“There is nothing weirder than an Irish secondary school.”
Oisín Fagan might be well clear of the secondary school system, but it's clear that the scars are still fresh. The 25-year-old's first collection of stories, Hostages, opens with a dramatic account of a school strike led by transition year students. Youthful disaffection and boredom spirals outward into political power-play and catastrophic violence. In a neat twist, it is narrated by a bomb.
The story’s grand arc is underpinned by a keen eye for detail, with Fagan making the spectrum of class and social status to be found among the sons of Meath farmers just as vital as the contours of the plot. The whole story, despite its over-the-top velocity, is uncannily relatable.
“Unlike in the city, we can’t all go to different pubs,” says Fagan of the school setting. “In rural Ireland you kind of have townies, culchies and then you have the good middle-class, whoever, and it’s like, ‘Get in there together! Let’s see what happens.’ For me, that was the main thing about secondary school. It was like, here’s a full cross-section of everything you will meet. At the time, it wasn’t f**king easy. It is traumatic, even just on a social basis. But it’s the only thing that means anything.”
Though the five stories in Hostages vary wildly in terms of style and content, they are all set in Meath, mostly centred on Moynalvey, the tiny village where Fagan grew up. Having moved away to college before spending a couple of years in France, Fagan began to realise how much he didn't know about his home and he set about getting back to it with a better understanding of its social and political make-up.
“We’re living in far less political times in rural Ireland than our grandparents would have grown up in, where it was more like, ‘We might have to kill them’, but it’s still there,” he says. “There’s the monied family, there’s the snobs, there’s the wild ones. It runs so deep. It’s like capitalism, but it’s rooted within. It can only be understood locally. It’s no use saying, ‘Oh, they’re capitalists’. No, they’re Moynalvey capitalists.”
At the same time, he says, he wasn't all that interested in writing about local places and their history without some explosions. Looking for a more spirited take on history led Fagan back to the Irish myths he'd half-learned as a child. Their form, combined with their loose grip on the facts, provided a template for the almost novella-length stories that make up Hostages.
“Some of it is so wacky, but some of it you feel a real deeper truth in it,” he says of those myths. “There’s one where Cú Chulainn loses his best friend and his way of dealing with his grief is to punch a hundred men’s heads off. You could read that as, that’s mental, or you could be like, No, I feel you man.”
"The length, maybe I'm reaching, but I think pre-printing press, you wouldn't be going more than twenty, twenty-five thousand words. All the Ulster cycle, even The Iliad and stuff like that, they're all different books and that form was held in. There definitely is that sense that you could tell 700 years of history or just one battle's history; it's still within that little space."
Fagan gradually found ways to integrate the histories and mythologies, turning them into stories that could live and breathe on their own merits.
“As a reader, you’ve got to find that magic there because it’s not going to be radiant prose,” he says. “There’ll always be a drop like, ‘In 1836 this mother of six set something on fire.’ You’ve got to find that. There was a point where I was doing some research and I was like, I can’t find anything good in this. But that was my fault. It is good, it’s real, real facts – now my duty is to make that connect with something else. Which is a lot of fun with local history, because you can make it come alive very quickly by describing someone’s eyebrows or something.”
In a simpler, calmer time, it would be easy to call Hostages a book of dystopian science fiction. But Fagan is adamant that this description is inaccurate. What he's doing is closer to a magical realism of sorts, an effect of concentration where global events and ideas all happen and mingle in a single, "hyperlocal" place. It's less about how things might be than an amplified version of how they already are. If there is a speculative element, it is more concerned with what we might do about this situation.
“I don’t think it’s dystopian, unless you want to say that today is dystopian. The intent, and this is why I have no interest in writing dystopian fiction, is like, what use is hopelessness? There’s no point in that. I wanted to have a book that was full of actual heroes. Get to the meeting on time, tie up your laces; community leaders, organic leaders, stuff like that. I think in each of those stories, there is a utopian drive. I hope it’s embodied in the person. They come from a place, they know things, they are within a community. I would never write a story that didn’t have that like, we could do something. We could do this.”
“Honestly, when you’re writing this stuff, there are parts where you’re like, this is crazy. But most of the time, you’re like, this is a thing. This is real. Rural Ireland and Moynalvey was a scene of trauma, a century ago, two centuries ago, three centuries ago. It was the scene of revolution and strange happenings, and it will be again.”
This positivity cuts to the core of what makes Fagan's stories more than an indulgence. The explosions, plot twists and revolutions never obscure the progressive and socially minded political ethic which gives the work its true character. Hostages is ultimately a reminder to face the world as we find it and, corny as it sounds, to muster the strength to resist the forces of oppression and dispossession. If dystopia is here and now, Hostages tells us, it's up to us to plot a way through.
“It’s not like those American films where it’s like, there’s going to be a wave and it’s going to come over everyone but don’t worry, you and your wife might get back together,” says Fagan. “It’s not like that. No, there are two million people trying to get into Europe and they’re shooting them. Little kids wash up on the beaches where you go on holiday. Ireland can only pretend it’s not part of this system for so long. Obviously I’m coming from a position of privilege, but it’s our world. It’s right there. It’s not in east Asia any more. It’s in France and Spain and Greece and Germany. It’s coming.
“While a lot of the stories end badly, it’s not as simple as saying everything’s s**t. There are opportunities, with enough dedication and enough work. It’ll probably f**k you up, but you’ve gotta go for it.”
Hostages, published by New Island Books, is in shops now.
