Oisín McKenna on his intoxicating debut novel: ‘I thought of it as writing in a big key, the way a pop song might be’

The summer is almost upon us. By the end of it, Oisín McKenna’s debut novel, Evenings and Weekends, will surely be a much-thumbed book atop many bedside stacks and best-of lists. With it, yet another brilliant Irish voice announces their presence in contemporary literature.

McKenna grew up in Drogheda, Co Louth, and lives in London. Evenings and Weekends is set over the course of a weekend in London, where a series of interlocking moments of hedonism and personal crisis unfold, where relationships solidify and fracture, domestic lives creak under pressure, and the search for release, safety, liberation, love and care play out across a city that feels simultaneously claustrophobic and expansive.

The novel begins with a whale stuck in the Thames. From this, a fractal vista of the then contemporary context (the book is set in 2019) expands. Take the opening pages: “It’s suddenly important to have an opinion. Callers to daytime talkshows wish the whale well and suggest schemes for rescuing it. Crowdfunds are set up, bake sales planned, and thousands of pounds are raised within hours, though some argue that certain causes – food banks, police bail funds, refugees crossing the Mediterranean, injured British army veterans, people in need of gender-affirming care, and generally, Syria – are more deserving of your money. Battle lines are drawn, arguments lost and won. Blame is attributed to some combination of carbon emissions, single-use plastics, the European Union, English nationalism, eco-fascism, the volume of fossil fuel required to keep the internet turned on, and anyone who still buys cheap clothes from high street shops. The exact ratio of factors is yet to be agreed, but one thing is certain: the whale is bad news. It points its finger in accusation. No one is innocent in the whale’s unblinking eyes. You, declares the whale, are morally, spiritually and ecologically bankrupt. The whale is alive, but only just about.”

At the time, lots of people experienced [Corbynism] as an expanded moment of political possibility ... Maybe it’s the only time in my lifetime that might happen

This is intoxicating stuff. There’s Ed, a bike courier torn between settling down with this partner, Maggie, and cruising train station toilets. There’s Maggie, weighing up moving back east to Basildon, and the hold London has on her life. There’s Phil, living for the weekend, and negotiating a relationship with his flatmate Keith. And Phil’s mother, Roseleen, an Irish immigrant whose memory is increasingly drifting westward home. Concerned with themes of deterioration and personal growth, hiding and finding oneself, and the desire for transformation, Evenings and Weekends is a wonderful, almost engulfing reading experience.

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During the recession in Dublin, McKenna, alongside Niamh Beirne, ran the nomadic spoken word event Pettycash, performing work at the now defunct but hugely influential DIY space Jigsaw (formerly Seomra Spraoi), the Dublin Fringe Festival, Electric Picnic, Body & Soul, and also at Words in the Warehouse, a magical spoken word and performance night at what was then Squat City in Grangegorman, one of the most important cultural spaces in the capital at the time, ultimately bulldozed to make way for luxury student accommodation.

McKenna was prolific, writing and performing the piece Salesman at Project Arts Centre in 2013; Grindr, a love story, at Dublin Fringe Festival that same year; Gays Against the Free State! at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2016. There was Suddenly Paranoid about Ageing (2018); his award-winning Dublin Fringe Festival piece Admin (2019); a BBC Radio play, Total Enjoyment (2021); and the Dublin Fringe Festival audio walking tour Speak Softly, Go Far.

[ Admin review: Vivid and wry account of precarious London living ]

Although McKenna’s poetry, like so much other performance poetry at the time, often responded to the social and political issues of the day, it was also elevated, rising above the more snapshot reactive work, and inhabited by characters, almost novelistic in form. It was obvious that McKenna was a serious (and also very funny) writer, his work brimming with a confidence that contrasted slightly with his low key, softly-spoken, gentle presence offstage.

McKenna moved to London at the end of 2017, at which point, he says, his life experienced “a range of different transformations”. He moved into “a big queer warehouse situation” (in Evenings and Weekends, a warehouse living “situation” is also one of the precincts), which he says “drastically affected my sense of what was possible in my life”. He hadn’t known people to live in the way that people were living there, from the built environment itself, to the autonomy residents had within it, and the sense of potential the space offered. This was also in the midst of “a political moment around Jeremy Corbyn ... There has obviously been a great postmortem around what that moment meant. At the time, lots of people experienced it as an expanded moment of political possibility. It was the first time, certainly in many generations in the UK, that there was quite a significant alternative being proposed. Maybe it’s the only time in my lifetime that might happen. That has kind of ended. That is no longer the case for any mainstream political project.”

Initially, he played with that political moment being more to the fore in the novel. Ultimately, it became subtextual. “I think all of the characters, really, desire to live in some way that is more expansive than what is currently possible to them,” says McKenna. “There’s a range of different social, economic, and cultural forces at play which makes it a little less possible for them. I was interested in creating little moments of rupture in the book, where suddenly there’s a slippage and something is a little more possible.”

McKenna started with structure. He was interested in setting a story over a weekend, it being “very polyphonic” in terms of characters’ voices. He was inspired by “the dissonance of euphoria” in Virginia Woolf’s work, “this ecstatic love for the city and life”. Plot came later, which is an interesting thing to hear given how robust its architecture is. And he also thought deeply about the reader, interested in “creating a sense of pleasure, leaning quite hard into fun, moving people”, he says. “I didn’t want it to be minimal or spare. If there was an idea I could push really far, or a sensation, then I want to do that. I thought of it as writing in a big key, the way a pop song might be. If a pop song can escalate towards something quite hooky, it does that. If it can create a hands-in-the-air moment, it does that. I was interested in playing around with what those things may feel like.”

If my life is going well, it’s absolutely amplified to an ecstatic level during a heatwave. But I find it incredibly painful and harrowing to be lonely during a heatwave

There’s also the literal temperature, as the novel is set during a heatwave, which adds to a feeling of revelry with a hint of apocalyptic collapse. “Certainly in my life during the summer, I really have the best and worst of times,” says McKenna. “If my life is going well, it’s absolutely amplified to an ecstatic level during a heatwave. But if there’s something wrong, if I’m feeling out of sorts, feeling isolated in any way ... I find it incredibly painful and harrowing, to be lonely during a heatwave.”

McKenna’s writing goes further back than his work for stage, or even his spoken word. As a teenager, he wrote a lot of poetry. He also credits his English teacher, Mr Downey, for encouraging him when he was “making stylistic choices in a conscious way” while writing short stories in school. In the margins of one story, the teacher wrote “never stop writing”. McKenna says, “At that age, that was hugely life-changing, to get that sort of encouragement.”

Inevitably, a novel set over a short period of time where large decisions and changes loom, has a liminal quality. “In terms of the liminal thing,” says McKenna, “one of the real defining features of my life here [in London], particularly when I moved here first, was this sense of possibility, but also the fact that the promise of transformation is barely made good on, but always feels so, so tangible. There have been so many times where I feel if I go to this certain party or talk to these people, it feels as something is really about to kick off and my life is going to change. That never really happens. Occasionally the transformation does happen for a brief moment, and that’s hugely invigorating. I find being suspended in the longing for that thing like a sort of edging, really. There is something pleasurable about being in that moment of suspended longing.”

Being launched into the hot-new-author category, and the attention that will inevitably follow, is something McKenna greets with a degree of reticence. “I definitely feel conscious of being a sensitive person, I guess,” he says, “Sometimes my emotional life, reacting in quite big ways often to small stimulus, I feel conscious of how that might play out during a time in which my work has increased visibility, is reaching new audiences, is being received in different ways.” Much like the characters in Evenings and Weekends, McKenna is now at a threshold, albeit of his own conjuring. How does he feel about that? “Pleased”, he says, and then a little more quietly, “and excited.”