‘Paul Murray: ‘How the banks got rich off poor people would be a painful read without comedy’
Saturday 15 July 2015
The Celtic Tiger boom and bust has cast such a shadow over Irish life since the late 1990s that it is no surprise its effects have featured so prominently in Irish fiction. Economic, cultural and personal turbulence have been explicitly explored in, or implicitly provided a backdrop to, work by Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Colm McCann and many other writers, not least Paul Murray, the 40-year-old Dubliner whose second novel Skippy Dies was a breakout success in 2010, and whose three books together span the years before, during and after the crash.
Murray’s debut, the Whitbread first novel prize shortlisted An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was set and written around 2001. “It has a lot of stuff about how Dublin was being physically transformed with cranes everywhere,” he recalls. “Living through that time was like being in one of those 1930s movies that opens with a million dollars being washed up on a beach, and in the next shot you see all the locals sitting round smoking cigars.” Murray embarked on Skippy Dies – his wide-ranging, tragi-comic, Dublin boarding school epic that takes in war, poetry, higher maths and much else – in 2002, when the boom had taken apparently permanent hold. He finished it in 2009, a year after the Lehman Brothers collapse called an abrupt halt to the good times. His new novel, The Mark and the Void, published this month, is very much a product of the post-crash world. “It was all over and everyone was feeling embarrassed about what they had done the night before,” he laughs. “Without wanting to be a state-of-the-nation writer, I can’t help but be interested in the times we are living through. Things have, and still are, changing so quickly. The country has done a complete 1800 turn in 10 years. Of course I want to write about that.”
The changes to Murray’s career have been just as dramatic. His debut was promising, but so are many debuts. Skippy Dies, however, longlisted for the Man Booker and several other prizes in Ireland, the UK and the US, really struck a nerve. It was optioned by the film director Neil Jordan and a long-awaited screenplay is imminent. An Irish singer wrote a song based on it. In America Bret Easton Ellis was a fan and PJ O’Rourke declared it left him “weeping about everything”. The definitive indication of what a mainstream hit it had become was when David Cameron announced it had been his 2011 holiday read, and although he didn’t actually finish it while on Ibiza he “picked it up again” when he returned home.
But Skippy’s success not only raised Murray’s profile – Donna Tartt is thanked in The Mark and the Void acknowledgments for her “inspired early reading” – it has also raised expectations. “I’ve met lots of people who absolutely loved Skippy and it means a lot to them. So it was little scary to tell people the new book is about banks – which are actually really interesting! You can see their faces freeze a little.”
As far back as 2002 Murray had begun to think about a book set in the Irish banking system when his sister got a job working for the bank of Bermuda in Dublin. “My idea was for a comic two-hander in which a banker meets a writer. The joke was that the banker, who thinks of himself as a very boring person in a very boring job, is in fact sensitive and intelligent, and the writer, who is supposed be those things, is in fact a boring and crass individual.”
The idea was put to one side when Murray concentrated on Skippy, but resurfaced following the crash. “I came into town a day or two after Lehman’s had collapsed and the place seemed empty. Nobody was spending money. We were constantly being told what a good thing it was that we were the most globalised country in the world during the boom, but no one quite knew what it meant until the crash, when you realised there were absolutely no defences. We were at the mercy of the vagaries of international finance and it was a really frightening time.”
He says one of the ideas he has kept coming back to in his work is that of the “dominant stories we tell ourselves which, when you look at them with any kind of closeness, are deeply flawed and inconsistent. But people are very happy not to look at them closely, especially if all the institutions – in this case the Irish Times, the government, the banks – were all saying that this thing can only go up.” While, “of course”, Murray has political opinions about the whole affair, he is also conscious that “explaining derivatives, and how the banks got rich off poor people and so on, can be pretty painful to read in a novel”. So his way in is via humour, and French philosophy. “Straight out of college in the late 90s I had a very dull job in the Bank of Ireland putting cheques into an enormous and finicky machine that seized up if there was a folded corner. It was a weird mix of old-fashioned factory drudgery and being up close to the abstract coalface of capitalism.” In a “small act of defiance” at how little his English degree was valued, he began to read Roland Barthes and some of his ideas about “boringness” were incorporated into The Mark and the Void. “In a way my French banker in Dublin is sort of a version of my young self, stuck in the monotonous world that Ireland felt like as I grew up. It was insular, parochial and dull with a strong sense that real life was elsewhere. If you had any kind of ability or spark you left. The comedian Dylan Moran described the atmosphere as 13 guys, who hated each other, gathered round a single pint. That was about right.”
Murray was born in 1975 and was brought up in a middle-class Dublin suburb. His father is an emeritus professor at University College Dublin with a specialism in Irish drama and his mother was a teacher. School was Blackrock College, which has turned out many members of Ireland’s business and professional elite, and where some teachers have expressed annoyance about the fictional school in Skippy Dies. As books “were sort of my dad’s thing”, Murray’s cultural heroes were indie filmmakers, bands and comedians. His writing took the form of sketches done for friends – never performed – such as “scenes from the Richard Briers sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles set in the Franco-Prussian war, or in hell.”
At Trinity College, Dublin he did submit work to the literary magazine but it “wasn’t so much rejected as ignored. I had this strange dual thing going on in that I never really thought I could do writing seriously, and at the same time it was the only plan I had.” The beginnings of this bind resolving itself came in his final year when he got on to a writing workshop led by Irish writer Deirdre Madden. “It was the first time I’d shown people stories and they said they enjoyed them and that they were funny.” Murray went on to submit a story – “about a kid on a boring holiday who meets the Devil” – to the university of East Anglia creative writing course and was accepted. Ali Smith was a hugely supportive tutor. “She would read your stuff and, good or bad, would find some point of entry that would flip the whole thing open and give you a renewed perspective.”
But when Murray completed his MA he returned to Dublin in debt, and his father, “who knew what writers’ lives were like, essentially said to me that I’ve had a good crack at it but isn’t it time to try something else? The next day I got an email from an editor saying he had spoken to Ali Smith and that he’d like to make an offer for the book. The whole world changed. That gulf between writing as a slightly pathological thing I did, and becoming an actual writer, was bridged.”
By this time the Ireland of his youth was being transformed by new money. Yet despite the wealth, Murray says, there was a “strange sense of cultural flatness. Money became the only measure by which you were judged and people did not care what had to be done to make it. It was all about everybody piling into Harvey Nicks to buy a black silk shirt and a pair of Aviator shades. Boyzone summed things up in that you couldn’t say a word against them because they were selling all these millions of records, but they were really bad. And they weren’t even handsome guys. The money just wasn’t generating interesting things.”
That said, Murray does acknowledge that “capitalism did dissolve some boundaries. The country became less homophobic, racist and maniacally religious”, but a divide had been drawn between old and new Ireland. “Tea and holidays in Wexford were old Ireland. Latte and a house in the south of France were the new. Books were part of old Ireland despite once being something we had been proud of and suddenly people would shake their heads when you told them you wanted to be a writer and say ‘good for you’ rather sorrowfully. The same was true if you were a teacher or a policeman or a nurse. Anyone who wasn’t flipping property was a loser. You might as well have been the village idiot masturbating in the square.”
He says he was lucky to have been given big enough advances to write full-time. He is married, with a son born in 2011, and works from an office on the “wrong” bank of the Liffey in central Dublin. Despite this stability, however, the long gaps between his novels have been a strain. “You do worry that you might lose your place.” The production of Skippy was also “quite hairy” – he initially handed in a version well over 1,000 pages long. “I knew it would have to come down, but I was being a bit precious until I was shown a letter from an editor in the States, who had liked and taken my first book, saying it was not only too long, but also that she thought there was no way it could be salvaged. From then on all I was trying to do was turn a 1000-page turkey into a 600-page turkey. I really thought I’d squandered the goodwill I had built up from the first book so when it came out it was all a lovely surprise.”
He has more recently been worried about his new book taking five years and featuring potentially arcane subject matter. “I’m quite a pessimistic person about things like this, which is maybe why I like jokes. They are the way I deal with the frustration and oppressiveness of the world and within the humour you can approach the heavier stuff and make it pretty dark. Pynchon, who was my big guy in my early 20s, wrote that metaphor is ‘a thrust at truth and a lie’. There is a slight sense now that the comic novel is somehow infra dig, but it is completely wrong to say that humorous stuff is not the real stuff … I would contend that the comic novel is the novel. From Don Quixote onwards there is the clash between romance and a reality that is messy and absurd and laughable.” He suggests a line that connects Sterne, Waugh, Martin Amis and Jonathan Franzen, and also includes “my favourite incident in literature, in Waiting for Godot, when Estragon takes off his belt to hang himself and his pants fall down. This is reality. In the midst of the blackness there is humour. Comic writing seems a truer way of reflecting the actuality of life, and one that can take in the darkest situations, from economic catastrophe to war. Without wanting to be crass, something like Isis is terrifying, and also ludicrous. Mediaeval holy warriors with a YouTube channel?” he snorts. “Most of the world’s wrongs are caused by people taking themselves and their ideas too seriously, so the novel might be an attempt at curbing that.”
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