With his latest novel on the Man Booker Prize longlist, hard-hitting Belfast author Ronan Bennett talks to Deaglán de Bréadún.
Outspoken but softly spoken, that's Ronan Bennett. His life is conducted at full volume: he's a man who welcomes controversy and likes to tackle issues head on. Although I met him briefly eight years ago, it is still a surprise that he speaks so quietly and insistently, more the chatty priest in the confessional than the platform speaker declaiming at a political rally.
Now in his late 40s, Bennett has been to places few of us will ever get to and learned things most would not want to find out. In 1974, aged 18, he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life for taking part in an IRA operation that led to the murder of an RUC officer. That was quashed, and he was released after a year in jail. But three years later he was arrested in England under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, held for a month, then released and arrested again a year later. His trial for conspiracy, to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown, developed into a cause célèbre. A jury acquitted him on all counts.
His reputation vindicated and liberty restored, he dropped out of the headlines to pursue a course in history at King's College London, leading to a doctorate called Enforcing the Law in Revolutionary England: Yorkshire, 1640-1660.
He came back into the spotlight as a novelist and screenwriter. The Second Prison (1991) was a psychological study of a man released from jail in Northern Ireland who cannot get the experience out of his head and tries to discover the truth about the circumstances that led to his sentence for murder. The next book, a political thriller called Overthrown By Strangers, was set in South America. In 1998 Bennett moved into the heavyweight division with The Catastrophist, a love story set in the chaos and bloodshed of Congo in the early 1960s, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Whitbread Novel Award.
Now his latest novel, Havoc, In Its Third Year, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, one of two books by Irish authors (the other is Colm Tóibín's The Master, a highly praised reconstruction of the life of the American writer Henry James). Bennett is amused that, in a 22-book longlist, someone rated his chances at 25 to 1. At those odds it's a bet worth having.
Havoc, In Its Third Year is set in an unnamed town in northern England in the 1630s, when puritanism was on the rise and any sign of human weakness was liable to be severely punished. The central character and reluctant hero is John Brigge, coroner and one of the governors of the town, as well as a closet Catholic at a time when "popery" could be a pathway to the gallows.
Although it is neither academic nor studious, Bennett draws heavily from his research on the period. It took him five years to write, and he says he was forever having to lay aside some highly enjoyable historical study to get back to the demanding business of fiction.
Although the locale is in England, the fierce passions and atmosphere of virulently opinionated intolerance are reminiscent of Northern Ireland in the grip of the Troubles, specifically Portadown at the height of the Drumcree fever.
Bennett responds that different readers will draw their own parallels. He was inspired by the intolerance of what he calls the Bush-Blair project, as well as Tony Blair's own crusade against crime, in partnership with the British home secretary, David Blunkett. It's his first and probably last historical novel, but he finds it illuminating to explore the present through the past. The nearest place to the fictional town of the novel is Halifax, although there are some important divergences.
Brigge, a flawed and ambivalent character worthy of Graham Greene, is both a harsh and stern administrator of the law and a tender and loving husband and father. Bennett sees no contradiction. Brigge's position was not for the squeamish, but that was the temper of the times.
Bennett points out that, even in more recent days in Northern Ireland, well-known figures have been capable of bitter and unyielding sternness towards their political or religious opponents and loving kindness to their dear ones. He argues that to have portrayed Brigge as a card-carrying liberal or a 21st-century humanist would have been anachronistic.
Much of the action takes place in a legal or court setting. Bennett says he studied the period through its court records and concedes that his approach in the novel may have been influenced by his own experiences of the judicial system.
Although Havoc, In Its Third Year is primarily a novel, it also contains an implicit message. The puritan reformers try to build the godly city on the hill, but their authoritarian approach of sanctions and punishment doesn't work, can't be sustained, and the havoc of the title is the result. "The world needs more compassion," says Bennett.
He initially wrote the narrative in full-blooded 17th-century prose, but this didn't work; he shifted down a gear, so the novel still gives a flavour of the discourse of the period without becoming too specialised and confusing. There are some fascinating usages from the time - "intellectuals" is used with its former meaning of "faculties", as in "His intellectuals became unclear and imperfect" - but he has also borrowed rhetorical touches from US President George W. Bush, who sees himself as leading "a monumental struggle of good versus evil".
Ronan Bennett was born in Oxford, in January 1956, but he grew up in Belfast, and his life has been shaped by the Northern Ireland conflict. When is he likely to tackle the subject again in fiction? He prefers to approach it obliquely, he says, but isn't shying away from it. "I would never not write something because I feared there would be an adverse reaction."
He expected adverse reaction to another literary endeavour, the screenplay he wrote with Alice Perman for The Hamburg Cell, a docu-drama about the September 11th hijackers recently shown by Channel 4. As part of his research, Bennett went to Hamburg to meet former acquaintances of some of the hijackers. He observed the places where they lived and the mosque they used for worship. He also studied the Koran, as well as the culture and politics of the Islamic world.
He feels it is not enough simply to disapprove of and condemn the 9/11 terrorist hijackings: to dismiss the perpetrators in blunt terms as evildoers and fanatics is counterproductive and an oversimplification. Ziad Jarrah, who piloted one of the planes, was by all accounts a fairly hedonistic and well-to-do Lebanese who had received a Catholic education but then got caught up in radical Muslim politics. Dreadful as it may seem to many, people who knew him had to admit they couldn't help liking the guy.
So how does this square with the terrible deeds of 9/11 where we have Jarrah, for example, steering an aircraft loaded with innocent people towards the White House? Bennett attributes this to the perception among young Muslims that their co-religionists have been subjected to a "holocaust" in places such as Chechnya, Bosnia, the Palestinian territories, Kashmir, Indonesia and Iraq. The would-be hijackers used to sit around in Hamburg watching graphic videos of the cruelties being visited upon their Muslim brothers in Chechnya.
He says there was pre-production difficulty when the celebrated US channel Home Box Office (HBO) withdrew its support for the movie. Bennett was in Los Angeles at the time and went to see the HBO people. They told him, "We like the script and the director and so on, but the American public is not ready for this film. It shows Jarrah, for example, to be a likeable person." He recalls that noted Irish writers used to portray republicans as lacking any human dimension.
Bennett is a strong supporter of the peace process and a great admirer of Sinn Féin leaders such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. But he expresses himself "kind of disappointed" with David Trimble whom he accuses of failing to grasp the opportunities presented by the Belfast Agreement. "The history of the last six years or so could have been very different if Trimble had been a bit braver."
But he admits with a wry smile that Trimble and himself have "a bit of a history". When Bennett was commissioned to write Rebel Heart, a drama series about the War of Independence, Trimble, who was First Minister at the time, protested in a letter to the BBC that Bennett was "a most unsuitable person" to write such a screenplay. Despite the setbacks to the peace process, Bennett believes there is no likelihood of a return to conflict. "The war is over," he says. "It's been over for a long time, I think it was over before the ceasefire really." He believes the republican leadership has handled its "unruly membership" extremely well despite the political stalemate.
He does not know to what extent his early experiences with the legal system 25 or 30 years ago have an influence over his work, because they are so deeply embedded in his psyche at this stage. But one cannot avoid the feeling that, without them, Ronan Bennett's writing would have nothing like the force and meaning that has helped establish him on the literary scene.
His next novel will be about privacy and will draw to some extent on his own experiences of building a successful career as a writer despite attempts to highlight his political views and his travails in the courts by elements in the media who prefer their republicans to be either apostates or informers.
The key question in his next book will be, "When are people allowed to let go of their past?". The corollary of that is, when does your past let go of you? This is the tension that has made Ronan Bennett the writer he is today.
Havoc, In Its Third Year is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99
