. They thought that’s a good way to want to spend your time. Give it a go, you know?
How did your parents’ break-up affect you?
It was kind of a turbulent home – my parents’ marriage wasn’t happy and it ended when I was 13 – and I think for a teenager who’s bookish or into music or interested in the arts, the world of the imagination becomes a kind of safe place, a retreat. All kids have this to some extent or another. I can see in my own eldest son now, who’s about to turn eight, that for him the world of Harry Potter and the world of story is very real. I feel that’s what happened to me. I just never came out of the other side of it. I loved reading and I was one of those kids who’d read anything. I can remember having a go at a story when I was about 17, after my first girlfriend – a wonderful person called Sarah Maher – gave me a copy of a novel that her father loved, which was Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye. That was a book that I can remember thinking, “I’d love to do that. It’s not enough just to read.” I remember after finishing it having a little go at short stories and daring to hope that you might one day be able to do that. That’s the book that made me want to write. I still love the book and I still read it every three or four years. In fact, the older I get the more I love it in a way.
Why did it have such an impact on you?
When you’re young you are so taken by that central character – he’s so fucking cheeky. The opening paragraph in the book, which I’ll paraphrase: “I suppose you want to know who I am and where my parents are from and all that Charles Dickens crap.” At that age, the only novels you’re reading in school are the Charles Dickens crap. But here’s this snotty nosed little fucker coming along and demolishing the 200-year long tradition of the English novel with the opening paragraph of the book. You are absolutely hooked. It’s so funny, but when you’re older you see the darkness of the book. Every book I’ve written has been an attempt to do something as pure and as effective as Catcher In The Rye.
Charles Dickens gets a mention in Redemption Falls, which most readers would presume is a kind of homage to the author?
I have a love/hate relationship with Dickens. I've always hoped that when I die, Dickens will be there in heaven so I can embrace him and then headbutt him! He’s such a fantastic writer, but he believed in the story at the expense of the characters. He’s the greatest storyteller – ever. People who don’t read at all know who Dickens’ characters are. We know who Scrooge, Fagan and Oliver Twist are. The great flaw in Dickens is there isn’t a psychologically real character in his entire body of work. He illustrates the classic problem of the storyteller, which is the more weight you give to the story, the less complexity you can give to the characters. As a way of illustrating it, if you think about Oliver Twist: here is this child who’s born in a workhouse and has the classic abusive childhood. He runs off to London where he’s fostered by prostitutes and thieves. He has this awful life and is turned into a burglar and all the way through the book he never swears or blasphemes or has an ungallant thought. And he talks like a little member of the British Royal Family and you’re wondering, “How can this be? How could this incredibly damaged child be like Little Lord Fauntleroy?” You realise the reason for this at the end of the book when it’s revealed that Oliver is secretly the child of an aristocrat – and Dickens just can’t bear that a child of an aristocrat would talk like the fucking plebs talk. The book embodies the very snobbery that it’s constantly railing against.
You went to UCD. Did you start taking writing more seriously then?
In a way I did, yes. I didn’t have any sort of realistic hopes of writing fiction because nobody ever believes me when I say this, but there wasn’t any notion in Ireland during the early 1980s that you could be a novelist as your profession. There weren’t any novelists. Neil Jordan had become a filmmaker. There were very few other people around. There weren’t readings or festivals of literature like there are now in every little town in Ireland. There really was no notion of even Ireland’s literary past being anything other than the face of Yeats on a bank note. So, I became interested in journalism because I liked writing and I wanted to make a living that in some way involved writing. So, in the summer holidays when my mates where going off to Germany to earn big money in the car factories, most summers I had a job with the magazines or newspapers in Dublin.
What was your first big break?
With my first summer job, I wrote to every single publication in the country – including the trades like Shoemaker’s Weekly – and nobody wrote back except Vincent Browne, who had just taken over running the Sunday Tribune. He said come in and have a chat. I wrote a piece of about 1000 words defaming and libeling President Hillary, saying that he wasn’t any good and that was very much the Magill style – holding politicians to account. I thought Vincent would love this. So, I get this irate phone call from Vincent: “Come in here and discuss this fucking piece!” So, I go in and he goes, “What makes you think anybody gives a fuck about your opinions? Nobody gives a shit about you. If it was Conor Cruise O’Brien, they might. But this is just absolutely fucking useless. Now go and rewrite it and take all the opinions out and just give me the facts.” I did that and the following Sunday morning he rang me up to say the piece was in the paper. He had harassed me and then encouraged me (laughs).
Did you feel overshadowed by having a sister with such a huge international profile while you were trying to make your own name in the writing world? Or did her success in any way help you?
It was probably both, to be honest. It could sometimes be a pain being asked about Sinéad all the time. But it probably helped in other ways. It’s just the way the media works – the way Irish people work generally, anyway. I mean, if I was to ask somebody about you – who you are – and it would be, “He’s the brother of that guy or he’s married to that woman.” You know, we make connections. So, it probably evens itself out. I understood it because I had worked in the media myself. And I wouldn’t blame them being curious because it’s a strange thing, you know? But I never said that much about it in public.
Growing up, did you know Sinéad would be such a success?
Yeah, when there’s somebody like that in the family you realise that’s a very special person. This isn’t somebody who wants to be a pop star – this is somebody who wants to sing. And if it all ended tomorrow she’d be back singing again in The Purty Kitchen. Sinéad always sang. I can remember going to see Sinéad singing in the pubs in Dun Laoghaire to 20 people. I think what’s great about Sinéad is that on some level that’s the same to her as singing in a stadium to 20,000 people. She’s a musician first. She was an artist first and she’s one of those people who needs to sing. She needs to express herself that way. I don’t think success is genuinely important to her. If nobody ever bought another record she’d keep going. People like that are rare.
Staying on the theme of music, what type of stuff do you like yourself?
I can’t imagine a day without music. I like Stephin Merritt’s band a lot, The 6ths. They had a very unpronounceable album title, Hyacinths And Thistles. I like Duke Spirit, Morrissey, Dylan, Marc Bolan, Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon and Nick Cave, to mention a few names. I’m thinking of writing something about Rory Gallagher, so I’ve been listening to a lot of him. I like a pretty wide variety. I like music with a bit of dirt under its fingernails. I love great pop music too. I think Girls Aloud are the best band since The Monkees!
Music has played its part in Star Of The Sea and Redemption Falls. Will music play a significant role in the third part of the trilogy?
The last two books are so kind of operatic and symphonic that I thought rather than finish with a really explosive third one that it should be a little coda, like an Irish ballad – a Connemara ballad. That’s actually the way to finish. So, that’s what I’m working on now. The third book is going to be very different; extremely short and very chronological; very pure; narrated by one voice. And it’s loosely based on a real life story about the great Irish playwright, Synge. In the last few years of his life, Synge had a very passionate, tempestuous but secret love affair with a much younger woman who was an actress at the Abbey. They went to extraordinary lengths to keep their love affair secret.
Which of your books are you most satisfied with and do you actually dislike any of them?
I worked really hard on my last two books. I put everything I had into them. There’s a drop of my blood in Star Of The Sea and Redemption Falls. They’re the books I’d like to be around in a few years. I don’t dislike any of my books, although I have to say that some of them I love in the same way we have to love our children. When I read Cowboys And Indians now, which I did recently because somebody was interested in making a film of it, I did slightly want to read parts of it through the grid of my fingers, just thinking, “Oh, fuck!” It’s so much the work of a young writer and it has an innocence and a charm. I don’t think it’s a great book but I have an affection for it. On the other hand, it is the book of a 27-year-old person. It’s absolutely not the way I would write it now. It’s so fucking lurid and full of this funny desire to tell everybody: “I’ve had sex!” You’re kind of secretly hoping that your granny might read it and that your girlfriend who dumped you might read it. The whole purpose of the book is to say, “Look! Fuck you all!”
How do you put your books together?
They start usually from an image or an idea of a person. With Star Of The Sea I was trying to write a much more modern book – a cop thriller set in Celtic Tiger Dublin – and I would find late at night, when I was taking a rest from that book, that I had this image that just came into my head of this man walking up and down the decks of a 19th Century ship. It often happens when you’re beginning a novel that you get ideas for other books, because your mind is very open and your imagination is crawling around in the depths. But I found as time went on, this fella in my head just wouldn’t go away. I started scribbling down ideas about him and pictures of him, trying to see if I could get him more clearly. After I had 20 or 30 pages of that I stopped, as I usually do when I have the beginning, and I then try to think of my way all the way down to the end of the story. I think my way down to the destination and then I build a kind of architecture for it. With Star Of The Sea and Redemption Falls, which are both quite complicated books, it took a long time to do that and to find a shape that would allow all of the voices and all of the music and textures to come in.
How do you approach the actual writing itself?
The moment I have a plan, I’ll write it fairly quickly. Both of those books were written in very intense bursts of nine months. I work every day. I work office hours. Before I had kids, I worked whenever I felt like it and I would think nothing of sitting up all night writing if I wanted to, but when you have kids your life changes and so I’ve had to adjust to office hours. Civil Service office hours! Kind of 10am to 4pm! And there’s flexi-time. Essentially, by nature I’m a very lazy person, so the only way I can get anything done is to work all the time. If I genuinely only wrote when inspiration struck me, I think I’d write about twice a year and I’d spend the rest of the time in bed with a bottle of gin! It has to become a habit.
What advice would you give novice writers?
If you want to write you should just write! That’s the most important thing. Don’t worry so much about going to writers’ courses and workshops and all of that wonderful stuff that you can these days. Sometimes it’s the modern equivalent of sitting in McDaid’s in the 1950s talking about the novel you would be writing if you weren’t sitting in a pub, you know? You’ve got to make writing a part of your life. Writing is very demanding. It’s far more like being married than it is like falling in love. There will be good days and bad days. And there will be moments when you’re fucking sick of the sight of writing, but you have to make a long-term commitment and hope it’ll be worth it over that extended period. Everybody has got a regular time that they can write – like for most of us, it isn’t full-time; everybody has got two hours on a Saturday afternoon or four hours on a Sunday morning. You’ve got to make that time and say to your loved ones, “Don’t come near me when I’m doing that. The door is closed and that’s the time that I write.” And you have to do it. Whether you’ve won the Booker Prize or are just starting out, the hardest thing is facing the blank page, and having the balls to face it and see what comes out.