Rónán Hession: ‘I’m okay with writing books that fit into my life’

I meet Rónán Hession at a picnic table looking out to sea in Portmarnock where he lives with his wife, Sinéad, and their two sons. It’s on the route he takes during his daily lockdown walk. Hession is author of this year’s One Dublin One Book selection, the beautifully kind-hearted Leonard and Hungry Paul. Panenka, a richly melancholic but similarly gentle novel, will be published in May. Hession is also a senior civil servant and I first knew him as Mumblin’ Deaf Ro when we were both gigging musicians in Dublin’s independent music scene in the 1990s and 2000s.

His novels seem, to me, like a natural progression from his songs. Both are meticulously crafted and incisively observational. His last album, 2012’s Dictionary Crimes, is an uncharacteristically autobiographical record about family, children, illness and bereavement. “My mother died, we had a miscarriage, then a couple years later, we had kids,” he says. “And it was like I had this big orangutan sitting on my stomach and I was like ‘at some stage I’m going to have to acknowledge I have this big orangutan and I’m not being honest as a writer if I’m avoiding things.’... I kind of thought it was going to be received as a sort of like: ‘sorry for your troubles but a bit too personal’. But people were open to it and it was quite cathartic. When I listen back now, I can see why Leonard and Hungry Paul is a lighter book.”

The books and albums all start the same way, he says: “You get a surge of creative energy which kind of has instructions coded into it and over the years, I’ve got an internal radio, and I’ve got better at tuning and picking up those frequencies. So it hits me and I have a sense of what it wants to look like… And if I’ve taken shortcuts, or if I’ve tried to do in a contrived way, it just still feels unresolved… It’s a very distinctive sort of surge. I suppose it’s probably like the way birds know when it’s time to migrate.”

A busy father, Hession wrote Leonard and Hungry Paul in 2017 between 10 and 12 in the evenings when his children were in bed. That’s still when he writes, when he has the house to himself. It was his first experience writing prose and there aren’t any writers in his family. His father, a postal worker, died when Hession was seven leaving his mother, a hospital cleaner, with eight children to raise. Half of his family are in the postal service, he says. “Where the [writing ] came from, I don’t know. I don’t really have a good answer for that except that I grew up without much adult supervision. I always had to be self-taught in things. And I think through my music and writing I have just figured out a way for me to get into that without learning how to do it comprehensively or properly, just seeing if there is an opening that I think I can squeeze in to.”

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Being chosen for One Dublin One Book has made him realise how rooted he is in the city. He grew up in Beaumont, went to school in O’Connells in the north inner city and was wandering around the city at the age of 12. (“My eldest son is 12 and I haven’t let him go to Dunnes yet.”) He went to college in Trinity. He now works in the Department of Finance. “I’m probably one of those people who, if you showed the Google Map activity at my funeral, they’ll say, ‘apart from his holidays he didn’t really go far’.”

Quiet lives

Leonard and Hungry Paul is a celebration of people who live quiet lives, people who “don’t push themselves to the front” and are often either simplified or, worse, rendered grotesque in literature. This is why, in both books, he says, “there’s very few physical descriptions, no surnames, no place names... I didn’t want shortcuts. I didn’t want people to be able to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I know this person based on these descriptors’. If you want to take quiet people and put them in the foreground, you need to prune away the things that normally obscure them.”

He’s very conscious, he says, that those who have made the most difference in his own life are self-effacing people who often go unchampioned. “I’m not naturally like that. My wife is a naturally kind person and she’s had a very good influence on me. One of the nice things about One Dublin One Book is that friends of my mother have got in touch and said, ‘I didn’t know you were a writer,’ and I’m able to send them a copy and say, ‘This is inspired by kind people like you were to me.’”

What kindnesses is he referring to? “There was a lot of pressure on my mother to keep everything together, and her whole group of friends were a great support to the family,” he says. “And neighbours. Leonard is a sort of an adjunct member of Hungry Paul’s family and I was a bit like that for other families on the street. They would bring me out on trips in a way that didn’t make me self-conscious… I remember there were football managers or parents of other guys on the [football] team where when I had to go to a trial and when my mother was working they would drive me to Blanchardstown, wait for me to play, then drive me home. If I did that once in my life, I’d be telling everyone about.”

Was he a good footballer? He wasn’t bad, he says, “but I remember marking Jason Sherlock at one stage, and I was like, yeah, I’m not at that level.”

Panenka, his next book, has football in it. It’s a moving story about a retired footballer grappling with a sense of failure. What inspired it? “I remember reading Disgrace by JM Coetzee,” he says. “Disgrace is a really interesting topic and it didn’t really deal with it in a way that I was expecting… Also, I had read an interview with Daniel Timofte, the guy who lost a penalty against Ireland for Romania… He hadn’t got over it. And people hadn’t let him get over it. And though he was a very talented footballer it was still the thing he was known for. The main theme of that book is life’s unfixability. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable?”

Unashamedly optimistic

Part of why I enjoy Hession’s books so much is that they’re unashamedly kind and optimistic when literary fashion often veers towards the dark and nihilistic. He puts this down to a couple of influences. “Leonard and Hungry Paul in particular, is heavily influenced by coming out of a decade of reading children’s books for my kids,” he says. “What children’s books do a bit better than other fiction is they try to go beyond just saying ‘the world is a bad place’… They try and say, ‘Is there a way to be in the world, given the world is the way it is? How do I engage with the world without it overwhelming me?’… That’s something I think of in my own life and it comes out in the book.”

He also rarely reads anglophone literature, he says. “There are a lot of conventions in writing that are purely English conventions, including around characterisation, including around narrative structure. Building a book around conflict, having a narrative where there is an escalation of a problem and a resolution at the end… There’s a lot of very good writing from China, Japan, Croatia, Egypt, Sudan where writers are able to give you a full experience and don’t do any of that stuff…. I thought the thing people would talk about the most, and nobody has mentioned this, is the omniscient narrator. It’s a very 19th century idea… I thought the show-don’t-tell police would have me put away for that.”

He never expected Leonard and Hungry Paul to be published and so he’s very loyal to his independent UK publishers at Bluemoose Books. After the book picked up readers some bigger publishers were interested. “I think it would be hypocritical of me to say, ‘Here’s a gentle book, now let’s sell it to the highest bidder.’ [Bluemoose] changed my life. I wouldn’t be a writer without them… Coming from this independent music scene and being into underdog football clubs [he supports Watford], it’s kind of natural to be on a small publisher. I can’t see myself being with a jet-setting major publishing. I like that sort of outsider thing. Partly because there’s a lot of creative control in it... But also, I just like dealing with a small number of people. Kevin [Duffy, co-founder of Bluemoose] talks to me every day almost.”

Furthermore, unlike most artists, Hession has never fantasised about leaving his day job, never sat “dreaming of an alternative existence”. He points to a rich legacy of civil servants who wrote, people like Egyptian Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and Flann O’Brien and Thomas Kinsella. “Civil servants are interested in things very close to what writers are interested in,” he says. “You’re interested in society, and fundamentally, the position of individuals in society… That ‘zoom in, zoom out’ type perspective of the civil servant feels very natural in novel writing. I’ve a very interesting job. I love it very much… You’re dealing with some of the marginalised people in society. It is quite grounding. But also, you’re in a position to do things about it. I believe in my country. I believe in Irish society. My interest in the civil service and my writing is to try and contribute to that... And I’m okay with writing books that fit into my life. I believe in integration of everything. I’m not really one for compartmentalising. I try to be the same in writing as I am in work as I am with my kids. I don’t feel I’m playing roles.”

He’s already working on his next book, currently titled Ghost Mountain. Among the events he’s doing as part of One Dublin One Book is a live interview with Leagues O’Toole at which he will also perform music for the first time since 2014. “I was thinking after the next book maybe an album might be a palate-cleanser,” he says. “But in terms of gigs and, carrying equipment and tuning guitars, I groan at stuff like that. The thought of sound-checking a drumkit. The sound of a bass drum and a surly engineer who just wants to go get a sandwich and you’ve just been sitting there with two hours to kill between soundcheck and the gig.” He laughs. “I feel very at home in writing and I sort of feel like I’m just getting started.”

For information about One Dublin One Book and related events go to onedublinonebook.ie