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| Donal Ryan |
Donal Ryan: ‘Writing is like being gloriously drunk, and it’s always followed by a hangover of guilt’
Friday 9 March 2018
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His fifth book, From a Low and Quiet Sea, begins with a very different story: that of Farouk, a Syrian doctor who with his wife and daughter flees a country collapsing into war in the hope of safety in the west. They discover too late that the boat they are crammed on to with other desperate families has no captain and no life jackets: and then a storm hits. Ryan took the story, he explains, from a news report about a Syrian doctor who paid what he thought was a high-end smuggler to get him out of the country, then lost his family at sea. “It really happened, the boat went down. What happens in the book happened in real life.” In the novel, the traumatised Farouk drifts through refugee holding camps, unable to process his loss. The real Farouk was employed on one of the Greek islands as a brain surgeon, says Ryan. “There was a line in the report where he says that he spends the time after his shifts looking out across the water, because that’s his family’s grave.”
Ryan felt compelled to write Farouk’s story, starting and restarting it dozens of times, until he hit on a way of telling it that seemed right; but he also felt hugely conflicted. “I was taking as inspiration a living man’s story and his expression of terrible, unimaginable grief. I felt an obligation to that person and to the thousands of others like him to represent their struggle in as real a way as possible, to make it as immediate and relatable as possible, but I had this whispering voice in my head, saying, ‘You’re a fraud. You’ve never felt this. You’re just making stuff up and writing it down and you’re actually enjoying it.’ Because writing, when it goes well, brings me such joy, and I rarely feel as though I deserve it. The joy is like being gloriously drunk, and it’s always followed by a desperate hangover of guilt.”
He had previously written an award-winning radio drama about crossing the Mediterranean, I Seek Refuge, narrated by a young Syrian girl, and a short story set in Syria, “Long Puck”, in which the Irish game of hurling brings together Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim players – until the militants representing Islamic State intervene. “I think so much about people who have to move across the world to try and find safety, and the reactions we have in the west. We export nine tenths of what we produce in Ireland and still there’ll be an idea that: ‘If we let people in we won’t have enough for ourselves.’ Empathy seems to be diminishing globally.”
Though many of his stories have been prompted by news headlines, Ryan admits: “I’m a pretty lazy researcher. I find when I research too assiduously I start to write non-fiction, to explain to the reader what a thing is that they could easily know more about than me.” In a way, Farouk is “just me really. I do it over and over again, I give all my characters my own desperate character traits. You only know yourself really, and even that’s a mystery to most of us.”
Farouk’s is not the only voice in From a Low and Quiet Sea: his journey to the west and eventually Ireland is threaded with the stories of Lampy, an aimless twentysomething working as a bus driver for a care home, and John, an elderly man with a dark past. Though the trio have nothing in common, they will come briefly together, to devastating effect. “The question is, how different are we? The things that make us human are the things that unite us,” Ryan insists. “The main elements of humanity are shared.”
His older sister and younger brother went on to work in the civil service and the police force respectively; the children grew up in a house filled with literature. “My parents bought books in job lots: books from auctions and jumble sales, new books. They made sure that we were literate. They had all the mid-century Americans; I was reading Steinbeck, Hemingway and Bellow, very early on.”
And the house was filled with stories, too: “My maternal grandmother was just wicked – a beautiful wit, could cut people in half, she was hilarious. My parents, both great storytellers. The story could be totally inconsequential, but it would be just the joy in the telling.”
Ryan’s ambitions to write were reflected back at him by family and friends: from teachers at school onwards, “People around me were so convinced it’s what I should do.” But after a law degree at the University of Limerick and joining the civil service, Ryan spent a decade in “a creative wilderness”, making false starts at “pale pastiches of things I was impressed by”. At this point, it was just him and a ghost – a friendly one, he stresses in his matter-of-fact, rapid fire Tipperary accent. “There was no horror element, just a constant feeling of a warm presence, objects moving around, footsteps, whispered voices. I saw her once, walking across a room, right in front of me. Ninety-six per cent of the universe can’t be explained. There’s a world of room there for my ghost.”
It was meeting his wife, Anne Marie, that changed everything. Without her, “I’d still be messing around, getting to page 10, forgetting about it. I wrote That Thing About December just to impress her. She’d been saying, ‘Look, you say you’re a writer, just go and write a novel.’ I felt satisfied – that I could live my life knowing I did the thing I always thought I could do, and Anne Marie loves it. That’s enough.”
By this point the pair had started a family, and the recession was beginning to bite. Ryan was working for the National Employment Rights Authority, and when public sector workers’ pay was cut, their household income fell by a quarter. “We were floundering a bit, all right. I thought how can I make some extra money, and I thought the one thing I’m good at is writing.”
Rejections had been pouring in for That Thing About December, about a young man sitting on valuable land who is bullied by his community, but Ryan snatched evenings and early mornings from the blur of family life to write The Spinning Heart, set around the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. “Cynically I thought, what’s the gap in the market now? People had already started to write in that area – Claire Kilroy, Roddy Doyle. I was just lucky.”
It’s become a classic publishing fairytale, with 47 rejections logged before That Thing About December was spotted in the slush pile of a small publishing house, Lilliput Press, who brought Spinning Heart out first to a string of awards, and December a year later.
But with sky-high expectations, writing a third novel proved harder. “First I’d never been paid in advance for anything in my life, it was horrendous, the thought of it. The lump sum in the bank brought a feeling of achievement, then I realised it was completely hollow.” At one point he asked his wife to phone up the publishers: “Say, ‘I made a mistake. I’ll give the money back. I can’t do it. I’ll stick to the day job, it’ll be fine.’ I was a bit of a wreck for a while but she got me going again, thank God.”
All We Shall Know is the story of a woman who, like many of Ryan’s characters, is bent out of shape by emotional damage from childhood. She becomes pregnant by a young Traveller man, and later befriends a young woman from the same community. Ryan remembers the “mad irreverence, glorious wit” of the Travellers who came to his father for driving lessons. At the same time, “You can feel this frisson of sadness, because there’s so much pressure on Traveller men to be a certain way.” The plot hinges on a fight between two young men to resolve a feud between families. “It happens on a weekly basis, these fist fights are organised to settle disputes. There’s a savage nobility in that, but still it shouldn’t go on. People view Travellers as a problem to be solved, which is a horrendous way of looking at any human being.”
Ryan was in the news last year when his announcement that he was returning to his full-time job led to anxious reports about the impossibility of even bestselling authors making a living from writing. He stresses now that he was only ever on a career break. “I wasn’t forced back in penury, I was always going back. The whole thing was very embarrassing, to be honest. I was kind of mortified. Most writers struggle their whole lives. It’s a tough business.”
Since then he’s left the civil service to lecture in creative writing at the University of Limerick – without a regular income, he says, “I’d be a nervous gibbering wreck. I wouldn’t be able to write.” Teaching writing is a joy, but “a little bit of a cocoon maybe”, compared with being constantly on the road as a labour inspector talking to people, a process that contributed to the panoply of voices in The Spinning Heart. Then, “I was really close to the beating heart.”
All Ryan’s books have been written out of a struggle about the purpose of fiction, and From a Low and Quiet Sea is no exception. “Creative fiction is kind of an unnatural act, to try to impose narrative on senseless things. I suppose that’s why we do it, because we need to think there’s some sense there.” And it’s not the only novel in which using other people’s stories has caused him sleepless nights. “The effects of the recession in Spinning Heart, bullying in The Thing About December – these are all things that happened to people in real life that I’ve pretty much appropriated to write books to make money. Which seems kind of awful, really, it seems sociopathic at times – the whole act of writing and creating fiction seems psychotic.”
“I can’t imagine 40 more years of life filled with just making stuff up,” he says now, suggesting that after a few more books he’ll “forget the whole daft idea of it”. But this state of radical uncertainty is also where his inspiration resides. “I don’t know anything, I admit that all the time. I think things, and I feel things, but I’ve no certain knowledge. I think if you walk around with all these certainties, you can’t create really. People are puffed up lately with certainty, moral rectitude – puffed up to the point of bursting. Certainty is anathema to creativity”
• From a Low and Quiet Sea is out from Doubleday on 22 March.
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