Paul Murray Transcript

Listen to Paul Murray talk and reading.

Welcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode author Paul Murray reads from his novel ‘Skippy Dies’, and takes questions from the audience. Recorded in the Central Library on 27 of May 2011 as part of its 'Dublin Revealed' series.

Rita McCann: My name is Rita McCann and on behalf of Irish Literature Exchange I just want to begin today by extending our thanks to the Library, to Dublin City Central Library, for their cooperation in organising this four fiction Friday series of readings and especially to Padraic and to Bernadette for all their help and for making this lovely venue available to us.  I want to say a special thank you to everybody who is here in the audience and to all the people who came to the last three events, for really making them such enjoyable and memorable occasions so thank you all.  Now before we get underway I’m just going to take a moment to introduce our organisation and to tell you a little bit about our work.  Ireland Literature Exchange or ILE is the national organisation for the promotion of Irish literature abroad.  So we do that in a number of ways but primarily by awarding translation grants to foreign publishers to help make great works of Irish literature available to readers right around the world.  So we actually have a couple of examples, we have the German translation of Skippy Dies and the Italian translation.  Now these are just two of over 1,500 works translated into over 40 languages with the help of ILE.  In addition to this ILE supports the participation of Irish writers at events and festivals around the world and we host some literary translators here in Ireland.  So at the moment we have a Russian translator of Irish literature and the Turkish translator of Flann O’Brien who I’m delighted to say is joining us today and they’re here to research and work on their translations.  To complement these what we call core programmes ILE also attends some of the major world book fairs, we organise events here at home and abroad and we produce a range of promotional materials which are aimed at highlighting the remarkable breadth and quality that exists in Irish writing.  I’m sure that you all know that Irish writers are renowned right around the world and really it’s ILE’s job to make sure that the current generation of Irish writers is just as well known as the canonical giants and it’s for that reason that it gives me particular pleasure to introduce today one of Irelands most acclaimed young writers Paul Murray.  Paul is a native of Dublin.  He studied English Literature at Trinity College and also completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.  He is the author of two novels, An Evening of Long Goodbyes was published in 2003.  It was short-listed for a Whitbread prize and also nominated for a Kerry Irish Fiction Award.  His second novel, Skippy Dies, was published to great critical acclaim in 2010 and was long-listed for Man Booker Prize in that year.  It was also number 3 in Time Magazine’s top 10 works of fiction from 2010 and if I can read for moment in her review in the Irish Times Eileen Battersby writes "Novels rarely come as funny and as moving as this utterly brilliant exploration of teenhood and the anti-climax of becoming an adult.  Skippy Dies is intuitive, truthful and one of the finest comic novels written anywhere."

I think that says it all and I don’t think much further introduction is needed.  Just to say that we are really delighted and honoured that Paul has agreed to be here today and so without any further ado I will hand you over to Paul Murray.  Thank you.  (clapping)

Paul Murray: Hi everybody.  Thanks for coming.  Thanks to Padraic and the Ilac Library for hosting us today and can I say thanks to Rita for the lovely introduction.  The ILE does really good work.  Translation is really expensive and my books tend to be really long and the publishers go like “Your book is costing us so much money Paul I don’t know what we’re going to do” (laughter) so it is very helpful to have the ILE there just because otherwise I don’t think they would get published.  I had a great German translator, he didn’t do this book but he did the last book, called Wolfgang who was this very sort of depressive guy who would call up and he always sounded like he just about sort of 6 inches away from killing himself and my book wasn’t helping (laughter) so he’d go "okay Paul, page 10, Charles is on the ball, is he standing on a ball?" and you’d go "no, no that means he’s sort of you know" ... and he’d go "okay, okay page 12  blah, blah, blah, page 13, blah, blah, blah, page 14, blah, blah, blah, blah, ah page 16", and so on and so on through the book, like blah, blah, blah was basically the meaning of the book for Wolfgang, you know.  The only time he got excited was when we started talking about the Rolling Stones “Have you ever seen the Rolling Stones play Paul?  I’ve seen them play three times.  Once on a very big stage, once on a medium size stage, once on a very small stage”.  (laughter)  I’m rambling.  I’m going to read.  Because it’s quite early in the day for me I’m going to read sort of the one less maniacal parts of the book.  The book is set in Seabrook College for boys.  Most of the characters are 14-year-old boys but there’s also a teacher, there’s a history teacher called Howard, who is sort of an old boy of the school who has come back.  He’s failed.  He went to London to work in the city and he failed disastrously so he’s ended up coming back to the school to teach in the classic sort of those who can’t do teach style.  So he’s quite a bad teacher.

In Our Lady’s Hall, hormonal surges have made giants and midgets of the crowd.  The tang of adolescence, impervious to deodorant or open windows, hangs heavy, and the air tintinnabulates with bleeps, chimes and trebly shards of music as 200 mobile phones, banned during the school day, are switched back on with the urgency of divers reconnecting to their oxygen supply.  From her alcove a safe elevation above it, the plaster Madonna with the starred halo and the peaches-and-cream complexion pouts coquettishly at the rampaging maleness below. 

‘Hey, Flubber!’ Dennis Hoey scampers across Howard’s path to waylay William ‘Flubber’ Cooke.  ‘Hey, I just wanted to ask you a question?’

‘What?’ Flubber immediately suspicious. 

‘Uh, I was just wondering - are you a bummer tied to a tree?’ says Dennis.  Brows creasing, Flubber - 14 stone and on his 3rd trip through 2nd year - turns this over. 

‘It’s not a trick or anything,’ promises Dennis. ‘I just wanted to know, you know, if you’re a bummer tied to a tree?’

‘ No,’ Flubber resolves, at which Dennis takes flight, declaring exuberantly, ‘Bummer on the loose! Bummer on the loose!’  Flubber lets out a roar and prepares to give chase and then stops abruptly and ducks off in the other direction as the crowd parts and a tall, cadaverous figure comes striding through. 

Father Jerome Green:  teacher of French, coordinator of Seabrook’s charitable works, and by some stretch the school’s most terrifying personage.  Wherever he goes it’s with two or three bodies’ worth of empty space around him, as if he’s accompanied by an invisible retinue of pitchfork-wielding goblins, ready to jab at anyone who happens to be harbouring an impure thought.  As he passes, Howard musters a weak smile; the priest glares back at him the same way he does at everyone with the kind of ready, impersonal disapproval so adept at looking into man’s soul and seeing sin, desire, ferment that he does it now like ticking a box.  Sometimes Howard feels dispiritedly as if not one thing has changed here in the 10 years since he graduated.  The priests in particular bring this out on him, the hale ones are still hale, the doddery ones still dodder; Father Green still collects canned food for Africa and terrorises the boys.  Father Laughton still gets teary eyed when he presents the works of Bach to his unheeding classes.  Father Foley still gives ‘guidance’ to troubled youngsters invariably in a form of an admonition to play more rugby.  On bad days Howard sees their endurance as a kind of personal rebuke - as if that almost-decade of life between matriculation and his ignominious return here had, because of his own ineptitude, been rolled back, struck from the record, deemed merely so much fudge. 

Of course this is pure paranoia, the priests are not immortal, the Holy Paraclete Fathers are experiencing the same problem as every other Catholic order: they’re dying out.  Few of the priests in Seabrook are under 60, and the newest recruit to the pastoral programme - one of an ever dwindling number - is a young seminarian from somewhere outside Kinshasa; when the school principal, Father Desmond Furlong, fell ill at the beginning of September, it was a layman - economics teacher Gregory L. Costigan - who took the reins, for the first time in Seabrook’s History.

Leaving behind the wood-panelled halls of the Old Building, Howard passes up the Annexe, climbs the stairs, and opens, with the usual frisson of weirdness, the door marked ‘Staff-room’.  Inside, a dozen of his colleagues are kvetching, marking homework or changing their nicotine patches.  Without addressing anyone or otherwise signalling his presence, Howard goes to his locker and throws a couple of books and a pile of copies into his briefcase; then, moving crab-like to avoid eye contact, he steals out of the room again.  He clatters back down the stairs in the now-deserted corridor, eyes fixed terminally on the exit - when he’s arrested by the sound of a young female voice.  It appears that, although the bell for the end of the school day ran a good 5 minutes ago, class in the Geography room is still in full swing.  Crouching slightly, Howard peers through the narrow window set in the door, the boys inside show no sign of impatience; in fact, by their expressions, they’re quite oblivious to the passage of time. 

The reason for this stands at the head of the class.  Her name is Miss McIntyre; she is a substitute.  Howard has caught of glimpses of her before in the staffroom and on the corridor, but he hasn’t managed to speak to her yet.  In the cavernous depths of the Geography Room, she draws the eyes like a flame.  Her blonde hair has that cascading quality you normally see only in TV ads for shampoo, complemented by a sophisticated magnolia two-piece more suited to a boardroom than a transition year class; her voice, while soft and melodious, has at the same time an ungainsayable quality, an undertone of command.  In the crook of her arm she cradles a globe, which while she speaks she caresses absently as if it were a fat, spoiled house cat.  It almost seems to purr as it revolves langorously under her fingertips. 

‘... just beneath the surface of the earth,’ she is saying, ‘temperatures so high that the rock itself is molten – can anybody tell me what it’s called, this molten rock?’

‘ Magma’, croak several boys at once.  ‘And what do you call it, when it bursts up onto the earth’s surface from a volcano?’

‘ Lava’ (laughter) they respond tremulously. 

‘Excellent! And millions of years ago there was an enormous amount of volcanic activity with Magma boiling up over the entire surface of the earth nonstop, the landscape around us today’ -  she runs a lacquered fingernail down a swelling ridge of mountain – ‘is mostly the legacy of this era, when the whole plant was experiencing dramatic physical changes.  I suppose you could call it earth’s teenage years!’

 The class blushes to its collective roots and stares down at its textbook.  She laughs again and spins the globe snapping it under her fingertips like a musician, plucking the strings of a double bass, then catches sight of her watch.  ‘Oh my gosh! Oh, you poor things, I should have let you out 10 minutes ago.  Why didn’t someone say something?’

The class mumbles inaudibly still looking at the book.  ‘Well alright ...’She turns to write their homework on the blackboard, reaching up so that her skirt rises to expose the back of her knees; moments later the door opens, and the boys troop reluctantly out.  Howard, affecting to study at the photographs on the notice board of the hill-walking club’s recent outing to Djouce Mountain, watches from the corner of his eye until the flow of grey jumpers has ceased.  When she fails to appear, he goes back to investi-

‘Oh!’

‘ Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’  He hunkers down beside her and helps her re-amass the pages that have fluttered all over the gritty corridor floor.  ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you, I was just rushing back to a ... a meeting ...’

‘That’s alright,’ she says, ‘thank you’ as he places a sheaf of Ordinance Survey maps on top of the stack she’s gathered back in her arms. ‘ Thank you,’ she repeats, looking directly into his eyes, and continuing to look into them as they rise in unison to their feet, so that Howard, finding himself unable to look away, feels a brief moment of panic, as if they’ve somehow become locked together, like those apocryphal stories you hear about the kids who get their braces stuck together while kisses and have to get the fire brigade to cut them out.  (laughter)

 ‘Sorry,’ he says again, reflexively.

‘Stop apologising,’ she laughs. 

He introduces himself.  ‘I’m Howard Fallon he says, I teach History.  You’re standing in for Finian Ó Dálaigh?’

‘That’s right,’ she says.  ‘Apparently he’s going to be out till Christmas, whatever happened to him.’ 

‘Gallstones,’ Howard says.

‘Oh,’ she says. 

Howard wishes he could unsay gallstones.  ‘So,’ he re-begins effortfully, ‘I’m actually on my way home can I give you a lift?’

 She cocks her head.  ‘Didn’t you have a meeting?’

‘Yes,’ he remembers.  ‘But it’s not really that important.’

‘ I have my own car, thanks all the same,’ she says. ‘But I suppose you could carry my books, if you like.’

‘ Okay,’ Howard says.  Possibly the offer is ironic, but before she can retract it he removes the stack of binders and textbooks from her hands and, ignoring the homicidal looks from a small clump of her pupils still mooning about the corridor, walks alongside her to the exit. 

‘So, how are you finding it?’ he asks attempting to haul the conversation back to a more equilibrious state.  ‘Have you taught much before, or is this your first time?’ 

‘Oh’ -  she blows upwards at wayward strand of golden hair – ‘I’m not a teacher by profession.  I’m just doing this as a favour for Greg, really. Mr Costigan, I mean.  God, I’d forgotten about this Mister and Miss stuff.  It’s so funny.  Miss McIntyre.’

‘ Staff are allowed use first names you know.’ Howard says. 

‘Mmm .... yes actually I’m quite enjoying being Miss McIntyre.  Anyhow, Greg and I were talking one day and he was saying that they were having problems finding a good substitute, and it so happens that once upon a time I had fantasies of being a teacher, and I was between contracts, so I thought why not?’

‘ What’s your field normally?’  He holds open the main door for her and they step out into the autumn air which has grown cold and crisp. 

‘Investment banking?’ she says.

 Howard receives this information with a studied neutrality, then says casually, ‘I used to work in that area myself, actually.  Spent about 2 years in the City.  Futures primarily.’

‘ What happened?’ she says.

 He cracks a grin, ‘Don’t you read the papers?  Not enough future to go around.’

 She doesn’t react, waiting for the correct answer.

‘Well, I mean I’ll probably get back into it someday,’ he blusters.  ‘This is just a temporary thing, really.  I sort of fell into it.  Although at the same time, it’s nice, I think, to give something back? To feel like you’re making a difference?’  They make their way around the 6th years’ car park, a series of Lexuses and TTs – and Howard’s heart sinks as his own car comes into view. 

‘What’s with the feathers?’ she says.

‘ Oh it’s nothing.’  He sweeps his hand over the car’s roof, ploughing a mighty drift of white feathers over the side, they pluff to the ground, from where some float back up to adhere to his trousers.  Miss McIntyre takes a step backwards.  ‘It’s just a ... ah, sort of a gag the boys play.’

‘They call you Howard the Coward,’ she remarks, like a tourist enquiring the meaning of a puzzling local idiom.

‘ Yes.’ Howard laughs mirthlessly, shovelling more feathers from his windscreen and bonnet and not offering an explanation. 

‘You know, they’re good kids, generally, in this place, but there’s a few that can be a bit, ah,  high spirited.’

‘ I’ll be on my guard,’ she says. 

‘Well, like I say, it’s just a small percentage.  Most of them ... I mean, generally speaking it’s a wonderful place to work.’

‘ You’re covered in feathers,’ she says judiciously. 

‘Yes,’ he harrumphs swiping his trousers summarily, straightening his tie.  Her eyes, which are a brilliant and dazzling shade of blue custom-made for sparkling mockingly, sparkle mockingly at him.  Howard has had enough humiliation for one day; he’s just about to bow out with the last shreds of his dignity, when she says, ‘So what’s it like, teaching History?’

‘ What’s it like?’ he repeats. 

‘I’m really liking doing Geography again.’ she gazes dreamingly around at the ice-blue sky and the yellowing trees.  You know, these titanic battles between different forces that actually created the shape of the world we’re walking around in today ... it’s so dramatic ...’ She squeezes her hand sensually, a goddess forging worlds out of raw matter, then fixes The Eyes on Howard again. ‘And History - that must be so much fun? 

It’s not the first word that springs to mind but Howard limits himself to a bland smile. 

‘What are you teaching at the moment?’

‘ Well, in my last class we were doing the First World War.’ he says. 

‘Oh!’ She claps her hands.  'I love the First World War.  The boys must be enjoying that.’

‘ You’d be surprised,’ he says. 

‘You should read them Robert Graves,’ she says. 

‘Who?’

‘ He was in the trenches,’ she replies’ then adds, after a pause, ‘he was one of the great love poets as well.’

‘ I’ll take a look,’ he scowls.  ‘Any other tip for me?  Any other lessons you’ve gleaned from your five days in the profession?’

 She laughs.  ‘If I have any more I’ll be sure and pass them on it sounds like you need them.’.  She lifts the books out of Howard’s arms and aims her car key at the enormous white-gold SUV parked next door to Howard’s dilapidated BlueBird.  ‘See you tomorrow,’ she says. 

‘Right,’ Howard says. 

But she doesn’t move and neither does he: she holds him there a moment purely by the light of her spectacular eyes, looking him over with the tip of her tongue tucked in the corner of her mouth, as if she’s deciding what to have for dinner.  Then, smiling at him coyly with a row of pointed white teeth, she says, ‘You know, I’m not going to sleep with you.’

 At first Howard is sure he must have misheard her; and when he realises that he has not, he is still too stunned to reply.  So he just stands there, or perhaps totters, and the next thing he knows she’s climbed into her jeep and pulled away sending white feathers swirling about his ankles.

I’m just going to read this last little coda out which sort of explains the nickname.

Howard the Coward: yes, that’s what they call him.  Howard the Coward. Feathers; eggs left on his seat; a yellow streak executed in chalk, on his teacher’s cape; once a whole frozen chicken there on the desk, trussed, dimpled, humiliated.

‘It’s because it rhymes with Howard, that’s all,’ Halley (that’s his girlfriend) tells him.  ‘Like if your name was Ray, they’d call you Gay Ray.  Or if it was Mary they’d call you Scary Mary.  It’s just the way their brains work, it doesn’t mean anything.’

‘ It means they know.’ Howard says.

‘Oh God, Howard, one little bump, and it was years and years ago.  How could they possibly know about that?’

‘They just do.’

‘Well, even if they do.   I know you’re not a coward.  They’re just kids, they can’t see into your soul.’

But she is wrong.  That is exactly what they can do.  Old enough to have a decent mechanical understanding of how the world works, but young enough for their judgements to remain unfogged by anything like mercy or compassion or the realisation that all this will one day happen to them, the boys - his students - are machines for seeing through the apparatus of worldliness that adulthood, as figured by their teachers, surrounds itself with, to the grinding emptiness at its heart.  They find it hilarious and the names they give the other teachers seem so unerringly right.  Malco the Alco? Big Fat Johnson? Lurch?

Howard the Coward.  Fuck!  Who told her.

I’ll stop there.  Thanks. (clapping)

Questions

Rita: Paul if I could start by just asking you a really basic question just about where the inspiration for the novel came and why you decided to set it in a school and especially an institution like Seabrook, that’s quite unique?

Paul It was going to be a short story.  (laughter)  It started off as a ... the short story was that chapter I just read like was going to be a two hander, it was going to be the history teacher or he was going to be a biology teacher originally, a teacher and this kid Skippy in his class who had some sort of a problem and it was just going to be a two hander.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul And really just when I started writing that chapter basically as soon as Howard stepped out of the classroom, as he does like at the beginning of the bit I just read there, it just kind of kept rolling and rolling and I was just really enjoying writing, you know, just describing that environment and describing the other boys and describing, you know, these strange freakish teacher that are working there and I kind of very quickly realised that writing about a school it’s very liberating ...

Rita: Okay.

Paul ... because the teenagers are, you know, if you’ve met a teenager or been a teenager they’re unhinged like they’ll do anything or they’ll say anything.

Rita: They are.

Paul So it meant the story could go to all kinds of quite strange places but also because everyone has been to story it meant that no matter how weird the story got that sort of prism that all the stories were sort of defracted through was one that like readers would be familiar with so it made ... because that setting was so familiar it meant like that the story could go to stranger places and people would still feel anchored by that.

Rita: Relate.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: Yeah.  I have to say it certainly took me back to the horrors of being a teenager, you know, all that self doubt ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... and, you know, on some level you think you know everything and on other levels nothing makes sense but actually I think the character of Howard is really interesting because he’s in some ways more like the teenage boys than some of the older adults.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rita: And I think is it one of his friends talks about it being ‘the age of the kidult’.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rita: Could you talk about that a little bit? 

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: About these kind of younger generation of adults who are somehow caught between being proper grown-ups and being teenagers somehow.

Paul: Yeah. Like sometimes people ask me like was it difficult to sort of project myself back into the mind of a teenager when sort of writing the book and I think that there’s much less of a gap between today’s teenagers and today’s adults than there was.  Like I’m 35 now and there’s much less of a gap between myself and sort of a contemporary teenager than there would have been like in my father’s time between like a 35 year old man and a teenager.

Rita: Absolutely.

Paul: Because ... well I mean I went to see Kevin Barry read yesterday with John Butler and they were talking about the same thing just about how your 20s nowadays are sort of kind of a lost decade in which people spend kind of 10 years just sort of tooling about and kind of going what do I want to do with my life, you know, I’m not really sure.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: (laughter) Where do I go?  And your sort of unfortunate parents are kind of funding this very slow voyage of self-discovery.  So ...

Rita: I think Howard is very much on that voyage and he’s sort of at the point, isn’t he, where he’s looking for some great meaning in life.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rita: And he seems to be constantly getting disappointed I think.

Paul: Yeah I mean I think that that’s sort of ... that yeah, basically sort of adolescence is a much more attenuated affair than it used to be and you’re encouraged to just the way that we’re encouraged to think of ourselves in a modern world, you know, you sort of think of yourself as like the star of your own little film which is a very sort of narcissistic way of thinking ...

Rita: Absolutely.

Paul: ... and it means that you’re sort of ignoring a lot of the real things that go on around you so on the one hand it’s sort of a gag that this teacher is like equally or even more immature than the students but also like it has very, you know, it has serious consequences because like no-one is looking out for these kids like the adults in their lives are preoccupied with, you know ...

Rita: With their own stories.

Paul: ... just going on like ridiculous like Howard is sort of hung on this like beautiful geography teacher ...

Rita: (laughs) Yeah.

Paul: ... and his friend Farrelly who is like also a teacher in the school.

Rita: On their own quest I think Halley goes it, doesn’t she?

Paul: A quest ... yeah, but it’s a quest of false grails ...

Rita: Absolutely.

Paul: ... like everyone in the book is pursuing these like romantic ideals which is again like a very sort of idealistic teenage way of seeing the world and like ultimately like adulthood is like a massive process of disillusionment (laughter) wherein you realise that like all the kind of crazy dreams you had of like marrying Beyonce or being a Ninja or whatever (laughter) none of those things are going to happen, you know.  If you’re lucky you’ll be a dentist and you’ll have a nice house in wherever – Sandycove – but that’s, you know, ...

Rita: That’s about it.

Paul: ... yeah.

Rita: It’s what I suppose Eileen Battersby said, the anti-climax of adulthood.

Paul: Yeah and learning to deal with that and learning to actually live in the real world and take responsibility for the people that are around you, you know, instead of living ... instead of just being self-absorbed and, you know.

Rita: Expecting things to come to you that may not I suppose.

Paul: Yeah sure, yeah.

Rita: I suppose the counterpoint to that is that like you said these teenagers are sort of left alone and not being watched a lot ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... particularly, you know, boys in a boarding school.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: I think as well while maybe adolescence is going into your 20s there’s also a lot of more adult influences on teenagers these days than say for our generation.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rita: You certainly notice in the book that some of the teenagers have really serious issues like, you know, drug abuse or anorexia ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... do you think it’s harder to be a teenager now, you know, than say when we were in school?  Or is it a different thing?

Paul: I think the teenage years are always really hard because I just think your mental state is so ... just the way, the lens through which you see the world is so, you know, dark and clouded that wherever, you know, you could be on like, you know, I mean yeah wherever you are you will be miserable I think (laughter) but I do think like the challenges that this generation of teenagers face are ... yeah, they are less protected than they used to be in some ways, yeah.  I mean I say that with a certain amount of, you know, I mean you look at sort of the disastrous way that like the teenagers of the 50s and 60s and 70s were treated ...

Rita: Sure.

Paul: ... in this country, you know, teenagers from a certain class but yeah I mean there are like very dangerous ... and also like it all seems kind of interrelated, like it all seems ... teenagers are now fair game in a way that they weren’t before like teenagers are the marketing man’s dream, like everybody wants to be able to sell their stuff to teenagers because teenagers are so vulnerable and so lost that they’ll buy anything like if you dangle it in front of them like if you get, you know, whatever like Britney Spears to put it on her head or whatever they’ll buy it, you know.

Rita: And they have the money now, that’s the difference isn’t it?

Paul: And they got ... exactly yeah, yeah so there’s like a real cynical sort of exploitation of teenagers to make them feel like unhappy in their own bodies and like dissatisfied with themselves which they already do anyway, you know, but just sort of just grown up people who are making a lot of money out of like exploiting teenagers it’s really just very, very cynical and I think like certainly what happened in Ireland in the Celtic Tiger was that their parents, the parents of that generation, were also like lost and confused and being exploited by, you know, the dudes, like people who were waving the property section of The Irish Times in front of them ...

Rita: Sure.

Paul: ... going this is how you define yourself and ...

Rita:  Absolutely and with things and with money ...

Paul: ... exactly so ...

Rita: ... and I think that’s part of what affects the kids in the book but also adults like Howard ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... is that the way we define ourselves is very different these days.

Paul: Yeah and we don’t ... like the parents don’t really know what to tell the kids because they’re so, you know, they’re equally kind of ...

Rita: Yeah, equally messed up in a way. (laughs)

Paul: ... yeah in some senses yeah, yeah.

Rita: There’s obviously like we said there’s a lot of kind of heavy issues and so on in Skippy Dies and, you know, the kind of tragedy that you expect from the title.

Paul: Yeah, yeah he dies, yeah.

Rita: Yeah, you give that one away very early on (laughs) but actually one thing that’s really commented on a lot in, you know, reviews and interviews and I’m sure by readers ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... is that the novel is very, very funny.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: What strikes me is that, that comes as a surprise, that we don’t expect to find humour in a literary novel.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: Do you think that’s in some way telling, you know, does it tell us something about where the literary novel is at the moment?

Paul: Yeah, yeah it does, yeah.  I mean the book that won the Booker this year was called The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson and it’s sort of a ... I haven’t read it but it’s a comic novel and he’s spoken quite openly about comedy in the novel and like historically the novel has been, like in days of yore when the novel started it was sort of like the antidote to like epic poetry so you’d like, you know, Milton or Homer or whatever writing epic poems in a very lofty style about like heroes and gods and goddesses and so forth and then the novel came along and it was all about just ordinary punters just, you know, eating their dinner or, you know, getting sick or finding their wife sleeping with whoever it was so like it was very prosaic that’s what prose means, you know, it’s all about the ordinary and the ordinary is what I want, like it can be tragic, it can be harrowing but it’s also somewhat ridiculous, you know.

Rita: Absolutely.

Paul: So like the novel through the ages like into like whatever Ulysses until very recently has kept that kind of comic strain going through it but recently it seems to me comedy has become sort of unfashionable and I think the reason is that comedy is done so well by other forms now ...

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: ... like it’s done so well like on, you know, you’ve got so many, we’ve got so much TV and so many DVD box sets and like so many YouTube videos of cats playing like ping pong (laughter) ...

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: ... that people get their laughs from elsewhere and people look to the novel for this like rarefied experience.  They want the novel to be ...

Rita: Elitist.

Paul: ... yeah they want it to be posh, they want to be a posh art form and what is posh?  It is sort of grand descriptions of human misery (laughter) so there’s a strange elevation like literarily, you know, it’s like I’m reading like a really beautiful book about the Holocaust, god it’s so moving and it’s so, you know ...

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: ... I find that stuff ... I’m very, very cautious of stuff that sets itself up as serious and doesn’t think that the ordinary life is worth writing about or doesn’t think that ordinary life is funny, you know, because it is funny

Rita: Yeah or even that, you know, by putting humour in it you may get less high literature if you like.

Paul: Yeah sure, yeah, yeah.

Rita: Actually you talked about Kevin Barry earlier ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... and he was here last week for one of our events ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... and he mentioned actually that I mean sales of literary novels continue to plummet I think was the word he used ...

Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rita: ... do you think that it’s time for ...

Paul: Getting another job?  (laughter)

Rita: ... well yeah maybe getting another job (laughter) or for the literary novel to be reinvented in some way to kind of reconnect it with popular culture so that it’s not seen as this elitist thing that ...

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rita:. ... it becomes part of just people’s lives and they can connect to it.

Paul: Yeah sure.  I mean I think literature really suffers from this kind of like ivory tower because it means that, you know, the majority of people who don’t want a posh experience (laughter), you know, feel like that it’s not for them, you know, so like for instance getting teenagers to read your book like because I mean I’ve done a few readings and like it’s really great when teenagers come up and say oh wow I really like your book, you know, it felt authentic.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: Just teenagers reading books at all is really exciting and kind of a relief as well.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: But I think like yeah writers like need to obviously like you don’t want to ... it’s not a question of dumbing down but I do think like you can’t write like you can’t ... I don’t think you can be Virginia Woolf any more, like I really don’t think you can, like I don’t think you can write sort of high modernist text, I don’t think the writers are sort of a figure on a mountain anymore delivering wisdom down to the people like I think on the one hand like writers are now sort of public figures in a way they never were before ...

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: ... so you’ve got like folks, you know me and Kevin, coming out and doing our juggling and you know whatever and meeting readers in a way that’s all quite new, you know.

Rita: That’s new.

Paul: And by the same token, you know, you write what you want to write but at the same time you have to be aware that your reader if she gets bored is going to have a lot of other things to distract her, you know.

Rita: To do.

Paul: And I think that reading is something that is to be enjoyed so yeah I think that writers need to get that message out there that books are ...

Rita: It’s funny you mentioned you know about getting teenagers to read books ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... because I have a nephew who is 18 and he doesn’t read a lot and I actually handed him Skippy Dies and said okay just read this bit and it’s the bit about the Robert Frost poem.

Paul: Oh yeah. (laughter)

Rita: So he was in stitches and he said okay can I take this which is really great ...

Paul: Okay yeah.

Rita: ... and I think it’s because he could actually connect to the humour.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: But he obviously then gets to experience all of the rest that’s in the book ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... all of the rest of the themes and the messages and the characters.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: So I think that’s a really good thing and also that if you ... because in your book obviously there are mentions of, you know, popular music, of things that teenagers are interested in so that kind of connection to other media makes that novel ... the novel may be seen like it’s part of wider culture rather that something separate.

Paul: Yeah well I mean it’s really interesting time to be alive and writing like I mean the Celtic Tiger was such a, you know, it was like Aesop’s Fables (laughter) like you know there was just such an interesting ... just that transition was so huge on such a comprehensive level that it was gold for a writer (laughter) and on a wider like sort of a macro global level like the whole transition into like the digital world it’s ... I mean I saw William Gibson read - god about 10 years ago - and I asked a question at the end like I said like how important do you think the invention of the computer is and he said after sort of sniggering he said I think it’s as important as the founding of the first city ...

Rita: Wow.

Paul: ... and I think we’re living in this time like the last whatever 20 years has been like just the most ...

Rita: It has.

Paul: ... and the next 20 years are probably the most seismic era in ... one hesitates to say the history of civilisation but ...

Rita: Yeah or human evolution in a sense.

Paul: ... like it’s just the way that we conceive of reality is changing so drastically, you know.

Rita: Yeah

Paul: The relationship we have with our own bodies, a bit like places, you know, in 10 years time maybe no-one will come to readings like this because we won’t go outside everything will be virtual and, you know, it’s such an interesting time and I really think that the novel ... because the novel is such a capacious form like you can do so many things with a novel.

Rita: Absolutely.

Paul: And you can sort of ... I think it’s really interesting to try and capture that like fragmented reality that we’re living in now like I really think that the writer has sort of a responsibility to try and catch that as opposed to looking backwards all the time and writing about ... because it’s sort of one of the kind of corollary of the posh literature thing is that writers write about the authentic and the authentic secretly means the beautiful and the beautiful is basically the old, the unthreatening, you know ...

Rita: The past.

Paul: ... it’s swans floating over a lake full of donkeys and ships versus kidnapping maids. (laughter)

Rita: There’s a lot of thing in ... like Irish writing especially that there’s a lot of memoir there’s a lot of childhood stories ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... but in a sense you’re avoiding kind of examining what’s going on now and things are changing so much so ...

Paul: Sure yeah, yeah.

Rita: ... it will be interesting to see how that develops.

Paul: Yeah definitely.

Rita: Another interesting thing recently is I heard that there’s going to be a film maybe of Skippy Dies can you tell us about that or is it ...?

Paul: Yeah I mean Neil Jordan optioned us which is really exciting because he’s a great director and he’s also a great novelist and he’s from Dublin ...

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: ... so he sort of ticks a lot of ... like if you were going to have someone, you know, making a film of your book which like writers are sort of wary about but they need the money (laughter) but he’s the guy you’d want to do it.  That said I don’t know what’s happening with it right now.  I think that he’s a busy man, you know.

Rita: He is, he is that’s true.

Paul: So he just ... when I met him, I met last year and he just finished shooting The Borgias, this TV show about the Borgias which hasn’t ...

Rita: Okay.

Paul: ... has that aired?  I don’t think it’s aired yet here.

Rita: I don’t think so.

Paul: It’s like the Tudors except it’s about the Borgias and he was filming it in Hungary and then he was bringing out his own, Mistaken came out at Christmas time.

Rita: Yes, yeah.

Paul: And then he was going to start working on the screenplay.

Rita: Great.

Paul: So fingers crossed, yeah, but they don’t tell me anything, yeah.

Rita: Yeah.  Are you particularly interested in seeing how like, you know, your characters translate to the screen?

Paul: Yeah, it’ll be really hard because like it’s mostly sort of 14 year olds (laughter) so I don’t know where you’re going to find like sort of 10 gifted 14 year old actors, that would be hard to do.  (laughter)

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: But yeah I mean like it’s sort of scary because like when I met him like because it’s such a long book and like all novels you tend to have to cut a lot out of it.

Rita: For the film.

Paul: And he was going, yeah, I mean like it’s 660 pages so I mean this whole part we’d probably cut all that out (laughter) and cut all that out (laughter) and I’m just there going Jesus man what is this?  (laughter)  So I figure like I mean ...

Rita: It would be an amazing experience.

Paul: ... it would be an amazing experience that you sort of watch through your fingers, you know.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: And as a writer I think he’s quite ... I was watching what’s it called, The End of the Affair, he made a film of The End of the Affair, a Graham Greene novel with Ralph Fiennes plays a writer and Julianne Moore is his beautiful lover and at one point they go to a movie which has been made of Ralph Fiennes book and he’s just watching it through his fingers like that, you know, (laughter) and I figure that’s Jordan going, you know, sorry mate, that’s what I have to do.

Rita: (laughter) It’s my turn.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rita: I think I’ve probably abused my privileges as compare quite enough so does anybody in the audience have a question for Paul?  Yeah?

Participant: Just President Obama was here last Monday and there was 100,000 people in College Green and a lot of those were young people ...

Paul: Yeah.

Participant: ... and I remember when President Kennedy came, all young people were inspired by him.  What is your take on the young people who went to see Obama?

Paul: My girlfriend works in a school just off Parnell Street and 5 of the kids from school or maybe 10 were chosen to go and meet Obama and I was really, really envious of them (laughter).  I think firstly like I mean if you ... it was kind of I was pleased that the kids in the school knew who he was, you know, because they live in a strange world sort of Justin Bieber is sort of like the president in that particular world (laughter) but yeah I thought it was really, really ... I mean I was incredibly moved to see Obama like I was down on the Quays, I happened to be in the Morrison Hotel and I came out on the Quays and everyone was standing along the keys and I saw the motorcade go by and I think I saw his hand at the window of the car (laughter) so I went home and I watched his speech and I found it really, really moving and, even though his star seems to have kind of faded somewhat in the States, it’s really hard to understand, I think he’s like an incredibly inspirational figure.  My friend Claire Kilroy was telling me that he was presented with some children’s books by Enda Kenny and he said “Oh if you want a well-written book go to Ireland”, I’ve been inflicting my Barrack Obama impression on everybody (laughter), which I found like very, very moving but I think that yeah he’s a really inspirational figure and I found it really fantastic that there was so many young people there. I think, you know, because you sort of ... like teenagers are really demonised a lot, you know, in this ... like in most societies I guess and you forget like that they are very ... they’re idealistic people, you know, and they’re waiting for someone to inspire them and unfortunately like this place has been so depressing for the last sort of couple of years and it was so cynical for the few years before that like that I think there was nobody telling them that, you know, yes you can, you know, so I thought it was a really wonderful occasion on so many different levels.  Did Kennedy speak in College Green or ...? 

Participant: Yes.

Paul: He did?  Did you see him?

Participant: Not Kennedy, sorry.

Rita: Clinton.

Participant: Clinton.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: I saw Clinton yeah.

Participant: He spoke down in New Ross.

Paul: In New Ross.  Ah okay, yeah of course, of course.

Rita: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, no, it was great, it was really great, a great day, yeah.

Rita: Anybody else?  Yeah.

Participant: Yeah just to say I read your book and I really do love it.

Paul: Oh thank you very much.

Participant: I absolutely did, I thought it was fantastic.

Paul: Great.

Participant: Really I thought it was very comical.  And we’re reading it for our book club as well, a whole gang of us.

Paul: Okay, brilliant.

Participant: I just wanted to say how long did it take you to write it and did you have crises of confidence along the way?

Rita: That’s a good question.

Paul: Yeah, it took 7 years to write it and it was, yeah, I mean you’re always going to have ... that’s the writing game, that’s the hard part, is the constant battle against doubt, you know, because there’s no-one like it’s very nice when the book comes out and it gets good reviews and, you know, but that doesn’t happen until 2 years after the book is finished, you know, when you’d really like someone to give you good reviews when it’s like a rainy Tuesday and you’re sitting alone in your house and you’ve just written a sentence and you’ve no idea whether it’s any good or not.  It would be great if Eileen Battersby came along (laughter), weird, it would be weird if Eileen Battersby then came along and said that’s a really good sentence, you know, but that would be very helpful.  No the book, like it took 7 years to write, it got to about well over 1,000 pages.  It was so complicated, there were so many plot strands I really wondered if it would ever coalesce and if I’d ever finish it, you know, and on top of the usual writing related doubts and anxieties of just like is this any good but you just don’t know 7 years is a long time, money was running out, no money coming in and also book number 1 starting to vanish from the bookshelves.  You’d go in the bookshop and they didn’t have it anymore, you know, because like it’s sort of, you realise that it sort of doesn’t take long to slip from the public consciousness, you know.  So you sort of stop thinking of yourself as even being a writer which is really scary, you know, so you feel like am I just some crazy person in a basement, you know.  (laughter)  So yeah it was a long haul but as I say like that’s what you unfortunately, not unfortunately at all, it’s a great job to have but that’s the strength you need to develop like just to keep showing up at your desk every day no matter how doomed the project can feel, you know.  And it can feel doomed on bad days, yeah.

Rita: Yeah?

Participant: Just I haven’t read the book yet ...

Paul: Yeah.

Participant: ... but I will do.

Paul: Great.

Participant: I’m looking forward to reading it.  What else have you been working on?  Have you got book number 3 coming out?  Looking forward.

Paul: I’m working on a screenplay right now which is quite interesting.  I haven’t done a screen play before so it’s a strange ... I like writing dialogue but I’ve never ... that’s something that’s just dialogue so it’s quite a porous medium in that like it feels quite light or ethereal or, you know, you realise that there’s so much that isn’t there that has to be put in there by someone else, you know, by the director or by the actors.  So it’s kind of a nice experiment but I’m looking forward to getting back and writing a book hopefully later this summer.  I’ve been saying that for a while now but hopefully later this summer I’ll get back to it and start into the new.

Rita: Great.  Do we have ... yeah?

Participant: The extract that you read reminds me of John Irving an awful lot, or of Tom Wolfe, so I’m wondering are those influences or other people that influence you in your writing?

Paul: I haven’t read John Irving actually.  My agent is a really huge John Irving fan and says the same thing so it’s good to hear.  Tom Wolfe, I don’t know, I read Bonfire of the Vanities years ago.  Like David Foster Wallace was a big one for me, he wrote a big book set in a boarding school so that was a big touch down like all those like American guys I was really obsessed with when I was in my 20s like Pynchon and Don Delillo and like Lorrie Moore.  I like funny writers, there aren’t that many funny writers but those guys are funny.  There’s a writer called George Saunders he writes short stories, an American again, who is really, really funny, a really wild imagination and he’s fantastic, yeah, I like him a lot.

Rita: As I said earlier we have Goulden who is the Turkish translator of Flann O’Brien ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... and she’s started reading Skippy Dies ...

Paul:  Oh cool.

Rita: ... and think she can see some influence there, are you a fan of Flann O’Brien?

Paul: Yeah, no I really like ... yeah all of those guys who are ... I really admire writers who just ...

Goulden: For example Professor Tamashi and De Selby.

Paul: ... yeah, yeah, yeah.

Goulden: ... are obvious I would imagine.

Paul: Yeah I mean he’s ... well it’s sort of a tragic story, the Flann O’Brien story, you know, but just like writers who just did what they wanted like the same with like Joyce and Beckett like just really wild days.

Goulden: Well then the death of Skippy at the very beginning of the novel if Flann O’Brien was alive today it was the kind of death he would definitely choose to ... must write (laughter) ...

Paul: Yes, yeah.

Goulden: ... it was tragically comic

Paul: Yeah.

Goulden: It’s just I held a special connection between you and Flann O’Brien and ...

Paul: Well he went to the same school as me as well, yeah.  He went to the school that I went to, it’s called Blackrock, and it’s a very famous school and Seabrook College, the school in the book, sort of looks a bit like Blackrock, it’s not the same school but it looks a bit like it but Flann O’Brien went there whenever he was a teenager a guess.  (laughter) So I mean like there is like some kind of a connection there like South Dublin, you know, what it does to a person’s mind, you know.  (laughter)

Rita: Okay.

Paul: Yes Sir, yeah?

Participant: Can I ask during this long period of gestation, through the 7 years, I’m curious as to how you paid the rent and the bills during that time did you teach or do anything else?  And what are your disciplines, the habits of writing Paul, is there a set period each day and a number of words or ...?

Paul: Yeah, yeah.  I’m a firm believer in Woody Allen’s line that 80% of success is showing up, I think that just ... Norman Mailer said a similar thing like he said that if you turn up at your desk at the same time every day no matter how hungover or sick or disaffected or whatever, how just not like writing you happen to feel if you do it every day eventually he said your unconscious will start to trust you and you’ll be able to produce even on those days when you think that you won’t be able to.  So the routine would be ... I mean everybody works in different ways but the routine would be very, very important for me and in terms of sort of the anxiety of it as well like it is kind of quite a strange chaotic process when you don’t have the things that like most other people have to give you structure.  Like you don’t have a boss going, you know, where are you? you don’t have like, you know, you decide your own lunch break, you know, you don’t have like a pay cheque coming in at the end of the week, you don’t know if it’s every going to be finished, you know, so the routine becomes quite important like the structure that you give yourself becomes quite important to keep you sane, you know, and to make it feel like a job, sort of demystify it, like I think like de-romanticising it and demystifying the process is quite important otherwise like if you’re sort of waiting for inspiration you could be waiting a long time.  As to how I pay the rent, yeah, I was living in kind of a big shared house full of hippies so the rent wasn’t that much (laughter) yeah it was okay.  It got tight towards the end.  I definitely needed to finish it, you know, (laughter) but yeah I survived, yeah.

Participant: Did you ever teach yourself?

Paul: No I didn’t, no, no, no.  It scares the Christ out of me, teaching.  I’ve got a couple of friends who are teachers and they would tell me stories and my girlfriend works in a school now and again like just amazing stories but I’ve a huge amount of respect for anyone who can, it’s a tough job, definitely yeah.

Rita: It’s a vocation isn’t it?

Paul: Definitely, yeah, no question, yeah.

Rita: Do we have one last question?  Yeah?

Participant: Just wondering either for yourself or Rita how long does it take for the translation to be completed into German or whatever other language?

Paul: Well we can ask...

Rita: Yeah as far as I know I mean it really depends but there’s actually often a lot of commercial pressure on translators so sometimes they are, you know, that’s a very large book but sometimes they are pressurised to get it done in maybe 6 months or even less because obviously the publishers need to get it out. The English language version is usually so predominant that, you know, say especially in countries like Germany or the Netherlands where people read in English, where people might read reviews in English, be very aware of English language culture, that if you wait, you know, give a translator a nice leisurely year to translate a book you’re going to lose a lot of your potential readers so I think it probably sometimes has to happen very quickly so I’m sure that for Wolfgang and people like him ...

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: ... being able to contact the writer is a big help for, you know, idiomatic phrases that they might not know and things like that, yeah.

Paul: Yeah.  Wolfgang is the only guy who called me.

Rita: Oh really?

Paul: Yeah.  He always seemed so sort of unhappy to be calling me, like he’s the only translator who actually did call me up.

Rita: Right (laughs) yeah that’s ...

Paul: Oh it’s Wolfgang how’s it going?  (laughter) Not so good actually.  (laughter)

Rita: Page 16.

Paul: It’s very long.  (laughter)  Yeah it varies, it varies yeah.  I mean they are ... there was two translators working on this in German so ...

Rita: That’s right.

Paul: ... but yeah I think it took them about 6 months to do it yeah.

Rita: Yeah.  What do you think Goulden, is it how long?

Goulden: It depends on the translator I guess.

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: Yeah it can do as well.  A bit like writing I suppose.

Paul: Yeah.

Goulden: Well it’s me writing, it’s not him, so it’s me writing it.

Rita: Yeah, with a whole new set of challenges.  (laughs)

Goulden: Again it depends on whether the translator is working at another job or if he or she devotes all this time totally to the translation.

Rita: Yeah, absolutely.

Gould: So it depends.

Rita: Ah, another vocation.  (laughter)

Paul: Yeah.

Rita: Alright well I think our time is up but once again thank you to everybody for coming and especially to Paul for his time. 

Paul: Thanks.

Rita: Thank you.  (clapping)

 

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