In his new novel, Home, Frank Ronan has portrayed his home town, New Ross, for the first time. Some of his former neighbours will laugh - others won't. He doesn't give a stuff, he tells Arminta Wallace
When Frank Ronan's début novel, The Men Who Loved Evelyn Cotton, won The Irish Times Literature Prize, everyone wanted to know who Evelyn Cotton was. More than a decade later, he has written a novel called Home, set in a hippy commune in the English countryside and in Ronan's own birthplace, New Ross - and he's ready for the inevitable question. Alas, the answer is no: he doesn't live in a hippie commune, and never has. But he does admit to a strong preference for country living. "My partner works in London, and he can't be very far away from the city, and I hate London," he says. "So there's a compromise; we meet in Worcestershire at weekends. It's the last bit of England worth living in," he adds, meaning proper country villages, not the ersatz kind crammed with wall-to-wall stockbrokers and four-wheel drives. "But Ireland is home."
In fact, it quickly becomes obvious that as far as Ronan is concerned, home is wherever his garden is. "I'm obsessed," he admits. "I can't remember people's names, but I can always remember plant names." He doesn't come across as an obsessive, but as he talks about gardening Ronan's languid, laidback manner is replaced by a palpable enthusiasm.
At the mention of garden design he suddenly sits bolt upright - not an easy thing to do when you've taken root in one of the Shelbourne Hotel's three-foot-deep sofas - and declares, "I've just come up with a fantastic idea for a design based on tartan." Sorry - did he say tartan? But he's already sketching it all out in the air, Latin names flying every which way. "Things growing in straight lines and crossing at right angles, so that from above it looks like a piece of tartan but from ground level you have all these walls intersecting. I can't wait to get started on that," he says, in a tone which suggests it will be in full bloom come June. It is a passion he shares with his novel's pint-sized narrator, a boy with the unlikely name of Coorg. Born into a cabbage-growing, peace-loving1960s commune, Coorg is declared - courtesy of a favourable reading of the I Ching - to be the new Messiah. But when the commune discovers that Merlin - in the shape of Marc Bolan - is already well on the way to saving the world, the hapless six-year-old is relegated to the position of Messiah-in-waiting. Meanwhile, his Irish grandparents turn up and spirit him away to New Ross, where he is given a more suitable name - Joseph - and discovers the dubious joys of Catholicism and confectionery.
The consequences of the boy's struggles to readjust his hippie norms to the realities of rural Ireland are startling and often hilarious - and the theme of "belonging" is one which seems to interest Ronan, not just in literature, but in life as well. "I am starting to think about this thing called society," he says, "and what are one's obligations to society - in fact. Is it just not to do any harm to anyone, or is there more involved? In my life, I isolate myself as much as possible. I grow my own vegetables. I don't have a bank account. I wouldn't have a telephone if I didn't have to."
But society, especially rural Irish society, has a way of striking back. Does Ronan worry about the way New Ross may react to his distinctly unflattering depiction of life in the town just a few decades ago? "Oh, I don't give a stuff," he says. "Come on - have you been to New Ross? It's an archetypal small town. There are great people there; and the people I like in New Ross will laugh their heads off. And the small-minded mumblers will do small-minded mumbling no matter what you do." He could have disguised the locale, but that option, he says with a shrug, didn't interest him.
"To begin with, creating imaginary landscapes is great fun. But there comes a point, six novels down the line, where you've done as many imaginary landscapes as you want to, and there are other bits of the novel that you'd rather concentrate on. Rather than making up street names and making up town names, you'd rather be thinking about what your characters are feeling and saying - and just put them in a place that you know your way around."
In retrospect, Ronan's own teenage years could be seen as a series of attempts at fitting into various social groups - or, perhaps, at trying them on for size, only to find that none of them fitted very well. They still don't, if his description of himself as "a bit of a misanthrope" is accurate. But, he says, he always knew he wanted to be a writer.
"I remember teaching myself to type at a very young age in my father's office, thinking it would be the one skill I would need. Then I began to write poetry - and was taken to poetry readings as a sort of prodigy," he says, with a most unprodigal grimace. "I don't think I was very good, but how they love a piping little voice . . . But I did meet some of the great poets of the day - and that was so off-putting. I thought, 'I really don't want to be one of those'. They all looked so depressed and shabby. I thought, 'There's got to be a better way to do this. I think I'll be a novelist instead - it might be jollier'."
After doing his Leaving Cert, the 17-year-old Ronan went to England to work with horses - and found himself constantly being asked what he intended to do with his life. "And when you're 17 you don't say, 'Well, I'm a novelist'. You just do what any teenager does and go, 'Dunno'. So then they all said, 'Aha - young man without private income. Only thing to do is join the army, obviously'. I was sent to see this general who said I was perfect officer material except that I needed to go to the colonies and have my corners rubbed off. I was thrilled. I told everyone I had to go to Australia for six months.
"And I came back, completely jetlagged, to find that the general had set everything up; I was picked up at the airport, half groggy, and driven to Bristol to take the Queen's shilling. I came to in a barracks in Woolwich and had a week of hell, jumping through bogs holding my trouser bottoms."
Army life was, for Ronan, a series of swift disillusionments. First, he was given a gun and told to shoot at a cardboard cut-out. "I said, 'I'm not shooting anyone'. They said, 'But you're in the army'." When Saturday night arrived and he realised he wouldn't be permitted to go to the local hunt ball, he phoned the general and demanded to be let out - permanently. He hasn't written about his 10-day soldiering stint, but the way he talks about it, you get the feeling that he might.
"It was interesting to see what went on - how those organisations make their members. What they basically do is, they take you to the point of a nervous breakdown and then back again. So when they take you back, you're grateful. And you actually saw people lying on the ground screaming. Sense of humour failure, they call that."
Not something from which Ronan's novels are ever likely to suffer. He writes as he talks, with a laconic and slightly surreal wit which he seems to find as baffling as others find it amusing. "When I finished Evelyn Cotton I sent it to my agent; and I phoned her after a week and asked her if she'd read it yet. And she said, 'Yes, I'm half-way through: I'm laughing my head off'.
"And I said, 'No, no, it's me - Frank'. She said, 'Yes, I know'. And I just couldn't believe that there was anything funny in there at all. Now I know that most people think what I write is funny. But it's not intentional. It just happens."
• Home by Frank Ronan, is published by Sceptre (£14.99 sterling)
