I suspect that at heart novelists - except for the lucky few whose lives seem to be permanent vacations - never really take holidays. Even in our sleep we invent characters. We loathe beaches because the sand gets into our computers. Occasionally we submit to being dragged off to exotic hotels by longsuffering partners, but after one day of alleged relaxation our fingers start to itch. We sit seemingly half-asleep on deckchairs, secretly studying every passing face and inventing extraordinary, clandestine and improbable lives for them.
At least that's how it seems at times. More likely it's simply the fact of escaping from day-to-day pressures that allows the most unlikely of ideas to enter our heads in hotels, be dismissed out of hand and yet still linger there long enough for us, months later, to eventually take the first tentative steps to invent a world to contain them.
Not that all hotels are the same. City hotels, by their nature, are transient stopovers, impersonal places that guests shoot through and forget. A novelist published in several languages spends part of their life being shunted around such places, with nothing to distinguish them in your memory except the different shapes of tiny bottles of stolen shower gel found stowed away in your bag months later.
You give a reading at 8 p.m., return to your hotel at 10, retire at midnight, lie awake listening to the clanging lift-shaft, the wheezing central-heating, the chorus of televisions and the guest next door who sounds like he's trying to share a shower with a highly strung Irish wolfhound. Then, around 2 a.m., you turn the light back on and grievously assault the mini-bar.
This type of hotel fascinated me enough to devise Finbar's Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar's Hotel and cajole/bully a legion of Irish writers to lend their imaginations to a collective writing experience in two different volumes. The bizarre events conjured by the writers in both books testify to the nature of city hotels.
You may think my fascination with hotels would be sated by now, but a different, relaxing type of hotel experience has, over the past seven years, gradually crystallised in my mind into the apparently quiet family holiday at the heart of my new novel, Temptation.
Without the introduction of the concrete block in 1902, not only would my annual holiday - along with those of generations of Irish families - be less interesting, but Temptation would never have been inspired and written. Although William J. Kelly applied in 1893 for a licence to build a hotel on Rosslare Strand in Wexford, all he initially constructed - in the then wildness of sand dunes - was a small, wooden tearooms.
Hardly enough to keep a growing family, which is why he also ran a brick-building enterprise, which traded successfully until the concrete block knocked the foundations out of his trade in 1902.
A lesser man might have strapped a quantity of unsold bricks to his back and drowned himself. Instead Mr Kelly simply knocked down his wooden tea-rooms and used his unwanted bricks to build a proper hotel, therefore founding a legendary Irish hotel dynasty.
The legend grew as his son, the keen photographer and bird-watcher, Nicholas, took over in the 1920s; to be succeeded in the 1950s by Billy and Breda Kelly (who awarded certificates in winter to anybody crazy enough to run straight from the sauna down into the icy waves); and who were succeeded by Bill and Isabelle Kelly who run it today.
If this succession (three of them even baptised William J. Kelly) suggests a continuity, then the loyalty of guests compounds the sensation. Ending my first stay I thought the queue to pay was moving slowly until I discovered that most guests were not just paying their bill, but booking themselves in for the same week next year.
Continuity fascinates a writer almost as much as change does, possibly because it can provide the medium to measure and compare change. Over the years as I returned to Kelly's Hotel I found myself becoming increasingly conscious of the changes in my own life since I was last there, from the time I had to eat my meals with one hand holding down a screaming child in a high-chair to now when my children wander freely by themselves.
These dichotomies and sense of a life passing must be far more pronounced for people who have been returning there for 40 and 50 years. But each year, as I walked in its gardens or rambling corridors with its famous art collection, I felt that a novel was waiting to be set within its walls, until I was eventually seduced by the temptation to write it.
In recent years there seems an unspoken competition among Irish novelists to further push back the bounds of shockability in Irish fiction. As somebody who helped to set the ball rolling with a government minister defecating on an Irish emigrant in a hotel bedroom in The Journey Home, I'm hardly blameless here, and I believe it to be invigorating that everything within the bounds of human experience should fall within the ambit of fiction.
You see this curve in French film also to such an extent that you can virtually date most French films between 1965 and 1974 by their level of sexual explicitness. Yet one of the most interesting and erotic French films of this period is Claire's Knee, where the sole physical contact occurs when a man briefly touches the knee of the woman he is infatuated with.
If the film Night on Earth inspired Finbar's Hotel, then Claire's Knee inspired Temptation. In my previous novels, characters' lives were transformed by major, often brutal, political or social events. But in Temptation I wanted to explore the life of a seemingly happily married woman enjoying what seems on the surface to be a normal family holiday. Yet by the end of it, without even her husband knowing, her life is utterly transformed.
I began the novel proper the week after my 40th birthday, when I realised that lots of events which still seemed vivid and immediate to me had now in fact occurred 20 years before. It was a sobering thought and one which haunts Alison Gill, who has returned to the same hotel with her husband and children every year, unaware that the man she almost married 20 years before has done the same with his family during a different week.
Following the death of his wife and children in a crash he returns for one last visit, accidentally stumbling into her, just as her husband is forced home by business, abandoning her there with the children.
I wanted them to meet when she was feeling most insecure, so that she found herself being forced to sit in judgement on her life: her present-day reality versus her image at 18, which he had carried in his heart.
Perhaps only somebody who hasn't seen us for 20 years can truly judge how our body and spirit has withstood two decades of living. In Alison Gill I wanted to explore how a mother feels trapped by always having to curb her own needs to mind her children; how somebody can love their husband but became aware of the phantom pain of unfinished business; how the touch you always ache for is the one you've never known.
Last year I locked myself away during daylight hours in a remote lighthouse to complete Temptation. Seagulls were my company, a seal sunbathing on a rock below my window at low tide, the occasional stray fisherman.
I wrote through a woman's voice, because women are able to treat their emotions more openly. What fascinated me was the challenge of creating a holiday that, on the surface, appeared an exact replica of every other holiday there. The same routine of meals and swims with, underneath that smooth rhythm, a turmoil that nobody present could conceive of.
Writers being compulsive liars, I sat down after finishing it to remove the real-life location from it and make it unrecognisable. Then I stopped myself. Re-reading it I found that, although the characters were completely fictitious, I had used every corridor and rock and tree in the hotel. Why not keep it like that, I thought, and create a work of fiction that readers could physically move around within, recognise the rooms and paintings and even play the same golf holes? Why not play with fiction by leaving a record of how a real building felt at one moment in time?
I did change the hotel's name to Fitzgerald's and the owner's name to anything except "William J". Kelly's Hotel is real and Fitzgerald's a work of fiction. But next time I return there I'll keep turning corners and expect to see the clandestine imaginary couple whose thoughts, regrets and temptations populated my days on a remote lighthouse near Dublin, keeping me company along with the seagulls, the basking seal and the occasional stray fisherman.
Dermot Bolger's Temptations is reviewed on Weekend 11