Kevin Barry Transcript

Listen to Kevin Barry talk and reading.

Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Kevin Barry reads from his novel ‘City of Bohane’, and takes questions from the audience. Recorded in the Central Library on 20 May 2011 as part of its 'Dublin Revealed' series.

Aoife Walsh: Good afternoon ladies and gentleman and welcome to this the third event in Four Fiction Fridays which is a series of weekly lunchtime readings.  Four Fiction Fridays is organised by Irish Literature Exchange or ILE as we are also known in cooperation Dublin City Public Libraries and it’s also part of the 2011 Bealtaine Festival and we’d like to thank the Public Libraries very much for providing the venue for these readings and all of the support that they have given us throughout.  My name is Aoife Walsh and I’m the Information Officer with Ireland Literature Exchange.  I’ll just give you a bit of background about ILE before anything else.  We are the national agency for the promotion of Irish literature abroad and we do this primarily through our translation grant programme which enables foreign publishers to translate and publish Irish works of literature in their own languages in their own territories so be it French, Italian, Brazilian, Portuguese, Chinese, Russian – you name it.  We’re funded by the Arts Council and by Culture Ireland and we’re extremely grateful for that support from our funders.  The translating grant programme has resulted in about 1,500 works of Irish literature in translation and that archive of books is housed in our offices but it’s also available through your public library through what’s known as the Rosetta Collection or the Rosetta List so if there is anything you are interested in, if your first language is not English, you can just go to the counter and ask them about the Rosetta Collection.  We also host  literary translators in Ireland for a period of up to 3 weeks while they’re working on the translations of Irish works and in fact next week we’re going to have three translators in the country at the same time from Russia, Turkey and China.  So we promote many, many writers from all different shapes and sizes, living and deceased.  So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you one of the living writers (laughter) Kevin Barry.

Kevin Barry: Half alive.  (laughter)

Aoife: Kevin was born in Limerick and he’s lived in lots of different places over the years but he knows lives in Sligo.  He’s the author of one collection of short stories called There Are Little Kingdoms, which is the small one here.  There Are Little Kingdoms won the Rooney Prize For Literature in 2007.  His debut novel, City of Bohane, was published in April by Jonathan Cape.  I should also say There Are Little Kingdoms was published by The Stinging Fly Press in 2007.  So City of Bohane, The Guardian, Scarlett Thomas has said that City of Bohane "marks Kevin out as a writer of great promise".  Keith Ridgeway writing in The Irish Times praised Kevin’s writing saying it "draws you fully into the thick atmosphere and ticklish menace of easily the best realised character in the book, the City of Bohane itself".  And Irvine Welsh no less has described Kevin as "the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years".  So now without further ado or any kind of messing I’ll hand over to Kevin who will read from his debut novel, City of Bohane.

Kevin: Thank you very much Aoife, thanks.  (clapping)  Okay so what we’re going to do is I know it’s called Fiction Friday but I’m going to read a little bit of fiction and I’m going to close by reading a little bit of non-fiction just something about myself and how I wound up living in a Garda station in County Sligo, just to finish off, and I think in the middle we’ll talk a bit and Aoife is going to ask me some questions.  We both come from Limerick so it could get a bit parochial and colloquial at some point there.  (laughter)  First of all I’m going to read a little bit from City of Bohane and the wonderful English publishers Jonathan Cape keep calling it Bohane, the wonderful City of Bohane, so I’ve been correcting them for the last year about the pronunciation, about getting it right, the ‘hane’ bit.  Bohane is a small and very malevolent and murderous little city somewhere on the western sea board of Ireland and I refuse to be drawn on exactly where it is.  And this is the story of how things are out in Bohane in the middle of the 21st century and though it’s in the future you’ll notice as I read that this isn’t a future as a progression it’s kind of a regression and in lots of ways Bohane feels to me like a kind of a western, it’s kind of like a west of Ireland western if you like.  So I’m going to read a little from Chapter 1 and a little from Chapter 2 just to give a feel for it and I tend to get a bit carried away when I start reading this so there’s a danger that this could get slightly theatrical at some point.

Aoife: Yeah, I’ll sit back and ...

Kevin: Sit well back.  (laughter)

So from Chapter 1 of the novel, City of Bohane, which I’m going to read in a Bohane accent.  This Chapter is titled 'The Nature of the Disturbance'.  (laughter)

Whatever’s wrong with us is coming in off that river.  No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river.  This is the Bohane river we’re talking about.  A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin’ waste and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane. 

He walked the docks and breathed in the sweet badness of the river.  It was past midnight on the Bohane front.  There was an evenness to his footfall, a slow calm rhythm of leather on stone, and the dockside lamps burned in the night-time a green haze, the light of a sad dream.  The water’s roar for Hartnett was as the rushing of his own blood and as he passed the merchant yards the guard dogs strung out a sequence of howls all along the Bohane front, see the dogs: their hackles heaped, their yellow eyes livid.  We could tell he was coming by the howling of the dogs.

Polis watched him, but from a distance.  A pair of hoss polis watering their piebalds at a trough ‘cross in Smoketown.  Polis were fresh from the site of a reefing.  ‘Ya lampin’ him over?’ said one. ‘Albino motherfucker.’ ‘Set yer clock by him,’ said the other.  Albino, some called him, others knew him as the Long Fella:  he ran the Hartnett Fancy.  He cut off from the dockside and he walked on into the Back Trace, the infamous Bohane Trace, a most evil labyrinth, an unknowable web of streets.  He had that Back Trace look to him:, he was a dapper buck in a natty-boy Crombie, the Crombie draped all casual-like over the shoulders of a pale grey Italian suit, mohair.  Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses.  It was a pair of hand-stitched Portuguese boots that slapped his footfall, and the stress that fell, the emphasis was money.

Hard-got the riches – oh the stories that we told out in Bohane about Logan Hartnett. 

Dank little squares of the Trace opened out suddenly, like gasps, and Logan passed through.  All sorts of quarehawks lingered in the Bohane Trace in the small hours of the night.  They looked down as he passed by, they examined their toes and their sacks of tawny wine – you wouldn’t make eye contact with the long fella if you could help it.  Strange, but we had a fear of him and a pride in him, both.  He had a fine hold of himself, as we say out in Bohane.  He was graceful and erect and he looked neither left nor right but straight out ahead always, with the shoulders thrown back, like a general.  He walked the Arab tangle of alleyways and wynds that make up the Bohane Trace and there was the slap, the lift, the slap, the lift of Portuguese leather on the backstreet stones.

Yes and Logan was in his element as he made progress through the labyrinth.  He feared not the shadows, he knew the fibres of the place, he knew every last twist and lilt of it.

Jenni Ching waited beneath the maytree in the 98er Square.

 He approached the girl, and his step was enough: she needn’t look up to make the wreck.  He smiled for her up the same, it was a wry and long suffering smile – as though to say:  More of it Jenni? – and he sat on the bench beside.  He laid a hand on hers that was tiny, delicate, murderous.  The bench had dead seasons of lovers’ names scratched into it. 

‘Well, girleen?’ he said, ‘Dude what been reefed in Smoketown he was a Cusack off the Northside.’ She said.  ‘Did he have it coming, Jen?’ ‘ Don’t they always’, she said, ‘the Cusacks?’  Logan shaped his lips thinly in agreement.  ‘The Cusack family has always been crooked, girl’ he said.  Jenni Ching was 17 that year but wise beyond it.  Careful she was and a saucy little ticket in her lowriders and wedge heels, her streaked hair pineappled in a high bun.  She took the butt of a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up and lit it.

‘I’ve got enough on me plate now ‘cross the footbridge Mr. Hartnett.’ she said.  I know that Jenni.  ‘The Cusacks’, she said, ‘gonna sulk up a welt o’vengeance by ‘n’ by and if yer askin’ me, like?  A rake o’ them tossers bullin’ down off the northside is the las’ thing Bohane need.’.  It is fond tradition in the city of Bohane that families from the Northside Rises will (claps hands) butt heads against families from the Back Trace.  Logan ran the Trace he was Back Trace blood-and-bone, and his was the most ferocious power in the city that year.  But the Cusacks were building strength on the Rises.  ‘What’s the swerve we gonna throw, Logan?’  There was a canniness to Jenni.  It was bred into her  –  the Chings were old Smoketown stock in Bohane.  Smoketown was hoors, herb and fetish parlours and grog pits and needle alleys and dream salons and Chinese restaurants.  Smoketown was the other side of the footbridge from the Back Trace, yonder across the Bohane River, and it was the Hartnett Fancy had the runnings of Smoketown also.  But the Cusacks were shaping for it.  ‘I’d say we keep things moving quite swiftly against them, Jenni' he said. ‘Coz they’re gonna come on down anyways, like?’  ‘Oh there’s no doubt to it, girl’ he said, ‘They’re going to come down barkin’.  We may as well force them to a quick move.'  She considered the tactic.  ‘Afore they’s full prepped for a gack off us, y’mean?  Play on their pride, like,  What the Fancy’s yelpin’?  Ya gonna take an eye for an eye, Cuse, or y’any bit o’ spunk at all, like?’  Logan smiled.  ‘You’re an exceptional child, Jenni Ching.’ he said.  He rose from the bench smiling.  Not a lick of warmth had entered the girl’s hand as long as his had lain on it.  ‘Y’wan’ more Cusacks hurted so?’ she said.  He looked back at her but briefly – the look was his word.  ‘Y’sure ‘bout that Logan? ‘nother winter a blood in Bohane, like?’  A smile, and it was as grey as he could will it.  ‘Ah sure it’ll make the long old nights fly past.’ he said.  Logan Hartnett was minded to keep the Ching girl close.  In a small city so homicidal you needed to watch out on all sides.  He moved on through the gloom of the Back Trace.  The streets of old tenements are tight, steep-sided, ill-lit and the high bluffs of the city give the Trace a closed-in feel.  Our city is built along a run of these bluffs that bank and canyon the Bohane river.  The streets tumble down to the river, it is a black and swift moving rush at the base of almost every street as black as the bog waters that feed it and a couple of miles downstream the river rounds the last of the bluffs and there enters the murmurous ocean.  The ocean is not directly seen from the city but at all times there is the ozone rumour of its proximity, a rasp on the air like a hoarseness.  It is all of it as bleak as only the west of Ireland can be.

Now in proper western fashion Logan faces a great difficulty at this time in Bohane because his old nemesis arrives back into town.  His old rival in both gangland and in love and this gentleman is called the Gant Broderick. Gant is actually a west Limerick word, a traveller, from traveller cant, and it means a kind of a leader and 'The Gant's Return' is Chapter 2 so I’m just ... as the Gant arrives back into Bohane on the early morning train we get more of a look around the city too so I’m just going to give a couple of pages from Chapter 2.

That hot defiant screech was the Bohane El Train as it took the last turn onto De Valera Street.  The El ran the snakebend of the street, its boxcar windows a blurring yellow on the downtown charge.  The main drag was deserted this wind-less a.m. and it was quiet also in the car that Gant was sat in.  There was just a pair of weeping hoors across the aisle - Norrie girls by the feline cut of the cheekbones - and a drunk in greasy Authority overalls down the way.  The El train was customarily sad in this last stretch before dawn, that much had not changed.  The screech of it was as a soul screech.  If you were lying there in the bed, lonesome, and succumbed to poetical thoughts, that screech would go through you.  It happens that we are often just so in Bohane.  No better men for the poetical thoughts. 

The Gant took a slick of sweat from his brow with the back of a big hand.  He had a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks.  The sweat he found was after coming out on him sudden.  It was hot on the El train and the flush of heat brought to him a charge of feeling also, the Gant was in a fever spell this season.  The tang of stolen youth seeped up in his throat with the rasping burn of a nausea and on the El train in yellow light the Gant trembled but the familiar streets rushed past as the El train charged and the pain of memory without warning gave way to joy, a kind of joy - he was back! - and the Gant beamed then ecstatically as he sucked at the clammy morning air, and he listened to the hoors.  ‘I fucking loved dat blatherin’ fucker big time’ said one.  ‘He was filth, girl, s’bone truth of it’ consoled the other, he was casting off all over the town, y’ check me?  He took you for a gommie lackeen.’

 He was back among the city’s voices and it was the rhythm of them that slowed the rush of his thoughts.  He had been glad to hop on the El train up on the northside and take the weight off his old bones.  The Gant was back at last in the Bohane creation.  Down along the boxcar he saw the Authority man mouth a sadness through his sozzled half-sleep, most likely a woman’s name – was she as green and lazy eyed as the Gant’s lost love? - and the city unpeeled, image by image, as the El train screeched along De Valera Street: a shuttered store, a war hero’s plinth, an advert for a gout cure, a gull so ghostly on a lamp post. 

Morning was rising against the dim of the street lights and the lights caught just as the El screeched into its dockside terminus.  The train locked onto its berth - the rubber jolt of the stoppers meant you were downtown, meant you were in Bohane proper and the El’s diesel tanks settled and died. 

He let the hoors and the drunk off ahead of him.  The Gant as he disembarked was fleshy and hot-faced but there was no little grace to his big-man stride.  There was a nice roll to his movement – ye sketchin’?  This Gant had old time style. 

The station is named Bohane St. Francis Xavier, officially, but everyone here knows it as the Yella Hall.  The Gant sniffed at the evil undying air of the place as he walked through.  Even at a little after 6 in the morning the concourse was rudely alive and the throb of its noise was by the moment thickening.  Amputee walnut sellers croaked their prices from tragic blankets on the scarred tile floors, their stumps so artfully displayed.  The Bohane accent sounded everywhere, it was flat and harsh along the consonants, sing-song and soupy on the vowels, betimes vaguely Caribbean.  An old man bothered a melodeon as he stood on an upturned orange crate and he sang a lament for youth’s distant love.  The crate was stamped Tangier - a route that was open yet - and the old dude had belters of lungs on him, was the Gant’s opinion, though he teetered clearly on eternity’s maw. 

Choked back another tear did the Gant: he was big but soft, he was hard yet gentle.

The early edition of the Bohane Vindicator was in, the city’s only paper, but the bundles had as yet to be unwrapped by the kiosk man who listened with his eyes closed to an eerie sonata played on a transistor wireless at this hour on the Bohane Free Radio the selector tended towards the classical end of things and towards melancholy.  Nodded his head softly, the kiosk man, as the violins caught.

Oh we’d get medals for soulfulness out the tip end of the Bohane Peninsula. 

The hoors who had wept on the train were ahead of him now on the concourse, they had gathered themselves.  They were painting on bravery from their compacts as they walked.  They would be bound, he knew, for Smoketown and its early-morning trade.  The Gant watched as they went out through the yellow hall.  Ah look: the quick switching of their buttocks beneath the thin silk fabric of their rah-rah skirts, and the way their calves are so finely toned from half their young lives spent on 6-inch spike heels.  The sight of the girls made him sentimental.  He had run stables of  hoors himself as a young man.  There was a day when it was the Gant did the runnings of Smoketown, a day when the Gant had the runnings of the city entirely.

Was said out in Bohane the Gant ran it clean.  He looked out to the first of an October morning.  The gulls were going loo-la on the dockside stones.  Those gulls of course were never right.  That’s often said in Bohane, the sheer derangement in their eyes and the untranslatable evil of their cawing as they dive bomb the streets, the gulls of Bohane are one ignorant pack of fuckers.  He’d missed them terribly.  He laughed out loud as the gusts of morning wind flung the birds about the sky but he drew no looks, sure the Yella Hall would be crawling with wall-bangers at the best of times. 

The Gant set out towards the Smoketown footbridge.  He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and opened it, he read a hand that had not changed with the years - still those big nervous childish letters - and its scrawl spelt out these words:

Ho Pee Chin Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe.

The Gant had a wee girl to meet at this place.  It was a good time for such a meeting, he could be lost among the crowd.  Smoketown he knew would be black at this hour of the morning.  The late shifts from the slaughterhouses and the breweries were only now clocking off.  Bohane builds sausages and Bohane builds beer.  We exist in the high 50s of latitude, after all, the winters are fierce and we need the inner fire that comes from a meat diet and voluminous drinking.  The plants worked all angles of the clock and after the night shift it was the custom to make for S’town and a brief revel.  In the dawn haze the brewery lads were dreamy-eyed from hops fume while the slaughterhouse boys had been all the silver and shade of night up to the oxters in the corpses of beasts, filling the wagons for the butchers’ slabs at the arcade market in the Bohane Trace and the wagons rolled out now across the greasy cobbles and it was a gory cargo they hauled:

 See the peeled heads of sheep and the vein fleshy haunches of pigs, and the glistening trays of livers and spleens, skirts and kidneys, lungs and tongues – carnivorous to a fault, we’d ate the whole lot for you out in Bohane. 

The Gant hunched his big shoulders against the morning chill.  The lowing of condemned beasts sounded in bass tones on the air – our stock yards are laid out along the wharf.  The Gant stepped over a gutter that ran torrentially with fresh blood. 

Now how, he wondered, was a man expected to think civilised thoughts in a city the likes of Bohane?

Thanks very much. (clapping)

Questions

Kevin: Okay.

Aoife: Thank you Kevin.  (laughs)

Kevin: I’ll maybe just say a few words about the book ...

Aoife: Yeah sure.

Kevin: ... before we have some sort of questions or whatever.

Aoife: Yeah.

Kevin: Sometimes ... we have such a rich inheritance in Irish literature that sometimes you can look at the map of Ireland and think oh God it’s all been done, you know, you can think Roddy Doyle did that bit and Edna O’Brien did that bit and John McGahern did that bit and you can think there’s nothing left, you know, so I got a marker and I physically drew an extra peninsula onto the western seaboard of Ireland and I said this is mine and I’m going to call it the Bohane Peninsula and I knew for a long time I wanted to build this little city at the far tip of the Peninsula and the only way to build a city on the page is to build it with voices, to build it with the city's voices so ... like while Bohane is an imaginary place it has direct links or connections with actual Irish cities so I grew up in Limerick City and I spent the guts of 10 years in Cork and I misspent a lot of my youth in Galway so (laughter) all these voices have kind of stewed inside in my head and actually when I started to hear these voices and when I could hear the way people in Bohane I put it down and it was a very exciting discovery to make because I thought actually these types of voices have almost never been used in Irish literature.  Working class Limerick speech, working class Cork speech has almost never appeared in Irish literature, there’s almost none of it, there are exceptions that prove the rule, you could think about people like Enda Walsh in drama, he’s used Cork city voices beautifully in his plays.  A writer like Michael Curtain in Limerick but there’s very, very little.  There’s more in Dublin, more so.  And it’s simply because these weren’t communities that produced books so actually when you look at the map after a while you find actually there’s lots that hasn’t been done here yet and you just have to listen to the voices to get it and I always think fundamentally there are two kinds of writers, there are writers whose inspiration comes in terms of a visual image and then there’s writers whose inspirations comes from the air and I’m definitely of this type.  My stories come from the way people speak and my ear is my tool and my main tactic or mode of approach really is to eavesdrop and to listen and the way the English language is spoken in Ireland and particularly the way it’s spoken in places like Limerick and Cork gives us a strange and weird and wonderful resource as writers because it’s twisted out of all sorts of shape and there’s lot of weird undertows on it and strange influences on it that come from Irish and it gives us something that no other country has in lots of ways and that’s the way I work and that’s the way Bohane came to life.  And it’s possibly a little unusual and I would say that the influences on the book aren’t primarily literary even though I would be influenced by things like Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange which was a favourite book of mine when I was growing up but influences on this are things like DVD box sets that I’ve been watching like The Sopranos and The Wire and Deadwood and also music and film.  So influences come in all ways and I think your questions are going to cross over, some of them.

Aoife: Yeah, well one of my first questions, I mean you’ve said that the name of the city of Bohane came to you in a dream.

Kevin: Yeah.  Well I don’t want to sound melodramatic (laughter) but I had a vision (laughter).  I actually ... I was all set to write this but I still didn’t know what the city was called and I woke in a fever sweat one night in County Sligo and I sat bolt upright in the bed and I said out loud “Bohane” (laughter) and of course herself kicked me and said “Ah go to sleep would you and stop your nonsense”, you know, but I managed to make the note on the piece of paper at the side of the bed and as soon as I knew what it was called I could start and Bohane is actually an old Cork surname.  I knew a couple of people called Bohane but it just sounded right to me for the name of the city, it’s kind of like Athlone or something, you know, it has that kind of mean old kind of feeling and you can just picture this dark little city called Bohane I think so ...

Aoife: Yeah, that long ‘a’ is coming out there.

Kevin: That’s it yeah the ‘a’ (laughter) so ...

Aoife: Did you write it quickly?  I mean did it flow?

Kevin: Yeah I did a mad quick draft.  I remember something once the great American writer William Maxwell said that if your inclination is usually to write short stories that with a novel the best way to do it is ... he was talking to John Cheever actually, the great story writer, he said go in quick, get a draft down quick and see what you have.  So I said I’m going to write 1,000 words every day for 10 weeks and see what I have ...

Aoife: Okay.

Kevin: ... and I had about 60,000 or 70,000 words so I had a very rough draft, so I had the city and I had the main characters after that.

Aoife: Yeah.

Kevin: And I then spent about 6 months putting the story in there and I realised at that point that I was thinking Jesus I’m writing a western essentially (laughter).  All the characters in Bohane kind of conform to real western types.  Logan is your classic sort of paranoid anti-hero, the Gant is the old timer with unfinished business, you have Immaculata, Logan’s wife, who is this mysterious woman caught between them and then you have all the young guns coming up on the sly on the blind side.

Aoife: Just short of 18 as well, they’re not quite adults.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah so it was great fun. 

Aoife: Yeah.  (laughter)

Kevin: I had a ball with it, you know.  Actually that’s something that took me a while to realise is that you should be having great fun when you write, you should be enjoying yourself.  I think when you start off and in your 20s there’s an awful lot of kind of tortured genius stuff that goes and you’re pacing and wringing your hands and pulling your hair out but eventually it came to me that if I’m not having fun in the writing room maybe the reader isn’t having so much fun when they open my book and it’s hard to get people to read books nowadays and I’m very determined if I have any ambition as a writer it’s to give the reader a good time when they open my book and to keep them entertained while they’re on the page.

Aoife: Yeah.  And was that writing process very different from the short stories, comparing all?

Kevin: Stories are quicker.  I always think with a good story that you’ll probably be in and out in a week.

Aoife: Okay.

Kevin: The good ones.  I know I have stories that I have spent much, much longer on and done lots and lots of drafts but I think, yeah, they’re very different, novels.  I think stories in some ways are more difficult.  A short story can go wrong on you very, very easily at any given time.  I always think it’s like walking a tight rope and that each sentence is like a step along the wire and you can misplace your footing at any moment and you’ll break your neck and you’ll lose the story and you’ll never get it back.  You can get away with more in a novel.  A novel by its nature is looser.  But I mean if I have an idea for some time I’m lucky in that I have a fluent imagination so I get ideas all the time but if I have an idea usually my instinct, my first instinct, is to see if I can make this work as a short story.  That’s my first ambition for it usually.

Aoife: Okay.

Kevin: My interest in the novel as a form is kind of different.  My interest in a novel is purely as an arena for innovation and for experimentation because I think it needs it.  I think the novel is struggling as a form.  It’s an awful thing to say but I sometimes go into the book shops and especially I look at the literary fiction shelves dutifully and I find myself edging over towards the crime and towards the graphic novels and God help us even towards the poetry (laughter) but there are poets in the room I shouldn’t say that.  I’ll be getting into trouble later on.  (laughter)  But I think the novel needs to ... the literary novel it seems to me can exist in a kind of a cultural vacuum where it’s only influenced by other things that happen in the literary novel and it’s cut off from things like ... I was just doing a radio thing last week in England about the influence of American television drama on the novel and should there be more of it and I honestly think there should because for me the best long-form fiction is in things like Mad Men and The Sopranos and I know that when writers gather now we’re not generally talking about the latest hot novel we’re talking about what happened in the last series of Mad Men.

Aoife: Yeah, a golden age of TV writing.

Kevin: Oh it is, it is absolutely and I think it’s ... and those shows actually they steal a great deal in terms of how they’re structured and put together from the novel.  David Simon who created The Wire says every series of The Wire is like an old 19th century Russian novel the way it’s structured so it’s time I think for novelists to start stealing things back and try and get some of that vitality in as well because.

Aoife: Yeah, well you’ve definitely made a start on that.  (laughs)

Kevin: Oh thank you, thank you.

Aoife: And you’ve said that Bohane is kind of like a wild west ...

Kevin: Yeah.

Aoife: ... and so is there ... we’ll talk about dialogue maybe in a moment but is there a dialogue between the urban and the rural in your work?

Kevin: Yeah.

Aoife: Do you consider that?

Kevin: Well yeah I mean I live in South County Sligo now, we’re looking out the window at fields and hills and a lake and it’s very rural and then a couple of days a week I’ll probably be in Dublin or Galway or in a city or somewhere so that’s very much a pragmatic influence on the book, just coming between the two all the time.  I think it’s a very interesting thing in Ireland as well that most people who live in Irish cities are in fact boggers not too far back, you know.  (laughter) Most people are originally either their parents are from the countryside or their grandparents are.  On my mother’s side they came into the city in the 30s I think, they were previously witches on the side of a West Limerick mountain (laughter) so we have the smell off the fields off us yet.  My father’s crowd were all townies going way back in the lanes of Limerick.  My brother once tried to trace our family tree and got to about the 1860s and gave up because he said there’s nothing good (laughter), there’s really nothing good back there, you know, (laughter) but I think it’s, yeah, I’m really interested in Irish speech and I’m fascinated by accents, by Irish accents, the way we express things.  Limerick City’s accent always strikes me as bananas because Limerick City is a small city, it’s about 2 miles wide, and you come in from Patrick’s Well and they’re pure boggers out there, they’re talking like that, and you go out the other side, 2 miles out the road the Clare side, and they’re even worse boggers out in Clare.  (laughter) But for about 2 miles in between they sound completely different.  It’s very flat and it’s very quick and it goes like that ... a hundred miles an hour (laughter) and it’s like how does that happen.  It’s very strange and I think if you can get the accent, if you can get the way that people speak you get everything about them.  You get the humour, you get their soul through their speech so always I’m trying to get how people talk so it’s been a natural thing the last couple of years I’ve been doing some little plays as well and that’s something I’ll definitely continue doing, yeah.

Aoife: Yeah.  So do you do what Enda Walsh did for Disco Pigs and sit in cafes and kind of listen to people and ...

Kevin: Oh I rob loads, yeah.

Aoife: ... yeah.

Kevin: I take loads of stuff because you can’t make it up as well as the crazy things that people say and I act it out when I’m writing at home in the room, I do all the voices.  I kind of approach it like an actor with a part really.

Aoife: Yeah.

Kevin: Because your ear will always get the false notes much quicker than your eye will get them on the page so I play with it and give it a go.

Aoife: Yeah.  So my last question for the day that’s in it, do you ... translators, do you spare a thought for them when they have to tackle people like Jenni Ching and Eyes Cusack. 

Kevin: Yeah a very brave French publisher has just bought the rights and they’re going to translate this into French so God only knows what it’s going to sound like (laughter).  Like I think it’s impossible to do a direct translation but fortunately the same publisher publishes Irvine Welsh and they’re sending it to all his translators because they’re saying if they translate Edinburgh they might be able to translate Limerick and Cork, you know.

Aoife: Yeah.

Kevin: But I think they’ll need to do like a version of ... I’d love a French translator who is also a novelist who would say what’s Marseille going to be like in the middle of the century and to do a kind of a version rather than a direct translation, I don’t think a direct translation is possible, I think it would be awful, you know.  I’m about to start getting questions from the translator which will be very interesting because I’ve made half of it up as well, you know.  I mean a lot of it comes from real Cork and Limerick speech but there’s lots that’s just made up off the top of my head as well where I was just inventing.

Aoife: That’s something to look forward to then.

Kevin: Okay.

Aoife: Does anybody have any questions before ... Kevin’s going to read again at the end?

Participant: Hi, I’m just interested in what you were saying about the literary novel and TV because I find sometimes very literary short stories are quite difficult to read but obviously everybody has their own taste.  Like there’s one quite well known writer and I’ve read some of his work, I don’t understand it, you know, it’s just too subtle for me some of it ...

Kevin: Yeah.

Participant: ... but I mean I’ve read lots of people all over the world that haven’t found them too subtle but anyway that’s ... so just saying is that a kind of an invention of the 20th century, this whole idea of the literary novel?

Kevin: Somebody ... I think it was some crime writer recently said that literary fiction needs to accept that it’s also a genre, you know, this kind of Booker Prize fiction if you like and I mean on a pragmatic level I know from talking to people at Random House is that every year literary fiction is selling less and less and less, people are losing interest and they’re just not buying it.  Random House publishes about 15 different imprints and last year was the worst ever year for its literary fiction titles and this year is down about 20% on that so it’s going that quickly and it’s purely from ... I do think there’s a big elephant in the room when you talk about books as well at the moment which is the internet and technology and technology the way it’s changing our brains.  I think physiologically the days of the long read are kind of passing us by to some extent.  Martin Amis talked about that recently as well.  I mean I always think that when I was 19 or 20 which is a very important age as a younger writer because it’s the age when your brain is a kind of a sponge and I was reading 4 or 5 hours a day and I would have been eating novels.  I would have been going through 6 and 7 novels a week when I was that age and I know if I was 19 or 20 now I wouldn’t be doing that, I’d be online for a lot of that time, so that’s going to have a huge effect down the line.  What’s not going to disappear is storytelling, telling stories is a fundamental human need, we need to make stories to give shapes to our lives because our lives are essentially shapeless in reality and make no sense so that’s why we need stories and that’s why we need to tell stories.  So we’ll always tell stories but I think the modes and the forms will change a lot and I think it’s going to be a really, really interesting time.  I think practically as a writer and what I’ve been doing is I keep going through a lot of forms, I’m kind of hedging my bets if you like, so I write short stories and a novel and I’ve been doing plays and little film scripts and everything just going between different forms and just keeping your options open because we’ll keep telling stories but I think the modes and forms are going to start changing very, very quickly.  Interestingly a big influence on this and I’m delighted to hear from the publishers as well is that one of the areas that’s really exploding and selling brilliantly and doing really well is the graphic novel, that has taken off massively over the last few years and it’s a really interesting form.  And I’ve been working with a Spanish artist who is based down in Kilkenny on graphic stories and it’s a really exciting area to work in as well.

Participant: That book is going to look good with graphics in it.

Kevin: We’re talking about doing a graphic novel version, it would be a very natural fit.  I mean I grew up with comics and graphic novels so they’re a huge influence on this as well for sure.

Participant: You could add in a few sound effects that aren’t in the novel.

Kevin: Yeah, yeah (laughter) there’s going to be an audio book as well which I’m going to be doing myself so that will be fun now. 

I’d love to see a real revival in westerns and I don’t think it will ever happen even though you had True Grit which was a bit hit last year apparently there isn’t a wide spread taste because I think younger people just don’t understand the grammar of western movies now.  They don’t know the types and stuff because it’s been so long since it was a commonplace thing but I remember as a kid my thing was westerns far more so than sci-fi or Star Wars and that I was big into westerns and there was kind of a late golden period in the 70s with the Sergio Leone stuff and all that and yeah it was good fun to find myself doing a Limerick western.  (laughter)  Okay?

Participant: On the same point about westerns and you drawing from cinematic roles and drama ...

Kevin: Yes.

Participant: ... and I’m a great fan of westerns as well ...

Kevin: Yeah.

Participant: ... but they have some people are magic, whether it’s Clint Eastwood or it’s John Wayne or it’s Gary Cooper who comes in and saves the town, saves the community which is falling apart when I'm looking at - and I’m a journalist, and I’ve been living here for 3 years now, (inaudible) ...

Kevin: Ah yeah.

Participant: ... and I’m reading about Northern Ireland ...

Kevin: Yes.

Participant: ... and watch it on BBC television in the news actually and I describe it to my friends as a western, a wild western, but without the guys with the sheriff’s badges.

Kevin: Yes.

Participant: You know, I assume that the city of Bohane doesn’t have guys with the sheriff’s badge then who just ...

Kevin: Not quite.  We have the polis out there, the hoss polis who are on horses.  It’s very interesting actually in western, one of the great TV shows in the last few years is Deadwood which is an invented kind of version of an actual wild west town and very interestingly it’s done in a kind of Elizabethan English, it’s real invention, but they have lots of Irish characters in the first season of it and ...

Participant: What’s the name again?

Kevin: ... it’s called Deadwood and it’s really ...

Participant: There’s lots of great comedy wasn’t there?

Kevin: ... yeah, oh there was an actual ... yeah in Deadwood in the North Dakota’s but there’s huge Irish influences on these places in terms of the music that was going out there and ballads and Peter Murphy the novelist would always go on about the murder ballads, Irish murder ballads, being a huge influence on western storytelling as that grew up as well so we did sort of feed a lot into that so it’s nice to bring western ...

Aoife: One more question, yeah?

Participant: Had your parents any memory of Kevin Barry the patriot in their minds when they named you?  (laughter)  Is it an advantage or a disadvantage to have a name that conjures up somebody else?

Kevin: Well people of a certain age tend to break into song when I tell them my name ... (sings) in Mount Joy jail (laughter), you know, I’m actually not named after the patriot I was actually named ... it’s quite a sad story, I had a cousin in the UK who was a mod who got killed off his scooter the summer before I was born and he was Kevin Barry.  I was actually named after him.  I was born about a year to the day later and so that was I was named for but going back generations we have Kevin Barry’s in the family and I presume originally it was in honour of the patriot, you know.

Participant: Right.

Kevin: But whether or not it’s a disadvantage I don’t know.  I found myself living in an old RIC barracks now so that’s kind of a strange place for a Kevin Barry to wind up.

Aoife: Yeah.

Kevin: Which is a lovely link.

Aoife: Lovely link, yeah.

Kevin: So yeah just to finish off and thanks very much for showing up, it’s been great fun talking to you.  I’m going to read something that’s kind of actual, about myself.  It was The Observer newspaper in the UK asked me to write an essay on anything that could be described as a life-changing event so I wrote a piece about finding the house we live in now in County Sligo.  So the piece is called simply ‘The Barracks’.

The house smelled of old sergeants. (laughter) It was 30 years since it had been used as a police station, but there were still bars on the windows of the rooms out back. The echo of our footsteps across the stone floors broke the long silence that filled the house.  As we pushed through the creaking doors, each room was like a pocket of trapped time, as if the silence was just a pause in some hard conversation with a ghost of the local felonry. There was rising damp, peeling paint and homicidal electrics.

"It does need a little work," the estate agent said. (laughter)

My girlfriend and I exchanged a worried look – we knew at once that this old mess was home.  There is a German word, weltschmerz, that describes a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been, and I knew that The Barracks, as it was still known, might ease such a feeling in me.  There was a leaking chimney, a half-acre of Japanese knotweed and a general air of drizzle.  We had an offer on the table inside 5 minutes.  “An offer?” the estate agent said and all the colour drained from her face.

It had been built in the 1840s for the Royal Irish Constabulary, in south County Sligo between the Bricklieve Mountains and the Curlews.  It had a vantage view over a smoke-grey lake and was surrounded by reed fields that murmured in the breeze and their summer gold was fading, and I worried at once that this was a place to inspire overly limpid prose. But it was time I put down a root.

I was 36.  This would be the first house I could call my own.  Over the previous decade and a half I had lived at 17 addresses across nine cities of Ireland, Britain, the US and Spain.  The psyche fractures from so much itinerant wandering.  You're never sure where you are when you wake up in the morning.  You turn a street in the city you're living in and you expect a different city, a different street.  You find that you're living in the amalgam place of a dream.

Also, there was the situation with the books – there were by this time more than 50 large boxes of books.  Recent moves had required the hiring of lorries for the books alone. (laughter) We needed a place to keep the books. (laughter) So we moved in. We painted the walls.  We sanded floorboards.  We kept the bars on the windows, in memoriam of the old sergeants.  We got all the old chimneys patched up and cleared and we lit fires. I’m a child of suburbia and I was at first freaked out by the sheer quietness at night and by the utter darkness that descended on the lake and the hills. The willows caught eerily in the wind. There were mystery rustlings from the hedgerows but there was a calm about the barracks itself – an odd comfort seeped from its old bricks.

I took the upstairs landing for my workspace and very deliberately I faced the desk away from the view.  But every few minutes I would creep up on the window.  Just water, and cattle, and wooded hills rising into mist, but a storied past can project a rush of images to a suggestible mind.  The Barracks was built at a strategic point in the Sligo hills, protective of the demesne estates and the hunting lodges around the lake.  It was torched by the IRA in the early 1920s and subsequently rebuilt to house the new formed Garda Síochána.  The guards had it until the 1970s.  I understand they used to go no further than the front gate to stage roadblocks and check for tax and insurance.  (laughter) They would have mugs of strong tea to hand against the inclemence. The weather in south County Sligo is mostly overcast but the lake makes the most of what light there is and refracts it; and the light, even on the greyest days, has a peculiar intensity there, a luminescence.  Quickly, as we settled, I began to feel an unaccustomed creep of contentment.

Happiness, for me, has tended to be retrospective. I'm never happy at the time, I’m generally moaning and grizzling at the time but as soon as I leave a place I become instantly nostalgic for it.  I start to think about the good old days (laughter) and in The Barracks, as I finally cooled my heels, I grew almost pathologically wistful for the cities and the flats and the houses I had lived in.  If they were full of grey ennui at the time, their colours came through in memory.  Even a bleak time in east London can become, with perspective, a kind of idyll and I can smile now on recalling the close shave I had with a double-decker bus when I left a Jamaican shebeen in a tower block at seven in the morning and, in something of a reduced condition, (laughter) I attempted to cross Leytonstone High Road on all fours.  (laughter) You would imagine it difficult to be nostalgic for the likes of Leytonstone, but there you go.

And I can remember now with great fondness the evil long-stay motel I beached up in on State Street in Santa Barbara – a premises occupied almost exclusively by eerily suntanned alcoholics. (laughter) A Mexican dwarf lady used to sell drugs from a pick-up truck in the parking lot, and she'd throw me a jaunty little wink each day as I passed by, and I would return it in kind – very strange, the lovely poignancy the years have given to that odd flirtation.

Random sounds and feelings come forth from the backways of time: I hear the afternoon clicking of the dominoes in Liverpool as the old dudes gambled and smoked heroically in the Chinatown social clubs; I feel the malevolent wind that lifts from the port of Leith to a salty Edinburgh New Town and it leaves you with a face on like a skinned haggis.  I remember the very strange mansion in the woods outside Ithaca, in upstate New York, where we were allowed to rent the basement after the elderly owner had died but she seemingly lingered.  In the small hours of the night there would be a shuffling upstairs and the lights would come on, though nobody lived there anymore.  We had a groundhog in the garden.  I'd go outside for a fag in the morning pale-faced after a night of ghosts and the groundhog and I used to sit and stare at each other.  I've since quit smoking but whenever I imagine those luxurious tars and resins I see a groundhog.

These memories are stirred each day as I cycle the Sligo countryside.  After a sullen morning at the desk, and then the Harold Lloyd slapstick of my attempts at DIY, I get on my bicycle and I pedal through the drizzle and the quiet.  The effort required for the steep gradients of the hills releases endorphins and these cause a giddiness.  As I ratchet up through the gears I make up nonsense songs and sing them aloud.  There are farmers in the vicinity who may believe me not to be the full shilling. (laughter)

I remember being peeled from the walls of questionable nightclubs in the city of Cork.  I remember the slow months in a room the size of a cupboard in Barcelona – I could make toast without getting out of bed. (laughter)  And I remember being a kid in Limerick, a serial truant, lying low around the back lanes and side streets of the city and that chill of excitement when you learn the hidden town.  But if I cycle a little faster, the past gives way to the moment, and the moment has its own romances.  It would take a heart of stone not to imagine a music for the place names I pass by: Templehouse Lake; the Plain of Moytura; Ballindoon Abbey; the Caves of Kesh.  The names have melody and are themselves a song.

Now I make frequent jailbreaks from The Barracks still. Bleak February groans to life and I'm history, I bolt for Andalucía. But when I'm away now I think about the chair by the stove in the Barracks, the squishy red armchair in which I plan to grow old, placid and handsomely fat. (laughter)

The Barracks has given me a place to allow my memories to filter through, and to make stories of them.  Forgive the neat metaphor but a writer's work is to police memory, and the precinct is the past.

A life, however, must be written in the present tense.  And when night falls, I can walk out into the darkness now where the reed fields give on to the lake and there is nothing to be heard but the breeze in the reeds. I tune in to the reed frequencies and a nervous moorhen witters a threat that I should keep my distance. I squat on the old jetty and close my eyes and I listen to the ageless presence of the dark hills beyond.  A feeling descends, for a moment, and then more, and it's something like peace.

Thanks very much. (clapping)

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