Cosmonauts lead genuinely exciting lives, whirling through space while nibbling upside-down on odd concoctions which look like they were dreamt up by the famous Michelin decorated Spanish chef, Paco Roncero, whose culinary alchemy can set diners back by €1,500 a head. Perhaps their meals are really pre-packed in a works canteen in a cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but even so their lives rarely get compared to the humdrum daily routine of novelists enduring daily skirmishes with the English language alone in rooms.
But just once in my life I was able to compare myself to SK Krikalev – the Soviet cosmonaut, third class, who blasted into space on what seemed like a relatively routine short mission on the Mir space station in 1991. Krikalev’s tour of duty took longer than expected. But after 10 months he returned to find that, although he had survived his hazardous expedition, the nation which sent him up into space had not survived. He had left Earth as a proud citizen of the Soviet Union. When he stepped forth from his space capsule on the freezing steppes of Kazakhstan in 1992, he discovered that the Soviet Union had dissolved and – in his absence – he had become the citizen of utterly changed Russia.
My parallel journey may have been imaginative rather than literal, but it left me with the same sense of bewilderment at trying to understand two vastly different worlds existing in the one place.
In recent years several Irish authors have set out to successfully chart the demise of the Celtic Tiger in finely-judged novels and plays blessed by historical hindsight. Indeed I did so myself in 2012 in an exceptionally short novella entitled The Fall of Ireland, a meditation on the thin line between illusion and actuality: a study of a homesick man, in the gilded cage of a luxury hotel, trying to unravel which elements of his life are real and which are subconscious deceptions.
It central character was Martin, a mid-ranking civil servant, who finds himself alone in a Beijing hotel: a superfluous accessary in a delegation accompanying a minister to China as the floundering Fianna Fáil-Green government maintains its illusion of power, with the Troika waiting in the wings. In a cat and mouse encounter with a Chinese masseuse, Martin struggles to bridge the gap between the chameleon face of being a diplomat telling lies for Ireland and the actuality of when everything is stripped bare, with nowhere to hide from the anxieties and contradictions in his head.
At a time when Fifty Shades of Grey was riding high in the charts, I tried to make it a Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-for-People-with-Pacemakers by writing the least erotic sex scene in Irish literature. But that short novella was written with hindsight when, as a nation, we knew that we were momentarily screwed. It was also written at a time when I had abandoned the full-length novel that I had been trying to write since 2006: a novel called Tanglewood which had left me feeling like Krikalev, the Soviet cosmonaut, in that the world where it was set had simply vanished.
When starting it, I did not set out to write about the collapse of the Celtic Tiger because it hadn’t collapsed. True, there were naysayers preaching caution, but such troublesome individuals were branded anti-patriotic, with Bertie Ahern publicly wondering why such people perpetually “cribbing and moaning” didn’t commit suicide.
But although a couple’s economic struggle to buy a house in that inflated market lies at the heart of Tanglewood, the story that I set out to explore was about two very different married couples living side by side in Blackrock. It wanted to be a bitter-sweet examination of the simmering tensions, intolerable strains and unbreakable bonds of memory and love that can simultaneously exist within any marriage.
Its title was inspired by Thomas Kinsella’s great poem, Wormwood, with its unforgettable metaphor of how the interdependency with marriage can at times be like how: “Two trunks in their infinitesimal dance of growth/Have turned completely about one another, their join/A slowly twisted scar…” Ever since reading Kinsella’s poem as a boy it fascinated me how, with his customary insight, he created this vivid image of two trees growing entangled in a forest to describe the tensions, dependencies and need for space that can exist within marriage.
Chris and Alice are desperate to move home. When their cajoling neighbour Ronan suggests that they build a townhouse for sale that would straddle both their gardens, Chris sees this investment property as their best chance of being able to move house, after being repeatedly outbid at auction. For Ronan, it is the chance to provide a secret nest egg for Kim, the young Filipino wife he has recently married after a messy divorce.
Kim is a strong woman trying to establish her own identity in a society unable to see beyond her age and her features. Ronan’s contemporaries envy his acquisition of a beautiful wife, half his age, yet behind his confident exterior he is beset by sexual, emotional and financial anxieties. And Chris is stretched to breaking point, unable to comprehend how the Ireland around him seems to be inexplicably changing.
I would like to claim to have been all-knowing in late 2006 when I first began to write about two marriages and that I knew how the financial basis of their world was about to collapse. But I didn’t. I was just writing about ordinary people living in a world that I knew. But then suddenly, half way through the novel, I needed to stop writing it because the novel made no sense anymore. The realisation dawned that nobody would built a townhouse in their garden anymore or, if they did, they could never sell it for the sort of life-changing profit that Ronan and Chris believe is about to provide financial independence for their families.
I felt like a writer who, in the glorious summer of 1913, set out to write a novel about his peaceful world only to find that world swept aside by the first World War. History changed in Ireland in late 2007 and my novel seemed a victim of history because nobody would now do the things that Ronan and Chris kept doing in their increasing desperation.
I put the book aside because I didn’t know how to finish it. This and personal circumstances meant that it remained untouched for several years. I had been doing a series of workshops with Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council, part of which involved me writing a book set in Blackrock. In haste I needed to write a teenage novel set there instead, called New Town Soul, which is now a choice on the Leaving Cert, with students nationwide sticking pins in effigies in me around now.
But Tanglewood refused to go away in my imagination and one day I realised that if you did indeed set a novel in the summer of 1913 you had no need to go into the whole story of the first World War: the reader would register the date and fill in the terrible tragedy of the Great War for you, without your characters being aware of what they were sleepwalking towards.
This gave me the clue about how to finish Tanglewood: not as a contemporary novel but an historical one – a novel perched on the cusp of momentous change which the reader would automatically be aware of, without me having to address Ireland’s collapse or my characters being aware of the cataclysm awaiting them.
I could go back to what I had set out to do, which was to explore the relationships within two very contrasting marriages. Although Ireland’s imminent collapse would loom in the background – with the reader more aware of it than the characters – Chris, Alice, Ronan and Kim could get on with the business of their lives, lost in their own concerns and preoccupations amid the separate loves that bind them in the same claustrophobic way as sometimes two trees in a forest grow dependent upon each other and yet also need to surface for light and space.
Tanglewood is published by New Island at €13.99
