Joseph O’Connor can remember the moment when he decided to become a writer. “If I thought about it carefully enough, I could probably come up with the week, certainly the month,” he says.
“When I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. She had very cool parents who had worked for a while in New York and lived in Greenwich Village and there were photos of them in the house of them hanging out in jazz clubs in Greenwich Village. The Catcher in the Rye was her dad’s favourite novel and she gave it to me. And I can remember specifically turning the last page of that wonderful novel and thinking: ‘That’s what I would like to do with my life.’
“It was probably in November 1980. I was just completely smitten by the book. And I thought that even if I never write anything as brilliant as that, that would be a way to spend your life.”
We’re sitting in Fitzpatrick’s hotel in Killiney. O’Connor is carefully spoken, funny and slightly lugubrious in both his prose and speech (people might be familiar with his voice from his old Drivetime RTÉ radio columns). It’s chilly out and we both have our jackets on. He’s wearing a scarf.
I first met him back in the Noughties when I was interviewing him for the Sunday Tribune, a paper for which he once wrote himself. I was relatively new to journalism and he was very encouraging. It’s unsurprising to me that since we first met he has become the inaugural Frank McCourt chair in creative writing at the University of Limerick and spends half his life guiding younger writers. He clearly loves writing and loves talking about writing.
He understandably does not want to talk about his personal life. His sister, the singer and songwriter Sinéad O’Connor, died suddenly in 2023. “It’s been a tough few years,” he says.
Books were an escape for him as a child, he says, though there weren’t too many literary models for him then. “The one writer who I ever heard of or saw growing up in this neighbourhood as a kid was Hugh Leonard, who lived on Coliemore Road in Dalkey and went around Dalkey in a Rolls-Royce. At the age of 10 I was like, ‘Jesus, every writer gets a Rolls-Royce.’
“There weren’t literary festivals or readings or a literary scene. There was no sense of even the picture postcard version of literary Dublin ...
“I remember going to London to stay with my aunt Martha to see gigs. And I was walking down the King’s Road in Chelsea, and outside the bookshop there was a blackboard and it said, ‘Tonight, three new American authors reading’ and they were Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and Jonathan Raban. That was the first reading I ever went to. I thought: ‘What a strange idea. People stand up and read their own stuff.’ Somewhere at home I still have a cassette recording of Richard Ford’s reading. I recorded it on my Walkman.”
He started writing “terrible, awful” short stories when he was studying history and English followed by an MA on the poet Charles Donnelly in UCD from 1981 to 1986. Subsequently he started a PhD in Oxford on the poet Stephen Spender. “I met him and interviewed him, which was a great thing, but I’d be sitting in the Bodleian Library in Oxford surrounded by the ghosts of these wonderful scholars, thinking: ‘I don’t want to do this.’”
He dropped out and went to live in London. He gave himself a deadline of three years in which to get published “trudging down to the post office every day to send stories off to journals the length and breadth of the place and they would seem to have been sent back to my filthy bedsit by the time I got home”.
How did he persevere through the rejection?
“I was young and foolish ... I mean, I do remember having a sense of carefreeness. I wasn’t married, and I’d no kids and, amazingly, London was a city then that you didn’t need a lot of money to live in very happily. You could go to the Comedy Store in Leicester Square on a Friday night for a fiver and see Paul Merton or Julian Clary or Jo Brand. It was more of a bohemian city then. Now it’s the city of millionaires and the people who work for them.”
A lot of his earliest writing success was in Irish journalism. He had begun doing this while studying in UCD. “I was back and forth between the couple of rooms over O’Donoghue’s pub where Magill was and the Tribune, which was over a supermarket.”
He recalls Fintan O’Toole, Colm Tóibín, Mary Holland, Nell McCafferty and Gene Kerrigan, “these amazing journalists ... Ireland was a very different, slightly forelock-tugging place, so to be 18 or 19 and around people who knew where all the bodies were buried was great training”.
The first job Sunday Tribune editor Vincent Browne gave him was to go to the National Library and produce a file on president Patrick Hillery. “Being an ambitious young fellow, I also did 1,000 words of my extremely satirical take on how Patrick Hillery wasn’t doing enough and handed that into Vincent and awaited front page publication. He called me into the office and f***ing roasted me. The climax of his bollocking was: ‘If you were Conor Cruise O’Brien, I might give a f*** about what you think and I only might ... So go through it and take out ‘I’ all the way through.‘”
I think [journalism] does root you in the world. It’s good to meet different kinds of people and hear different conversations and see what’s actually on people’s minds
— Joseph O'Connor
Browne also gave him a list of swear words never to be used in the Sunday Tribune (he later emails it to me from memory) and told him to always ask interviewees: “What’s the thing about you that you’d hate people to know?” He looks at me warily. “You needn’t get any ideas.”
Would he tell me the thing he’d hate other people to know? He laughs. “No.”
Was being a journalist useful for his novel writing?
“I think it’s very good for a writer to have a job. If you sit around by yourself for a couple of decades, you end up writing novels about other writers.” He laughs. “Which I’ve done a bit of.
“I think [journalism] does root you in the world. It’s good to meet different kinds of people and hear different conversations and see what’s actually on people’s minds ... I like teaching. I liked working for Drivetime when I did that. I like working in the theatre. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer, is the only writer I know who became a writer because he didn’t like people. He thought: ‘What could I do to make a living sitting in a room by myself for the rest of my life, and no one would think it odd?’ I can do that, but I have to kind of season it with doing something more collaborative, too.”
Almost all of O’Connor’s novels since 2002’s Star of the Sea have been works of historical fiction (The Thrill of it All is an exception to this, but even that is set largely in the 1980s).
“I had a deep loathing of historical fiction,” he says. “I sometimes think only people who dislike a genre should be allowed to write it ... One of the reasons I wrote Star of the Sea was that nobody else had. I just came to wonder, in my late 20s, is there a way of writing about the famine that would be authentic? ... The point about the famine is that it will always be contested. It doesn’t have one simple narrative. That’s what dictated the form of that, because I realised you’d have to do it in a choral way.”
How does historical fiction relate to the present?
“I love Peter Carey’s book Oscar and Lucinda, and I think it’s profoundly a book about emigration and new countries, despite the fact that it was written 25 years ago and set in the 19th century. Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales, which is set in the 1880s in northern Ireland, is absolutely on every page about the northern Ireland in which it was written ... I think a really good novel that’s set in the past will be about now, whether it wants to be or not.”
His most recent novels, My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome, are the first two instalments of a trilogy about an escape line run by the real Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty in Nazi-occupied Rome. They’re moving and politically potent and they rattle along almost like thrillers (My Father’s House is, unsurprisingly, being adapted for film). Are they also about now?
“They’re absolutely about now, alas,” he says. “I thought around the time that I became a parent that I would never have to explain to my teenage children what ultra nationalism and religious bigotry and hatred were, and that those things had disappeared into the craziness of the past, like the Victorian vogue for phrenology ... And then we’re living in the world that we’re living in now.”
But he wants these books to be hopeful.
“[Hugh] knows that he can’t save everybody, and there will be days when he can’t save anybody, but he puts together this group of very diverse people and they decide: ‘We’re going to do what we can with honour and with dignity and we’ll accept that it isn’t everything. We cannot do everything, but we will do something because we have to live with ourselves.’”
What are his responsibilities when it comes to writing about real people?
“I think it’s a morally ambiguous thing to do and I wouldn’t like to be in a novel myself. At the same time, if somebody is a public figure ... I wrote a novel about Synge and Molly Allgood [Ghost Light]. She was an actor, so in a sense, presenting yourself to the world is part of what she did. Bram Stoker is the central character of Shadowplay. Once again, I think I had a certain licence.”
My religious faith is a bit like the broadband signal in rural Ireland. It comes and goes. I don’t mind when the embers glow from time. It doesn’t bother me. But I’m glad they don’t burst into flame
— Joseph O'Connor
How does he balance fact and fiction?
“There is a certain type of historical novel where it’s all going great, and you’re 20 pages in, and then suddenly it’s as though a PowerPoint presentation has begun into how awful dentistry or surgery was at that time. And you know what’s happened is that the author has read a really interesting article about this in the National Library and just can’t bear not to tell you ... I do a lot of research, and then as soon as I get going, I put it all in a drawer and I don’t look. It has to be a novel first and last.”
Some of the characters in these books are devoutly religious. In his early days as a columnist, he caused controversy with his writing on religion. He laughs. “The whole letters page [in the Sunday Tribune] was given over to a column I wrote on Easter Sunday about how there’s no God.”
The views on religion are a bit more complex in these books. “That’s the handy thing about having a book with a number of voices, you can put in how you feel on a particular day,” he says. “My religious faith is a bit like the broadband signal in rural Ireland. It comes and goes. I don’t mind when the embers glow from time. It doesn’t bother me. But I’m glad they don’t burst into flame. I’m glad not to be a very religious person.
“I’m not an atheist. To me, it’s hard for a creative person to be an atheist because I believe in Great Expectations despite the fact that it’s not true in the documentary sense. The fact that a set of stories can carry truths while not being literally true is not a problem for me.”
The cover for the Escape Line organisers is that they’re a choir. His novel The Thrill of it All is about a band. Did he ever want to be in a band?
“I’m the only Irish author who never wanted to be in a band,” he says. “A number of my dear friends who are authors, their love for music is so intense that I think they would give up everything to have been in a band ... I played music with my kids. It was a lovely thing when they were growing up in the house. My son Marcus is a drummer, and my son James is a multi-instrumental fellow. And it was just lovely sitting around the house playing. I have vivid memories of James at the age of seven singing Iggy Pop’s The Passenger.” He sings it. “I know a lot of four-chord songs.”
Music is at the core of a lot of his writing, he says.
“Whoever it was said, ‘Everything aspires to be music,’ it’s true. I found that over the years, I just wanted to write lovelier sentences. I think it is one thing that is part of an Irish inheritance, that it matters to us how the words sound ... I passed one of my neighbours the other day and said, ‘How are you?’ He’s a Dub. ‘Ah sure, I’m still this side of the grass.’” He laughs. “There’s a kind of performative thing in how the Irish speak and it’s there all the way back to Synge and it’s there in Donal Ryan. I think it’s an important part of our kit.
“Your very first experiences in language are to do with sound. It’s the lullaby and the tongue twister and ‘the Owl and the Pussy Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat’. Like, that didn’t actually happen, but it’s just a lovely thing to say ... When I’m working with the students in UL we’d often talk about the ‘music’ of a piece of writing. It’s actually something that all brilliant stand-up comics are tapped into as well. Because timing is music.”
Would he ever write a novel set in contemporary Ireland? “I don’t know what modern Ireland is yet,” he says. “I’m looking forward to writing some novels about it when I do. I’m suspicious about its verities and the new sacred cows.”
Could he elaborate on that?
“When my parents were getting married, it was enough for one person to have a salary and buy a house in Dublin,” he says. “When their parents were getting married, at a time when Ireland was very seriously poor, at a time when in most families in the country somebody died of TB, there was a massive programme of house building ... I don’t understand how that was done at a time when the country was on its knees ... I don’t understand how this incredibly wealthy country has this housing problem at the same time that it has a bogus set of concerns about immigration and [we’ve allowed] the two to be put together.
“I’m not looking down on anybody who votes whatever way they vote. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand the sheer shattering level of the mental health funding crisis. I don’t understand how this Government has been elected pretty much [looking] almost exactly the same as the government we’ve just had. I would have to really think about it before I would know what to write.”
He thinks that maybe Irish people are still grappling with a confused sense of identity.
“If you were brought up in Ireland in the 1970s, happiness was constitutionally prohibited. That’s not what living in Ireland was for. You lived in this funny, rainy, failed place where there was a civil war up the road and it only existed because a couple of hundred thousand people left every two years and it was full of guilty secrets.
“Then along came the boom and you opened the Guardian or Le Monde and there’s another colour supplement about how funky Dublin is ...
“A year towards the end of the boom, I was the writer in residence in UCD [and] there was one very talented writer in the class and towards the end of the year, I said to him: ‘What’s your plan?’ He was about 22 and he said to me that he was going to borrow the money to buy two apartments and rent them out to Polish people. I remember going home to Anne-Marie [Casey, his wife] and saying, ‘We’re actually f***ed’ ... We went from that to the crash and Covid and it may be that people have decided to vote the way they voted recently because they’re just not ready yet to decide what we’re going to be.”
He looks sad for a moment. “There are things about it that I don’t have a handle on, and I’d need to have a handle on before I could write a novel about them.”
The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O’Connor is published by Harvill Secker
