Michael Mullooly talks to Dublin author Frankie Gaffney, whose novel Dublin Seven was published in September 2015 by the Liberties Press
Q1) W.B. Yeats said: “There is no great literature without nationality, and no great nationality without literature.” Do you think that the term “Irish writer” is a useful category when describing your identity as a writer?
I wouldn’t be averse to describing myself as such (particularly if it helps sell a few books). I suppose I am proud of the Irish literary tradition – but in reality the urban experience is pretty universal. Although the dialect and places in Dublin Seven are pure Irish, the social conditions that created the story can be found in cities worldwide. Every place is, to an extent, unique, and every person is certainly unique, so it is only through uniqueness you can create realistic stories and characters – if authenticity is your aim. Joyce took this to extremes in Ulysses, depicting in incredibly minute detail a day in the life of a fairly average – but very unique – Dubliner. Yet publishers these days are very conservative when it comes to this. I got told to tone down the dialect, and remove certain references (to the Monk, for example) because international audiences wouldn’t understand it.
But you can gain a lot of understanding from context, and in any case, when you come across a word or detail you don’t know, you don’t throw the book across the room in disgust. Rap music is a perfect example of this – inner-city slang from the Bronx has made it into the mainstream without ever supplying a glossary. But even in literature, Irvine Welsh includes the most obtuse sectarian slang in his work, and people are willing to engage with this often impenetrable Edinburgh dialect because it contributes to the illusion of reality. So basically, the universal is best revealed through the local, and I’m an urban writer more than I’m an Irish writer.
Q2) What is your next project?
Not telling. As they say in the North Inner-City, “loose lips sink ships.”
Q3) How important is research to your writing?
Very. Personally, I can’t imagine not having that balance of interpretation and creation. The greatest writers are always students of literature, even if their studies are informal, discussing literature with friends, or whatever. Writing a novel also really boosted my academic work. Understanding first-hand the process of writing and publishing – the limitations, how decisions are made, and how editors, publishers and agents try to impose decisions on you – really informs my interpretations of other people’s writing. It’s the perfect yin-yang. One process invigorates and informs the other. I know I don’t want to read books by people who don’t read, so I think it’s a sort of responsibility to your readers too, to engage at some level with literature.
Q4) Who, would you say, is the most influential writer working in Ireland today?
Writing is too individual and subjective to presume to speak for others, but Roddy Doyle was certainly a huge influence on me. Although I represent the Dublin dialect very differently, The Commitments is where I first saw it on the page, and realised the value of this exuberant, inventive, and irreverent way of speaking. Pat McCabe is our greatest living writer – The Butcher Boy is a sublime piece of work, the most perfect novel I’ve ever read. So perhaps he should be the most influential.
Q5) What three novels would you consider essential reading for every student?
I’m gonna take some liberties here, and add three non-fiction titles. Authors tend to neglect non-fiction when listing their influences, but my writing is informed every bit as much by reading science, history, linguistics, etc., as it is by reading literature. If you specify “students”, this becomes even more acute. There is a major deficit in primary and secondary education in terms of offering a broad understanding of, for example, human history – the guts of which could actually be given in one class. It is shocking that many people never learned such basics as the fact we evolved from primate ancestors, distinguishing ourselves particularly with language and agriculture, moving on to the rise of city states, moving through feudalism to the industrial revolution, etc. It is folly to expect people to have an in-depth and complex understanding of discrete parcels of history without first understanding what history is, and this is true in many subjects. Too often the humanities don’t demand even the most basic understanding of humanity itself.
This is true also in English say, where students do not engage with the basics of what language is, how it works, and how differs from the communication of animals, before immersing themselves in interpreting complex language for three or four years. There seems to me to be a sort of prevailing wisdom that these “big” questions are not to be addressed by students, instead they are often plunged into detail and minutiae of very specific (esoteric) courses, without having gained the type of foundational knowledge that would fast-track their ability to understand the subject matter. It’s difficult to choose just three titles in this regard, but I’ll limit myself.
Nonfiction
i) Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything is an entertaining introduction to the fundamentals of what we know about the universe, our planet, and the evolution of life.
ii) Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond is an excellent history of humanity that puts paid to the idea that “race” informs the success of different societies. Diamond argues that there is one species of human and it was fortuitous geography that caused the dominance of certain cultures over others.
iii) I could put any book by Steven Pinker on this list, but seen as we’re talking fundamentals, The Language Instinct is an enthralling introduction to the subject anyone concerned with using language effectively – whether that’s interpreting or delivering – should really read (and The Sense of Style, also by Pinker, is the definitive guide to improve your writing for the new millennium).
Fiction
Seen as I’ve gone all guns blazing on the non-fiction, I’ll offer three pure pleasure picks for novels. The first is a great thriller to read as an undergraduate, adding a vicarious frisson to student life, the second is an incredibly easy read that manages to be formally innovative, and the third is an exuberant classic of modern working-class fiction.
i) The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
ii) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.
iii) Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
Image courtesy of Frankie Gaffney.
