Compact and intense, appearing much younger than he is, Colum McCann (32) has just arrived back in Ireland for the launch of his third book. Clearly satisfied with the novel, This Side of Brightness, he is currently faced with the ordeal of speaking about it and reckons explaining it is far more difficult than it was to write it. He says he smokes, "only when I'm nervous - and I'm nervous now". But then the subject of his baby daughter and of course, the book, take over and McCann believes in both. The idea for the novel came from a casual comment made to him, symbolically enough, at a book launch in a New York bookstore. It was the first he had heard of the people living in the subway and train tunnels which form a complex, 800-mile underworld beneath New York.
His research began by "sort of hanging out everyday for about three weeks". As expected, the tunnel-dwellers were initially wary, but McCann, who worked as a journalist, knows the value of waiting, listening and earning trust. "One of the skills I got from journalism, aside from the value of preparation and of knowing how to meet deadlines, was knowing when to talk and when to listen. It worked."
First going down into the tunnel world was, he recalls, "strange, different and scary." Soon he discovered the bizarre beauty of the tunnels, illuminated by the ever changing filtered daylight from above. He knew he would write about this other world and eventually wrote an article for this newspaper. "But I didn't know I was going to write a novel." His visits to the tunnels became a daily ritual and McCann has the ability to see something in concrete terms and then place it in a lyric context. Author of a short story collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, and Song Dogs, he first set off for the US at the age of 21 - a country he had always thought of as "America with a K". By then he had already completed a journalism course and had worked as a news reporter and feature writer.
His intensity is tempered by his candour and enthusiasm. He has not forgotten the people who helped him get started as a writer: " my father, Sean McCann, was the features editor of The Evening Press - he always told me not to be a journalist - David Marcus, Dermot Bolger".
McCann is a reader and loves talking about books. He talks about his enjoyment of Don DeLillo's new novel, Underworld, which he has been reading for two months. Benedict Kiely, Edna O'Brien and Desmond Hogan are among his favourite Irish writers, "I think Hogan is disgracefully underrated and O'Brien is always being dismissed, but she is a brave writer, one of the best," he says.
Yet while he is very interested in Irish fiction, one of the most interesting things about his new novel is that it is a non-Irish novel. Set in New York and spanning some 70 years of this century, This Side of Brightness is the story of a mixed-race American family. McCann agrees that he deliberately set out to write a novel that was not Irish: "I'd say it is consciously non-Irish, but I don't think that's a bad thing. And I will write an Irish book," he pauses, rephrases his reply and says, "I would like to write one". Many of his literary mentors are North American: Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, Toni Morrison.
It is not that he has any problems with being Irish. In fact his Irish experience has been normal to the point of being neutral. One of five children born to a Dublin journalist, Colum McCann grew up in Deansgrange, Co Dublin. "I was the second youngest - completely normal, nothing traumatic or interesting, just normal. I think this might be a bad thing for a writer," he jokes, but quickly adds, "but then I don't think so, I'm not an autobiographical type of writer". Despite his various adventures, particularly his exciting cycling trip around America, and obvious experience at reporting, he claims no interest in travel writing - "I'm a fiction writer". He is a person who could fit in anywhere and has now settled in New York with his wife and child.
He has also lived in Japan, and when he says he worked in Cape Cod as a taxi driver while also writing features to send back to Dublin, it makes sense. He taught Americans nature survival in their own landscape. Though the definitive city boy, he seems comfortable anywhere; there might yet be an assault on Everest. Reports on his bike trip across America were written on borrowed type writers along the way. He is engaging, relaxed, modest and spectacularly determined. Even while speaking in the abstract he manages to sound utterly matter of fact.
Yet there is an almost campaigning streak to him, and his instincts retain a journalistic fervour. He is committed to tracking down facts, and likes information. When I remark that This Side of Brightness reminded me of Michael Ondaatje's novel, In the Skin of the Lion (1987), McCann quickly replies "he got his facts wrong about tunnels". When discussing the abuse encountered by mixed race couples in New York and elsewhere, he recalls consulting the marriage register for 193334 and the high number of mixed marriages recorded. "It's a taboo subject. Of course there were Irish who married African Americans". Facts, facts, facts run through his conversation.
McCann's novel is the story of a family. "I was interested in the idea of dignity, particularly as seen through a family's experiences of life." While telling the tragic story of three generations of the Walker family headed by the stoic Nathan Walker, a sand hog or tunnel-digger, McCann evokes an atmospheric New York - a vibrant setting for life's triumphs and pain. Race is another theme, as is balance; the obsessive compulsive character of Treefrog, an outsider living a form of self-imposed exile beneath the city, pursues balance through imbalance. It is an impressionistic narrative, written in, at times, a self-consciously lyrical language. McCann does force imagery but in response to this he thinks that readers can do as they wish. "I like ambiguity, I also think it's important in fiction," he says. He agrees that absolutes are difficult to impose on anything, never mind a novel. Two main narratives run through the action. Pursuing a deliberately parallel route, they in fact meet at central moments along the way, which, though giving the secrets of the plot away early, does not affect the book. The structure is very deliberate. Did such an elaborate technique impose an oppressive sense of restraint on him? "That's the mathematics of fiction," he says. Alongside the technique, which shows a major development since Song Dogs, is his own certainty about the book, even his handling of the voices.
The character of Nathan is also part of the structure. He becomes an important device, if a bit too Christ-like. McCann admits to being fond of him. "Yeah, you know I had killed him off, but I got so depressed about it, my wife said I was in mourning for him. So I brought him back to life." It takes a lot to kill Nathan, and his eventual death is balanced against his surreal experience at the beginning of the book, when a hold in the tunnel affects the air pressure within the tunnel and forces him out, high in the air above the East River.
McCann's face lights up at the mention of that episode, which reverberates throughout the book not only as an abiding image but through the many images of climbers suspended in the air, Nathan's grandson is a construction worker who loves scaling beams high above the city. "Yes, you know that really happened? Tunnel workers were shot up out of a tunnel because of a fault in the air pressure."
The book's dense layers of metaphor and symbols will probably end up meaning more to readers and critics than to him. "It's funny, you spend four years writing and book and then it's done and you've said what you wanted to say, you know what you meant. But you can't tell anyone else what it means, because now it's their book and things will mean different things to different people," he says, with more resignation than pleasure.
This Side of Brightness is published by Phoenix House at £15.99.
