Paul Murray: ‘The banks were full of basket cases'

Most people loved Paul Murray's novel Skippy Dies. The energy of its cast of impulsive adolescents, the exuberant detail of its school setting, the fizz of its dialogue, the range of its references, from Prada jeans and Pachelbel's Canon to string theory and the outer reaches of the universe: all of this, and more, endeared it not just to critics but also to a wide range of other readers. In Ireland and across the world Skippy Dies took on a life of its own.

But that was five years ago. So there has been considerable speculation – and anticipation – around Murray's long-awaited new book, The Mark and the Void. Set at the International Financial Services Centre, in Dublin, it brings together a lonely French investment banker called Claude Martingale and a struggling Irish writer called, well, Paul.

Where did the idea for the novel come from? "I began a first draft in 2002, long before I finished Skippy Dies," Murray says. "It was supposed to be a comic two-hander about a banker and a writer. I didn't really know anything abut banking, but I thought the IFSC would be an interesting backdrop for a boring guy who's kind of a lost soul.

"Then, when the banking crash happened, in 2008, like everybody I started reading up on all these crazy antics that they were up to – so once Skippy Dies was done I came back to this idea and started researching pretty seriously. The banking backdrop was turned up quite significantly in the mix, and it became much more a book about that world."

The Mark and the Void, then, isn't exactly a follow-up to Skippy Dies. Still, though. Was it hard to follow Skippy Dies? "It was strange in the best possible way," Murray says. "It was surreal, frankly. As a writer it's very rare that you see people reading your book. Most of the time you don't have any sense of an audience at all. So to see that book out there in the world was immensely gratifying – really, really gratifying. I'd meet people at readings and they'd say, 'I gave it to my son.' Or grandson, or whatever. But the flip side of that was, 'Well, this is all about banks.' I could see people picking it up because they love Skippy. And I could see their faces fall."

Panicky headlines

Written at a time of crisis, not just in the banking world but also in the literary world, the book has an uncomfortable, ambiguous, at times almost elegiac relationship with the world of literature. It’s as if the stream of panicky headlines about publishing – the end of the printed book, the ebbing away of humanity’s ability to read more than a couple of pages at a time, the death of the novel and so on – seeped into Murray’s consciousness while he was working on

The Mark and the Void

.

“In recent times the news has been getting better,” he says. “But for a while it was very upsetting and dark. There was a sense that writing books was irrelevant. If you’re going to spend three to five years working on a book the idea that it’s totally futile is not very helpful.”

Murray insists that he is not the Paul of the narrative. “If he starts saying things like, ‘Oh, it’s so difficult to be a writer,’ and, ‘People don’t really read,’ and all that, it can come across as me moaning about the difficulty of being a writer. And I definitely didn’t want to do that.”

What Murray is unquestionably very good at is dreaming up delightfully daft names. His debut novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, contained an eponymous greyhound and an anti-hero called Charles Hythloday. In The Mark and the Void the writer's four-year-old son is called Remington. Claude's bank is the Bank of Torabundo. Its new chief executive – the previous one has been fired for being too cautious – is Porter Blankly; the guy in charge of the Asian markets team is Thomas "Yuan" McGregor.

“I like jokes,” Murray says. “I would naturally write in a comic mode. You’re hoping that, for the reader, it will give the story a bit of energy, a bit of a spark, and power through some of the more arcane reaches of banking terminology or whatever. Also, for me as a writer, it’s a way of making it fun.

“The difficult part of writing a novel is the structure. Getting it right, getting the arc to be logical and coherent, and getting everything to make sense by the end.” When you’re three years into the five-year project that is a new novel, he adds, it helps to keep the momentum going.

How did he research banking for the book? Did he, like the writer in his novel, shadow a banker? “I felt like I really needed to have a wider-angle perspective. I have a couple of friends who work in banks. They were useful in just bouncing specific questions off – but, really, I did it by reading.”

As he talks about the financial studies he read, which include Simon Carswell's Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank That Broke Ireland, David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years and William D Cohan's House of Cards: How Wall Street's Gamblers Broke Capitalism, as well as Michael Lewis and John Lanchester, Murray's enthusiasm for the subject becomes clear.

"I ended up getting addicted to all that stuff. I'm still reading it now. I'm reading Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century." What is it that fascinates him about finance? "The preposterous machinations of these people who we still think of as being sane and sober individuals. But they're not. They're basket cases. The banks were full of basket cases, people who had lost any connection to their responsibilities as human beings."

For a comic novelist such material might seem like manna from heaven. But it has its dangers, too. Murray says he had to make his fictional bankers a good deal nicer than the real-life bankers he was reading about. "If you put those guys from House of Cards into a novel it would come across as some kind of Marxist screed. And it's 500 pages long, that book. By the end of it you feel like you've been trapped in a lift with six Monty Burnses," he says, referring to the Simpsons character.

Murray stresses that it’s not his intention to preach. But if comic fiction is to be successful it must be serious at its core, surely. He nods. “I’m interested in illusions of one kind or another. Romantic illusions. The dominant narratives by which we live, or by which we make our decisions. I think those illusions are often flawed in very serious ways. They lead us to make very bad decisions and sometimes to hurt the people that we love. As a writer, certainly as a comic writer, you’re trying to puncture those illusions. Your job is to look at those dominant narratives and kind of give them a kick and see if they hold up.”

Cheesy, outlandish or cruel?

For a novelist as much as for a stand-up comedian the relationship between real life and comedy is a tricky one. What amuses one reader will strike another as cheesy, outlandish or cruel.

The Mark and the Void

features a minister for finance whose terminal illness plays a central role in the narrative. Details of that illness will, for Irish readers, immediately bring a particular minister for finance to mind. Is Murray sailing somewhat too close to the real-life wind here?

"I thought of the book as a sort of parallel universe," he says. "It's not a roman-a-clef where you go, 'That's Anglo, and that's McCreevy, and that's Brian Lenihan. ' It's not something I did lightly. It's not supposed to be Brian Lenihan. At the same time Brian Lenihan's story was really interesting, because he was the one person within that government that I would look at and think that they had any integrity or honour or intelligence or ability – and he was shafted. He was taken to the cleaners by the banks in a really cruel way. And I think he did pay a really enormous price for that.

“So I also wanted to reflect that in the book, that during the recession people suffered in a very real way, from the guy eating pigeons in his back garden to the horses starving in the streets. Real things happened to real people. So while this is not a journalistic account of what happened – journalists, I think, have handled that very well – I did want to show that in this scenario there are very real stories.”

The Mark and the Void is published by Hamish Hamilton