Neil Jordan: ‘We all need disguises. Part of being alive is pretending to be something you’re not’

We all pretend, Neil Jordan believes. Every one of us. He and I are talking about the moment in his new novel, The Well of Saint Nobody, in which a young addict named Hughie decides to take on the identity of the friend he has left for dead in a grotty seaside caravan. Hughie is relieved, finally free of what he sees as the terrible burden of being himself.

This theme of passing off will be familiar to fans of Jordan’s work. The scene in his film The Crying Game in which Stephen Rea’s Fergus discovers that Jaye Davidson’s Dil is trans caused audible surprise in cinemas – a surprise that sticks in the mind even more than 30 years later. We all pass ourselves off in one way or another, Jordan explains, particularly in love relationships.

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“I think we pretend to be people we think the other person would like us to be. Or we pretend to be somebody that is not us, because the reality we imagine ourselves to be is so terrifying and loathsome we don’t want to display it to anybody ... I think we all need disguises to get through the world – part of the condition of being alive is pretending to be something that you’re not.”

The flip side of being someone you are not – that is, not knowing who you really are – also plays a part in Jordan’s lyrical new novel, a story of two classical musicians. Once a celebrated international pianist, William Barrow finds himself lonely in retirement. A strange and debilitating skin disease has attacked his hands, making it impossible for him to play even the simplest scale. William lives in an old rectory in West Cork, a house that, when he had considered buying it with his former wife years earlier, had an “elegance and a seductive emptiness that seemed to be begging for restoration”.

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Now that he is alone it is a creaking, broken place, “a home for a love that never quite happened”. This paradox is not lost on him, for irony is one of the few pleasures William has left. He gave his heart to music, but it proved to be a cruel mistress, returning William’s tireless devotion with “a chilly kind of absence, bemusement and contempt”.

Jordan played classical guitar when he was younger, and he has never lost his love for music. “I wanted to write an adult novel,” he says. “I’m in my early 70s, and I just wanted to write a novel about people who have lived, who have experienced life. I wanted to write about two musicians, and about the world of classical music, which is quite difficult and terribly rewarding.”

Two movies inspired the novel: Max Ophüls’s 1948 film Letter from an Unknown Woman, starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan and based on the book by Stefan Zweig, in which the protagonist forgets a series of encounters with a woman who adores him; and Lost Sex, directed by Kaneto Shindo, from 1966, in which a cleaner invents a legend in order to forge a relationship with a kabuki actor.

Both stories had lingered in Jordan’s mind for years, but it wasn’t until he was living in west Co Cork during lockdown, and afflicted with a condition in which his hands “literally turned into the hands of a Komodo dragon”, that he decided to put a pianist with an old house in the same position he himself was in: “I’ll remove all possibility of his art from his life and see what happens.”

William is forced to confront a lifetime of narcissistic behaviour. Tara, the fifty-something woman who upends his uncomfortable existence, is an unusual character in Irish fiction, for she is a woman fully accepting of her past. She’s fine with both the good and bad of her decisions and missteps. “Are the ones who don’t change luckier than the ones who do?” she wonders.

But being dismissive of regret doesn’t mean Tara is happy; she is fed up with scraping a living as a piano teacher and her fitful, unsatisfying relationship with Peter, a local boatman.

When William advertises for a housekeeper – as he rather grandly describes the cleaner he’s actually looking for – she applies. William, delighted with his new employee, is oblivious to the fact that he has met Tara three times before. Each encounter had a life-changing impact on her yet didn’t even register with him. Theirs is the story, Jordan explains, “of one woman who remembers everything and a man who remembers nothing”.

[ Neil Jordan: ‘Apparently I have a terrifying temper’ ]

William’s scrappy, untended garden holds the remains of a disused, mossy well. Initially for her own amusement, and only later delighting in the power it gives her, Tara begins to spin tales of pure water and healing, of redemption, forgiveness and faith. What begins as an invention, a tease – “Her own fancy. Her own weapon” – becomes something much bigger. And, incredibly, the well works: the moss begins to cure William’s hands. As this happens, the past William didn’t realise he and Tara shared begins to resurface, in strange and unexpected ways.

If reading that makes you fear that the big shiny button on the keyboard labelled Magic Realism got pressed down hard, don’t worry. Jordan didn’t want the recesses of the earth to be delivering some unspecified cure. The unexpected healing powers of the well feel more like reality inflected by legend.

It reads closer to what the writer Éilís Ní Dhuibhne means when she describes using the rich coloured light of folktales to illuminate the grey shadows of modern life. Even Tara acknowledges how unlikely it is that her invented history should prove to be true, wondering if perhaps all legends originally began with “a wayward fancy, a well-timed fib”. (When you think about it, The Crying Game too had a relationship with fables, with its story of the scorpion and the frog.)

The Well of Saint Nobody is also, as you might expect, a very visual book. Jordan has never quite come to terms with the perception of him as a film-maker who publishes the odd novel. After his first book, the short-story collection Night in Tunisia, from 1976, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, he started making movies, “and the minute I’d done that, it was as if I’d never written a book in my life. It’s very strange. I kept writing through the years, but it was just bizarre. People just said, ‘Oh, you’re a film-maker, aren’t you?’” He is puzzled but not resentful. “It’s fine. I’ve had a good time. I’ve been allowed to speak with two parts of my brain. Most people don’t get to speak with one.”

The Well of Saint Nobody is also a reflection on how creativity changes as we age, and on what Jordan describes as “a loss of a capacity for making art”. It is a loss he observes yet isn’t experiencing. The books and movies he wants to make are stacking up: he’d like to write science fiction, which he has never tried, plus a movie of his 2016 novel, The Drowned Detective. Because of the extent to which it affected him as a child, he would also love to make a screen version of The Crock of Gold, James Stephens’s quirky 1912 fantasy novel featuring a cast of fairies, policemen, philosophers and pagan gods, which he describes as quite beautiful and quite insane. “I’d love to make a movie for kids, which I’ve never actually managed to do.”

Despite the movies on his wish list, Jordan believes cinema is not an exciting place to be at the moment. “People are so irritated at the films that are coming out of Hollywood, and there’s the writers’ strike, the actors’ strike ... I think the entire world is going, ‘Come on, you could have served us better than you have been for the last 10, 15 years.’ There’s a sense of excitement you used to get from movies. They used to be the main feature of the culture in a way. That seems to have gone.”

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Fiction remains Jordan’s first love. For him there is a truth, an interiority, in the novel that just can’t be found in theatre or cinema. “If the gods said to me, ‘Okay, you can do one more thing, then we’re gonna shut you up,’ it would be a piece of fiction. That’s what I would do. I’d write.”

The Well of Saint Nobody, by Neil Jordan, is published by Apollo