Through the pain barrier

“I is another,” the boy Rimbaud said. And when 34-year-old Ballybrack-born writer Suzanne Power began her first novel The Lost Souls’ Reunion, the voice she found herself using – that of the central character Sive Moriarty – was significantly more weathered and withered than her own.

“I was sick when I wrote it, bedridden,” she explains. “I have ME, but thankfully I’m in the recovery stages now. That was the voice that I found when I was sick, that’s just the way I think. There’s a line in the book about a ‘dark woman on the edge of life’, that’s what I feel like I am, I don’t feel like I belong in the centre of anything. And I’ve two kids, eight months old, awake all night and all day so I now suffer from normal fatigue syndrome. But that’s OK.”

Power describes writing as “total freedom. When you’re in that (state), you’re doing exactly what you were supposed to do, with no interference. You can spew without destroying yourself. You look at me and you’d say, ‘Ah that’s a lovely girl’, as in Father Ted: ‘She could be in the Lovely Girl competition,’ and then you read the book and you think, ‘Jaysus!’ Nobody is as they seem. I think that books are the last place of the individual. Music has been invaded by uniformity. Books are the only place where uniformity does not work: real books that you want to stay with you for the rest of your life recognise individualism.”

One of the motifs Powers uses throughout The Lost Souls’ Reunion is that of Tarot cards, and while she professes a fascination with mysticism and lights up at the mention of the Gnostic gospels of Saint Thomas, she distances herself from the “velvet wearing, dingly-dangly stuff”. Rather, her writing presents Irish culture as if through the eyes of some future foreign anthropologist, and its use of elemental imagery has less in common with New Age airy-fairyism than New Zealander Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.

“One of my favourite books,” she confirms. “And one of my favourite films of all time is The Piano. When he (Baines) is seducing Ada, the cumbersome fingers he has, he speaks to her in the same way, it’s simple, honed down, there’s no expression in it. He says, ‘Two keys, and I’ll see your ankles.’ It’s communicating on the basest level, without it being base. It’s unadulterated emotion.”

Which, it goes without saying, is a quality Power strives for in her own work.

“There’s a lot of pain in the book,” she says. “It doesn’t hide from anything, but I don’t believe there’s no redemption in that. I believe if you can experience life at its harshest, there’s something to be gained from that. I’m not belittling Auschwitz survivors who suffer from survivor’s guilt and carry the burden – I’m talking about ordinary everyday harshness that we all experience, the heroism of getting through whatever circumstances are considered normal.”