Verbal Magazine

The Man Comes Around

Writing, for Peter Murphy, was something that he knew he wanted to do from a very early age - devouring every book and comic he could get his hands on; starting with the Alfred Hitchcock Presents… series and moving on to 2000AD and Starlord comics; then Stephen King followed by John Steinbeck.

This insatiable appetite for reading fiction became a stepping stone to writing during his school days; ‘It was really my English teacher, Mary Whelock in the Vocational School in Enniscorthy, cracking the whip and knowing I had an essay to submit every week. There was no sense of creative indulgence, you just coughed it up’, he says.  ‘I won a writing competition when I was 17 called The Michael Friedman Award and was packed off around Europe for a couple of weeks, visiting the European Parliament and the European Union. I had never been out of the country before then so it was a complete eye-opener.’
Between the writing competition and a career as a full time journalist, Murphy spent several years drumming with a band. Music journalism seemed almost inevitable, a perfect marriage of his two great loves. Murphy explains how he learned ‘…all the disciplines. I didn’t read fiction for about four or five years because I was trying to learn from the journalists and great music writers like Lester Bangs, so I was immersed in that for that time. Then something changed. I can remember in 1999, after listening to God Speed You Black Emperor, being inspired to write something that ended up getting used as an end of the world dream sequence in the book. It was quite millennial, as it was 1999. That, and listening to God Speed You Black Emperor, inspired me to just sit down, open up a document and start writing something.’
In 2000 Murphy’s father passed away and his youngest daughter was born a week later. This represented a huge change of direction for the writer. ‘I kept waking up at night and wondering what I was doing with my life. I love journalism but I wanted to create something - instead of writing about something that somebody else created, and that started a long process. I wrote another novel - which was ok but not great - but I sent some samples of writing to Marianne Gunn O’Connor, the agent, who signed me up and basically waited while I tried to figure out what the hell story it was that I needed to write first.’
Murphy laboured in solitude for a time before realising that the opinion and advice of others could be helpful in the feat of writing a first novel. Taking the bull by the horns he invited some friends and acquaintances to form a writing circle. The finished set consisted of Murphy, journalists Nadine O’Regan and Jane Ruffino, with writer Sean Murray. The group met up every two weeks in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel for two years. ‘They were brilliant, kind, supportive but also brutally honest, and I really respected their taste and judgement. They were also subtly different in ways that were good too and they came from different backgrounds so they kind of brought the baby to term and ‘mid-wifed’ it for me.’
In this reader’s eyes, John the Revelator is a work of literary near-perfection. It follows three characters; the eponymous John Devine; his mother, the bible-quoting, chain-smoking, Lily, and his Rimbaudian friend Jamey Corbery through the pains of growing up, the implications of living in a rural village in Ireland and the sense of confinement this produces. The relationship between the narrator and his single mother is magical; as is the inclusion and use of Jamey in the plot. The novel speaks of a hard won wisdom, only learned by facing adversity and struggle - and surviving.
This is not a book that could have been written by a younger Murphy. ‘You have to learn many things; patience, concentration - even how to make the very ambition and ego that drives you to write the thing take a back seat to let the story come through. After a while you really become unimportant. It’s a funny thing about language; it will reflect everything you don’t like about your own character. Everything that’s showy, egotistical or craven will all come out in your work and you look at it and it’s like looking in a mirror at everything you don’t like about yourself and you have to hack away until the part that’s left is essential and honest and true. It’s kind of humbling for you as a person but there is something very brutal about putting words on paper and seeing what you’re made of.’
Although the novel is very much rooted in an Ireland Murphy knows, he says he had no desire to use the novel to map out Ireland in a certain place and time; ‘I was only really interested in it in terms of my immediate environment. The book takes place in an alternative reality whereby chronology is mixed up; sometimes it seems like the 70s and sometimes it feels like the present day. That’s what it’s like where I grew up even now, when I go back it feels exactly like it did in the 70s - except you’ve the internet and Polish and Romanian and Nigerian people around so it’s different - but it’s also the same. People have pointed out that there seems to be a strange, temporal discrepancy going on and there is. But it’s not journalism, it’s more impressionistic.’
As with all the best fiction, the characters drive the novel, from John Devine to the bizarre figure of nosy neighbour Mrs Nagle. It’s hard to read such intimately described characters without wondering how much of the author and the people he knows exist in the figures so perfectly rendered. Murphy explains; ‘I think maybe that every one of them - just by dint of the fact that you have to write them - you have to become all of them. I’m Gunther Prunty kicking the shit out of Jamey at the same time as I’m Jamey getting the shit kicked out of me by Gunther Prunty. Jamey was based on several friends that I had when I was 15 or 16; not necessarily physically – they were young boys and girls – but on their mad intelligence and eccentricity and the fact that they were really smart and nobody’s parents liked them’.
The character of Lily is one that is very dear to Murphy’s heart and was inspired by two very important people in the author’s life. ‘You can’t write about a mother figure - because it’s such a powerful iconic image - without, in some fashion, envisaging your own mother. My mother was an amazing gardener and my favourite part of the whole book is the start of chapter two where it just describes her planting the garden. That’s definitely my mother, but the hard-bitten, wry, sardonic humour and the reading of the westerns and the chain-smoking was my father. Lily is sort of a headlong collision between the two. Certain lines are actually verbatim. Looking back on it I am really gratified when people quote a line directly from my father’s mouth. That part when she’s reading a western and John asks her is it any good, she says ‘Too many descriptions, I know what a tree looks like’. Every word of that was my father with a Louis L’Amour book open, peering over his glasses with a fag dangling out of his mouth.’
When picking up a copy of John the Revelator the eye is immediately drawn to two very significant quotations on the cover of the book from renowned Irish authors Colm Tóibín and Roddy Doyle. Tóibín says of the novel “So fresh, so original and disturbing and brave… it’s an absolutely wonderful novel”, while Doyle gushes “Everything about John the Revelator excited me – I couldn’t wait to turn the page and keep on going. It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I’d never read a novel before.” Such words of praise from two literary heavyweights, long before the novel was released, brought a sigh of relief from Murphy; ‘Well it was amazing, because pretty much the first things I heard were from other writers. It was extraordinary that those were the first reviews. To hear that from people who know all the pitfalls and the mechanics and the technicalities of the day to day ‘trying to string a sentence together’ grind of it - was amazing.
The good news for Murphy fans is that he is currently working on his next novel but hasn’t quite given up the day job yet; ‘There’s a benefit with the journalism in that it gets me out of the house and allows me to learn. It was very good for me when I was younger and it gave me a confidence that I didn’t have. There’s an element of random discovery in journalism that can be really useful. If it came down to it and I could write, or make little movies, or spoken word recordings, or collaborate on graphic novels, or any of this stuff, my idea of heaven would be a day filled with creative endeavours and then to do journalism or fiction as the mood takes me. But as a day job journalism is pretty nice. I think these stories have to be written with love - to think of it as just a money-making enterprise would take the joy out of it.’
John the Revelator is available now and is published by Faber and Faber.

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