Read or watched the news the last few years? Drug dealer shot. Teenager stabs teenager in fight. Man gunned down in front garden. Gangland feud claims another victim. Read many works of Irish literary fiction the last few years? Not much of a crossover between those headlines and the books is there?
Why, because most Irish writers don’t live in those parts of the country where those things happen. I do. Most Irish writers, to be fair them, wouldn’t be able to write about those places, or the people that live there, in any kind of authentic way, so it might be best if they don’t, or if they do want to take a stab at it, better do some deep research.
My research in this field has been going on for the last 40-odd years of living in Dublin’s north inner city. All writers have their subjects, themes, obsessions, that they write about, and that’s their prerogative, and they have no obligation to write about anything other than that which they want to or are compelled to.
After writing my novel, The Blocks (New Binary Press, 2016), a roman-a-clef based on my own life experiences and the lives of friends and family, I was compelled to write a book in which I did not appear as a character, that was completely about the lives of others, some based on, or more of a riff on real people that I knew, some purely fictional, some composite creations made of elements of the real and the imagined. I didn’t want any alter ego, no me, no writer as protagonist. Although I am surely in there as narrator, in the background pulling the strings, and sometimes having my strings pulled by the characters in The Grind.
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When I started writing The Grind, six years ago, I set out to write a work of literary fiction about the people from my lower-working-class background, that seemed to be headline makers in their deaths only, newsworthy as statistics, and shocking headlines that most people will read once then continue to eat lunch, get the kids ready for bed, go to the gym, live their lives, in other words.
I wanted to write about the people in those headlines as they lived, how they died, what led to those deaths, the environment that breeds the nihilistic violence of mostly young or middle-aged men who according to the CSO make up 80 per cent of all homicides in Ireland. Young men murdered by other young violent men. Women get to speak in the book too, women from the same lower-class background, the ones who rarely, except from a few exceptions, get to be heard on the TV, or panels. Single mothers. Mothers of drug-addicted or gangster sons.
Women continue to be murdered by violent men, and they’re sexually assaulted and raped at a much higher rate than men are. There are heroic figures in the book too, an MMA fighter, an artist. But The Grind is my darkest book. Written in a dark time. Close family members’ and friends’ deaths, the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that went with it, a neverending viscous and stupefying ‘Culture’ war, actual war breaking out in Europe along with the continuing territorial wars around the world, and the looming threat of climate change. The title of the book represents some of this, the grind of it all, the grind of the news, the daily grind, out on the grind, the grind of the drug trade, the grind of what Blake called the mind-forged manacles.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the only writer to take on the task of writing about characters from the drug world, the violent underclass - there are Lisa McInerney, Colin Barrett, crime fiction novels, anomalies in the world of Irish literature. The writers that influenced the book, though, are mostly non-Irish: Flannery O ‘Conner, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Price, Hubert Selby Jr, Marlon James.
The Grind is influenced by cinema and TV as much as any book or writer: The Wire, The Sopranos, OZ, Scorsese, Coppola, City of God, Love/Hate. I tried to use in some of the stories a kind of filmic technique, or a camera eye, not so the book can be a long-winded pitch for a movie deal (but I’ll take one if its offered, cost a living an all that) but rather to keep the prose modern, give the stories a feeling of happening in our time, in the hope that if a young person may read the book, it might speak to them on a level of familiarity. Whether I succeeded or not, is not for me to judge. Readers and/or critics will have to decide that for themselves.
I genuinely hope that I succeeded in what I set out to achieve with The Grind. A true work of art, an expression of some sort of philosophical truth, which I believe is the true mark of a genuine work of literature. A book about characters that don’t get to appear often if at all in works of literary fiction in Ireland: drug dealers and drug addicts, MMA fighters, boxers, gangsters. A book that looks at and confronts the darkness in society that is top down from the warmongering, gun-toting rulers of the world, through a microcosm of a small underclass of people, in a small setting of the tower blocks and social housing estates of northside Dublin, my community, to examine violence, in particular male violence, addiction and obsessions of the mind, to paint a picture in words of what Buddha called Duhkha, suffering, stress, unsatisfactoriness, pain.
To portray the world of samsara, and show Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering, The Buddha also preached the noble truth that there is a way out of suffering. I may have hinted at that or let a sliver of the light of that truth shine in at least one or two of the stories in The Grind, if you look hard enough, if you look in the right way. Maybe my next book will explore that way out of suffering through the Buddha’s eightfold path. We’ll just have to wait and see. For now though, I hope you get through The Grind.
