INTERVIEW:To mark the publication of the eighth book in the Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, um, 'trilogy', Ross will be regularly updating his blog on irishtimes.com, where you can keep up exclusively with his exploits. Here, Catherine Clearymeets his creator, Paul Howard
LIFE TAKES STRANGE turns when your alter ego is a former schools' rugby player who turned you into Ireland's best-selling author. Imagine the satirist invited into the inner sanctum of a world he has ridiculed for years and you get an idea of how Paul Howard felt earlier this year as he stepped on stage in Blackrock College. Hundreds of the sons of the country's wealthiest families in a haze of sporting hysteria stood waiting for him to speak to the pep rally for the South Dublin rugby school's senior team.
Howard reached for something from Ross's life. "I read them the speech that Fr Fehily gives to the Castlerock school team in one of the earlier books, which was, 'Yer daddies are rich. You are the gilded ones. After today you will never have to work hard at anything else in your entire lives . . . ' and they cheered every line. I thought for a long time that they missed the irony of it, but they do get it. And they do find it funny and I think they do find themselves a bit ridiculous at times." The bespectacled former sports journalist from Ballybrack, Co Dublin, invented Ross in what he describes as revenge against the audience that now clasps him in a meaty embrace. Howard's eighth Ross book ("yes, the eighth in the trilogy") has just been published and Ross will be making his debut as a blogger on The Irish Times website.
Howard's first glimpse of the life he has chronicled for almost a decade was like a portal on a world he never knew existed. "I remember being on a bus on the way to the ground and being a bit put out that this was my station in life, covering school sports. But I couldn't believe it when I got there - there were 3,000 people - and what a colourful bunch of people."
Did he like them? "Not really, no. Ross really came out of anger. I had a huge chip on my shoulder at the time about the background, a lot of it was just immaturity, but I suppose Ross was my revenge on those people."
And yet this audience could not get enough of Ross and his adventures in boom-time Ireland. Then came the invitation this year from Alan MacGinty, principal of Blackrock College, to talk to the senior cup team before they played. "I said, 'You know these books are taking the piss out of your kids.' And he said, 'Yes they know that but they still like it.'
"I had always wanted to be a fly on the wall on this particular day they have. It's about 900 kids crammed into a hall and they sing the songs. There are cheerleaders going round, these guys going around with megaphones singing the songs. But there are no teachers anywhere, so it's almost like they're doing it themselves. So there are all these chants like, 'You Can't Knock the Rock,' and 'We Will Rock You' and all this kind of thing. It was amazing. I can only imagine what it must be like to be one of those players and it's just hysteria out there and they're looking down on these kids and they're chanting their names and it's real hero-worship stuff."
Howard has become something of the toast of south Dublin. Recently, he was given presentations in Loreto Foxrock and St Mary's in Rathmines, a bottle of champagne in both schools, a Mary's jersey and a Loreto scarf. He found out recently the Australian Lonely Planet guide includes a reference to Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.
He would never have believed there would be eight books when he started writing them. "At the beginning it was going to be a one-off. The temptation was to do a second one and then I decided to do a trilogy. It was only after book four that it really took off and people really started talking about it and a lot of the "Ross-isms" sort of crept into mainstream life." Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra's Box sees Ross travel to Andorra to coach the national team and get a little trip into his own mind thanks to some psychoanalysis. It ends with a twist which Howard has been planning "from about three books back".
Howard's previous two books outsold Irish sales of Cecilia Ahern, a writer he knows and likes. And like J K Rowling, much of his audience has grown up with Ross's timeline. Although not all of them see Ross as the "cautionary tale" he intended. When he worked in the Sunday Tribune, the receptionist called through with a surreal message from a teacher in a south Dublin school about the books' influence.
"The teacher said, 'I've got three of students in my office right now and at the weekend they drove out to Tallaght and they were throwing fivers at the people.' These were kids 16, 17 years of age, throwing fivers like they were confetti."
Howard takes a serious approach to the business of being funny. He is a "lark rather than an owl", awake some mornings at 5am with an idea or a storyline. Next summer will see a biography of Ross and he has three other projects - "one of which involves a huge amount of research" - on the back burner. There will be two more Ross books, the plots of which he has already worked out in detail. And while the ninth will be set in 2007, he will skip a year for the 10th to allow Ross and his friends to live through the crash and all the interesting things happening around the "head-spinning madness of it all".
His own life is at a slight remove from much of the frantic whirl. He lives between his home in Avoca, Co Wicklow, and his girlfriend's apartment in Stillorgan. The early morning routine comes from "growing up in a house full of boys [there were four of them] when, especially in the summer months, the door was opened at eight o'clock and we were all thrown out on the road."
Ross's foray into the blogging world is perfect for a character so enamoured with his own thoughts on everything. "I'm told this has never been done before, but I'm writing a storyline on the status bar of - and this is where it gets technical while, seriously, I'm still struggling with light switches - Facebook, Bebo and Twitter. The idea is that five times a day I'm going to update the bar where it says 'Ross is . . . ' and you usually describe what you're doing or what mood you're in at that time or what your thoughts are and you're given 140 characters. This is going to evolve as a storyline over the course of a month and the only place to read all of them will be on The Irish Times website. Every day the rolling story will be updated to the blog on The Irish Times website."
One of the reasons for the success of the Ross books, Howard believes, is the interaction with the character. For the past eight years, it has been possible to "text Ross". Howard turns on the phone once a week to get feedback from his readers. During the days of T-shirt giveaways there might be 150 texts a week. Now it's between 20 and 30.
"That element of constant dialogue with my readership is a great thing for a writer because that world that I'm writing about the language is changing all the time. There are new words. A band that are popular today, you could reference them next week and discover you're very uncool for mentioning them. I made the mistake of mentioning MySpace one week instead of Facebook and I got about 30 or 40 messages from people, saying, 'Do you know how uncool that is?' "
Are they happy, these Ross kids, who speak in soundbites from American teen soaps? "I think there's a dark underside to it and the pressure on them to be thin and to be beautiful, and then the other message that's coming at them through advertising is to consume more. There are hidden horror stories out there of anorexia and alcohol abuse."
Howard let one of his characters - Aoife - die from an eating disorder. "She goes right the way back to the very first book. She was a character who started out practising disordered eating and it became an eating disorder. A vein of this was running through the books, food and counting calories and the almost punitive element to eating. Until Aoife died, it was always a little bit oblique. She would just disappear into the toilet or a girl would be seen permanently with a bottle of water in her hand, or eat only popcorn. Then Aoife died and lots of people came up to me at book signings and said they were really affected by that. Lots of people thought I was joking but I wasn't."
He would never call himself an anthropologist, but he is fascinated by the culture to which many of the wealthiest segment of Irish society have bonded. The rugby scene in Dublin is a mixture of the Anglo ascendancy, the rivalries between British public schools such as Eaton and Rugby replicated in Irish schools, and the culture of the American sports jock as hero to his peers. Howard has researched the etymology of words like skanger (West Indian term of abuse) and skobie (a term from the English middle ages where famine-stricken people would "scobe" for food in the communal dump).
Does he ever want to pursue literary success, maybe sit with anxious authors in the Guildhall waiting for news of a Booker prize? "I was watching Arts Lives on John Banville, when he said he writes three sentences a day, and that's on a good day. My jaw hit the floor and I phoned Penguin and said, 'Can we discuss the deadline for my next book, because I've just heard John Banville writes three sentences a day'. Now having said that, they are pretty incredible sentences but I have three sentences before I put the kettle on." He is not bothered by bad reviews (though he does have instant recall of the couple that he has had). "If somebody doesn't like what you do, they just don't like what you do. The column and the books were pitched at a younger audience, sixth year in school maybe first or second year in college. They're not literature or anything."
And what about marriage and babies for Paul Howard? "Yeah, put me down for that. I hope so. I've wanted kids for years. I have two nephews and I'm very close to them and they've been like surrogate kids over the years."
And might a future Paul junior have his name put down for a rugby school? "Aah," he says, the first serious pause in the whole interview. "I wouldn't and it's not because I think his values would be distorted or anything like that. I would love him to go to the school I went to, St Laurence College in Loughlinstown. We had our school reunion this month and it brought back all the fond memories."
He has sold a movie rights option twice on the Ross books but nothing has come of it. "I think the problem with Ross is that it's very Irish. Although the jock culture is universal, a lot of the humour in Ross is quite parochial. I'm always explaining to people in England the significance of Dubes, Avoca Handweavers or Cavistons."
Ross did become flesh in Howard's stage play last year, The Last Days of the Celtic Tiger. "But there's a little part of me that doesn't want it to happen [on screen] while I'm still writing Ross. A bad screen representation of Ross and his world could really ruin the character for a lot of people. It could ruin it for me, I think, as well. And that's why I was so pleased with the play because there was nothing there that I hadn't envisaged for Ross. Rory Nolan as Ross was exactly as I pictured Ross."
To celebrate the launch of the new Ross O'Carroll-Kelly book, Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra's Box ( Penguin, €14.99), Ross will be live and interactive on www.facebook.com and www.bebo.com from today at 12 noon. And you can keep up with his adventures on his blog at irishtimes.com