Once We Sang Like Other Men began its life more than 10 years ago on a drab, wet spring afternoon in Pairc Tailteann in Navan. My friend, Richard Ball, and myself were standing on the hill behind one of the goals, watching his native Meath and my native Kildare play out the closing minutes of the first half of a less than exhilarating football match.
Our talk was mostly of football but, as the referee blew his whistle to signal half-time, Richard turned to me and said: “Did you ever think that the apostles might have taken Jesus literally when he said, ‘Eat my body and drink my blood’?” Nothing unusual in that comment, we’d been having these kinds of conversations since we first met as young boys in St Clement’s College in Limerick in 1966.
I don’t recall the rest of that conversation but I went away with that idea in my head and then it drifted to that place at the back of the brain where most writers store the ideas they might one day return to – if memory and time allow. A novel, a collection of poems and a play followed in the next couple of years but always the figures of the 12 men and their leader were there in the shadows.
The process of writing took more than two years. Finding 12 voices to tell 13 stories can be difficult. It involved a lot of walking and some researching and then more walking
I wrote a novel called Joseph, a contemporary take on the life of a man who had long fascinated me – another peripheral figure in the Jesus story – and I found, in bringing him to life, that I was delving into myself and that our lives ran, to some extent, on parallel lines. He was of an age with me; we shared a taste in music; some of the things that had happened in my life had happened in his. And when I’d finished his story I thought again about the 12 other men who were left with the consequences of living with and witnessing the death of their leader.
That leader, his step-son, had never been named by Joseph, instead he referred to him as the little fellow and, later, the young fellow. And that was one of the first decisions I made when I began work on Once We Sang Like Other Men – that I wouldn’t name the central character. To his followers he was The Captain and that’s who he was to me. Why The Captain? Because his followers saw him as that, as a leader, a man worth following, a capable tactician and a philosopher, a man who made most of them feel safe and secure. It also allowed for the uncertainty that one of those followers, Jude, felt about the course they were taking.
And so I set off on a journey of writing and imagining. The journey began during the big freeze of 2009/10. I was living in an apartment overlooking a cemetery and the landscape was a white and quiet miracle. Many of the images from that place and time found their way into the stories, particularly one set in Moscow. And as the spring came on and summer arrived the stories opened out into experienced and dreamt countrysides – parts of the United States; Spain; Palestine; Ireland and London became settings for the tales these men were telling.
But one tale was missing – that of Jude (or Judas). He was gone, fleeing before the Captain’s death and dying himself in mysterious circumstances. But I found a teller for his story in Lily, his one-time partner, and her voice became one of the strongest in my head.
The process of writing took more than two years. Finding 12 voices to tell 13 stories can be difficult. It involved a lot of walking and some researching and then more walking. I was determined to keep the lives of the characters clear of politics and theology. During those long cross-country walks, there was also a lot of talking out loud to find the voices for which I was searching. The journey took me to empty beaches, to memories of North Carolina and the Mojave desert, to Mediterranean shores, to deeply personal and often painful recollections of losses I had sometimes caused and sometimes endured. And all, or most, of these voices and stories were written within the walls of that small apartment, overlooking the daily and nightly comings and goings in the cemetery below my window.
I think that particular landscape reminded me of a number of things that found their way into the book. It reminded me of the vanished souls who appear and disappear from the pages of life and literature – among them The Captain; Jude; Blue and Laz. And it reminded me of the fact that life goes on for those left behind and that each of us deals with the fallout of death and loss in our own way. There is no right or wrong means of surviving, there is only the act of survival.
When the 12 stories were done, I realised there was still something missing and so the 13th and final part of the book was completed. In it I returned to Peter, who had given the first version of events, and I allowed him to deal, at last, with a weight he had carried all his life. It allowed me to exorcise some demons of my own and it allowed me to finish that conversation that had begun years before on a damp Navan Sunday afternoon.
Rereading the stories at proof stage reminded me of the enormity of the loss those men and that woman must have felt on a human level – and that is the only level that I could find in the writing and it's the level I wanted the reader to find in the pages of the book – the ways in which men and women live their lives in the wake of catastrophe, the ways in which they learn to survive, to live, to laugh and love again without ever forgetting the events and the people that shaped them.
Once We Sang Like Other Men by John MacKenna is published by New Island Books
