Tell me about your new book, A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island 1989-2024.
The book consists of one entry from each year of the “record” I write every day. Diaries, I’m told, are heavy on the calendrical and the factual, while journals lean towards introspection and self-scrutiny. My daily scribbles are both. Perhaps I should call what I write “diurnals”, ie dailies.
Which two entries would you invite the casual browser in a bookshop to peruse?
The first entry The Fall of Communism, the End of History (Not) (Friday 10 November 10th, 1989) and the last, The Strike (Thursday 24 January 2024). The 1989 entry is about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the last is about Northern Ireland’s recent general strike. In 1989 we thought we were headed for sunlit uplands but the experience of 2024 suggests that we have turned around and have returned to where we were.
It is poignantly dedicated to your former TCD colleague Gerry Dawe, who recently died, and his wife Dorothea.
I owe Gerry Dawe so much. He was both an astute reader and critic, and a generous enabler. That I now work in the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, is all down to him.
You moved to Fermanagh to write The Glass Curtain (1991). You told me then you preferred the North to the South: “I don’t want to live in a country that is white, male and Catholic. I want to live in a pluralist society.”
Indeed. That’s what I said in 1991. Then the South changed and became much more diverse. Meanwhile, the Troubles having ended more or less with the Good Friday Agreement, which was predicated on EU membership, Northern Ireland has been dragged out of the EU, courtesy of the 2016 referendum. Now, in 2024, my thinking has altered in line with the new circumstances; I want Irish unification and Northern Ireland in Europe. I believe that’s where we belong. We do not belong in a UK that is not in Europe.
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You also told me: “A writer is just someone who bears witness.”
Yes, I believe that, and even if we don’t manage it, we should never stop trying.
You cite Orwell’s third reason for writing: “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and save them for posterity.”
The world (and these islands) are in trouble. Rectification won’t be possible until first the truth is told.
You were born in Dublin, raised in London, and Fermanagh is home since 1989. What is your identity?
Irish-European.
Christa Wolf’s journals inspired you. An East German dissident writer outed as a Stasi agent, she was unfairly maligned, you believe?
If the Stasi had asked me to spy, I’d have capitulated I’m sure. Knowing this of myself, I’m naturally disinclined to rebuke Wolf.
“The children of writers have a special burden.” Did you recognise yourself in your mother Edna O’Brien’s writing?
The burden isn’t connected to recognition in print. The burden arises from how, as a writer’s child, you are obliged to endure the projections and fantasies of readers who are devoted to your parent.
[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window ]
You wrote beautifully for us about your mother’s dying. How has it been since?
I cannot summon her voice by will but sometimes, as I wait for sleep, her voice returns unsummoned.
You describe Northern Ireland as “the Kaliningrad of Western Europe, a product of old history cut off from new history, mouldering away on the edge” of the UK.
Yes, I did, because it is.
David Barker’s photos are great. Who is he?
The UK’s foremost documentary film cameraman. (Google him. He’s made amazing films.)
Asthma made you a reader.
Indisputably. And asthma has done the same for numerous others.
You did a school history project on your IRA great-uncle Michael Cleary but researching a murder and public execution in the Chelsea square where you lived made you a writer.
Yes.
Which projects are you working on?
A memoir about my maternal grandparents with a side-bar on the aforementioned great-uncle.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Yes, to Algiers to visit Albert Camus’s birthplace.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Show up at the desk every morning bright and early and just do it.
Who do you admire the most?
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I would change the UK election system from FPTP [first past the post] to PR [proportional representation].
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
Which public event affected you most?
Labour’s 2024 election victory.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Transylvania.
Your most treasured possession?
The Mont Blanc pen the family gave me.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
My 1st edition of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day with Joan Hassall cover.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Elizabeth Bowen, Vera Brittain, Edward Bunker, MR James, Samuel Johnson, Gita Sereny, Jean Rhys.
The best and worst things about where you live?
Summer evenings (best); rain (worst).
What is your favourite quotation?
“Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.” Konstantin Stanislavski
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Madame Bovary.
A book to make me laugh?
The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith
A book that might move me to tears?
New Grub Street, George Gissing.
A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island 1989-2024 is published by New Island
