Tumbling Dice

When Billy Roche first began work on his debut novel back in the early 1980s, he didn’t have a whole lot of career options. The Roach Band had folded, the singer had a young family to support, and although he still played solo shows and gave guitar lessons, he knew his days as a working musician were over. All he had to turn to was the blank page.

“I suppose I started writing out of frustration, really,” he says over coffee in the Riverside Park Hotel in Enniscorthy, a couple of hours before he gives an effortless and assured reading in the town’s public library. “From 17 to 29 I’d invested every day of my life into music, and suddenly I had to admit it was over. My destiny would have been factories or building sites or barman. I feared for my life: ‘What the hell do I do now?’ So much time invested into the arts, I’d left myself wide open, with nowhere to go.”
So what happened?
“Eventually I woke up one morning and I was in love with writing,” he recalls. “In my head, in my soul, I was a writer. And it was a beautiful feeling to have this other dream, because I had no other skills. From about 1980 to 1986 I wrote Tumbling Down and A Handful Of Stars. Nearly seven years. It was tough. At one stage, about three and a half years into it, I said to myself, ‘How long can I hold out?’ And my little alter ego said, ‘As long as it takes.’ My missus gave up the ghost and went out to work, which was a brilliant thing, because first I didn’t like it, minding kids and making the dinner and all that jazz, but I got to love it. It rooted me and gave me a regime: I would write until five, make the dinner, light the fire when the kids came in, and then maybe go back and do more.”
Those hours of labour eventually yielded Tumbling Down, a smalltown bildungsroman peppered with salty dialogue (gleaned from Roche’s shifts in his father’s bar), vivid characters, and above all, a magical sense of place comparable to Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.
“You’re the second person that said that this week, actually,” Roche acknowledges, “and I think this (revised) one is even more so, it’s more skilful. But yeah, Under Milk Wood, Ulysses… Dubliners in particular has resonance there. In the beginning you’re wrestling with all these influences. Lines like ‘rainy days, November nights’ and ‘the accordian abandoned on the soft seat’, that’s Kerouac. It’s interesting that Eoin Colfer said the speech was so Wexford, and it’s lovely that he said that, but it was Kerouac I was thinking of.
“Is it in Big Sur where he wakes up and ‘Kathleen’ is being played on the chimes in the belfry? So beautiful and sad. I grew up in the bar with the sailors who read. They didn’t read Kerouac now, but they read The Ginger Man, they read Borstal Boy, they read horny books and (Kyle Onstott’s) Mandingo. Nobody ever bought a book; they used to pass them around to one another. They were at sea and had days and weeks to kill.”
Port towns, sad bars, sailors on shore leave – pure Tom Waits territory.
“I suppose it is. You’re talking about fellas mumbling about whorehouses in Amsterdam. Sometimes we used to dream if we could be like them. Putting your cigarettes and money on the table: ‘Just help yourself; tell me when it’s gone.’ Rothmans, Benson & Hedges. Sleeves rolled up. Sailors were spotless clean and almost soldier-like in their precision, ’cos obviously they lived in little cabins. Everything was pristine. Very few fights in the bar, only when a messer came in and didn’t understand the rules. So I grew up in that men’s world. Now, I actually can’t remember hearing one interesting thing in all the fuckin’ years I was in there! Looking back on it, it was all small talk, secrets divulged. But as a playwright I suppose I learned what men don’t say. It doesn’t mean they weren’t feeling these things or life wasn’t hurting them.”
Despite the high esteem in which his work is held by fellow writers, there still lingers the sense that Billy Roche’s canon of work is secret treasure. The publishing industry has never quite figured out how to market his books, and literary critics thoughtlessly omit him from pat lists of Irish luminaries. The new republished and revised hardback edition of Tumbling Down, which follows his haunting and melancholic 2006 short story collection Tales From Rainwater Pond, should go a long way towards redressing this state of affairs.
“That is a problem,” he concedes. “I can’t remember who said it, but one of my golden rules is, ‘Only that which is glimsed sideways sinks deep.’ And there’s no one glimpsing sideways anymore, everything is told bang- bang-bang right in the middle of the forehead, so subsequently I think the world is full of people in control who know that’s what makes money. ‘Tell them, don’t show them, keep telling them until they get it.’ That’s just so unsubtle.
“It’s interesting, every publisher that read the short stories, the agent that read them, ‘melancholy’ was a bad word. And I’d say, ‘What about Turn of the Screw, what about Billy Budd,> what about Dubliners, Madame Bovary? Everything we love that went on to live forever is melancholy. There are happy people in the world, and I wish them all the best, but do we want to write about them?! All you can hope for is you get to people who understand it and love it, and that’s good enough for me. If I were to get through life and write ten things I could be proud of and make a living as I go, that would be a nice journey.”