Verbal Magazine

Ghost Writer

It’s hard to think of a more poignant setting to interview Joseph O’ Connor tonight than the Southbank Centre in Waterloo.

In a small room that looks out at the London Eye, and with the chimes of Big Ben echoing along the banks of the Thames, O’Connor looks happy to return to a city he knows only too well.

Having spent much of the 90s as a freelance journalist, O’ Connor was better known for more tongue in cheek social commentary books such as The Secret World of the Irish Male, and his humorous articles in The Sunday Tribune than for outstanding works of literature. All that changed in 2003 with the success of Star of the Sea, which sold a staggering one million copies, making him an international best selling author overnight. The success of Star of the Sea he says coincided with becoming a father.
“I think the sea change in my books came around ten years ago when my first son was born, a funny thing happened to me when I became a parent: among all the joy, the happiness and so on, you suddenly realise that there is a rhythm to life, and that your own life will end some day, and I’m totally cool with that, its fine. But if you’re a writer, what flows from this is that you realise you can’t write books forever, so you say to yourself maybe I’ll give a 101 per cent to this next book, like if I’m lucky, if I live to be an old man and I might have ten more novels. So I think when I wrote Star of the Sea, I put almost a drop of my blood into it, I worked hard on every single sentence, and that came from my own personal life I suppose.”

His latest novel, Ghost Light, is his third historical novel in seven years, in what he says is not exactly a trilogy, but three books that bare some sort of distant relation.
“The books aren’t a trilogy in a sense that the characters don’t appear in more than one book, but like, Redemption Falls, which is the second book, the central character in that is maybe the daughter of someone in Star of the Sea. There is a woman who appears at the very end of Ghost Light, a very young woman, who is a theatrical dresser, she maybe, for example someone who appears in Redemption Falls. But the three books are completely independent of each other, it’s only if you have read them all you might see these little similarities, but they’re not a series as such.”

The central character in Ghost Light is Molly Allgood, a young actor from Dublin who supposedly had a passionate affair with famous playwright, John Synge. Although O’ Connor did a fair amount of research for this book, it is a work of fiction, and should not he says be taken for anything other than that.
The book reads as a stream of consciousness internal monologue from Molly, who lives in London in the 1950s and remembers back to 1907 when she had an affair with Synge in Dublin. Initially the book was going to be about Synge, but as O’ Connor got deep into writing the novel, he decided to do a U-turn on the narrative.

“I suppose the book is an attempt to put down in language what the inside of this woman’s head is like. I had two previous goes at it, one was a sort of very straight third person narrative, the second was in the first person, where Synge was telling the story, and I found with both of them attempts, they were fine, but that whenever there was a scene where Molly was there, a sort of electricity seemed to go through the book , so I just thought I’ll try it as a book that isn’t about Synge, but about Molly, and as soon as I tried this method, her voice came out. I think the voice for her is a mixture of the absurd; funny; tragic; logical, and serious.”

As someone who’s married to a Londoner, and having lived there for seven years in the late eighties and early nineties, O’ Connor feels the relationship between Ireland and England, historically, has been cloaked in propaganda, particularity by the Irish government.

“I think the relationship between Ireland and England is more complex than we think. There are hundreds of thousands of Irish living in Britain, and all through the 20th century, through the history of Independent Ireland we’ve been fed this fantastic lie by our Government that we’re a Gaelic speaking, nationalist, catholic place. The reality is that hundreds of thousands of us keep coming over here to the home of the old enemy to work, and there is a bitter irony in that, but at the same time I think it’s enhanced a lot of lives. Despite the political problems and propaganda from both governments over the years, the truth is that the Irish and English get on better than any two other nations on the planet. We’re very similar as people.”
When writing Ghost Light, O’ Connor says he wanted to write about a London that many Irish immigrants, including himself have experienced.
“I suppose I wanted to make Molly’s relationship with London the same as it is for a lot of Irish immigrants, which is that there are things that drive them absolutely fucking crazy about London, and things that they love about the place. There is a kind of freedom in London that there isn’t anywhere in Ireland, you’re in this new world with anonymity, and for all if its unfriendliness, which there can be, there is also that freedom. Even Molly says herself in the novel: ‘that all immigrants love London’.”

Although writing has been O’ Connor’s profession for the best part of two decades, he does it first and foremost because he says quite simply: it makes him feel good.
“The main reason I write is that it makes me feel better, I have some reason to do it, I feel if it wasn’t my profession I would do it anyway. I don’t know if it’s quite as much as catharsis, but if I have a day where I don’t write anything, I just feel a bit jumpy, like the way I do when I try to give up smoking. I like the process of writing, figuring out what I have to say, what sentence should come next and so on.”

O’ Connor over the last two years has had enormous success with his five minute podcasts for RTE’s evening news programme, Drivetime. Working in radio he says is something which allows him to enter into people’s lives in a way that even his writing doesn’t allow him to.

“I think when you speak on the radio, you’re aware that you become part of people’s lives in a way that you cannot do to the same extent if you write for a newspaper or magazine. You reach people intimately with your voice in the strangest situations, the radio is on in people’s cars; it’s on in the doctor’s surgery; it’s on in the supermarket; in the kitchen when the dinner is being made and so on. You just have a huge reach, where you a part of thousands of people’s lives for five minutes, it’s a wonderful medium.”

With the recent success of his peers in the literature world such as Colm Toibin, Colm Mc Cann and Joseph O’ Neill, O Connor says we are in a golden period of Irish literature.

“I think the confidence in Irish writing now is a real confidence. Because in some ways when I was starting out in the late nineteen eighties, there were too many Irish novels, Ireland was becoming hip at the time. There was a sense in publishing at the time, that anyone that could string a sentence together who was Irish could publish a novel. I think among younger writers, it’s the best generation ever. I’m currently editing the Faber book of Irish short stories which is coming out next year, and it’s fucking frightening how good young writers in Ireland are. These guys are so much better that I was when I started out, and they have clearly read so much more than I did, and are dedicated and smart, so it’s an exciting time for Irish literature certainly.”

In Ghost Light, O’ Connor writes about a relationship that struggles through the division of the classes -Molly coming from a modest working class catholic family, while Synge comes from a more well to do Protestant land owning ascendancy family. The era O’ Connor sets his novel in is an Ireland that is almost obsessively divided by class. Fast forward to post Celtic Tiger Ireland, a century later, and not much has changed he says. 
“There is a great myth in Ireland that we love to tell ourselves that we are a classless society compared to Britain. I think it’s more fluid in Ireland; you can move from one class to another probably a bit easier than you can in Britain, and we don’t have an aristocracy like the British do. But we sort of pretend we’re all in this classless and egalitarian society. We experimented for eighty years to be sort of De Valera’s catholic Ireland, and then we experimented for the last twenty years at being like Thatcher’s Britain, being very materialistic, everyone defining themselves by their car or house, thankfully that all ended in disaster.”

As the sun sets over the Houses of Parliament it feels as if the interview is digressing more and more away from the world of literature and into a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party.
“I think the only future for Ireland, economically and politically is where we have a similar system to the Scandinavian countries, the only way I think as a country if we are going to survive is if we’re a more equal society, tax would be higher, the Welfare State would be bigger, and there won’t be enormous differences of income between the richest and the poorest.”
When you ask O’ Connor a question he is never short of words, and every answer comes with a meandering tale or a humorous anecdote. Filling the page with words has never been a problem for him he says. Although his previous two books were both mammoth pieces of literature, with Ghost Light he wanted to keep the novel short and concise.
“I just wanted this book to be almost clean and pure. There is a traditional Scottish folk song: Annachie Gordon- its about five minutes- but its got so much of the story packed into it, well that’s the sort of the approach I took in writing Ghost Light, I wanted it to be sure and to the point, like a folk song.”

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