INTERVIEW:For his new novel, writer and teacher James Ryan delves into the murky history of Ireland during the second World War - a passage in history largely ignored in Irish fiction, writes Fiona McCann.
James Ryan could make anyone want to write. Not because he makes it look easy - he takes pains to dispel any myths about the writing life, pointing out that "it is 99.99 per cent hard work" - but because the writer in him revels the joy of his craft which the teacher in him then imparts with a subtle but commanding grace, ensuring it remains with you long after you leave his company.
We meet in a Dublin hotel, Ryan's temperate voice rising over the din of Hoovers and coffee machines without ever being discernibly raised, as he talks about his fourth novel, South of the Border, a coming-of-age story set in Ireland during the second World War.
"Very often, when you're thinking in terms of fiction, you're looking at areas which might allow you to break out of the mould a bit, and I think the second World War promised that," he says, explaining his decision to hang his story on this particular moment in the country's history.
"We were, whether we liked it or not, involved in something that was happening across the globe. Even though we were the ones who were neutral, it still impacted on us in a very definite way." It's a passage in Irish history that has been curiously unmined by fiction writers, an anomaly Ryan is eager to examine. "I think the political and historical intricacies of it actually frighten people away, because it is politically and historically very complex and any fiction writer would feel daunted by the question of how to integrate it into the narrative," he says. "Trying to keep the historical information in a background role, and seamlessly integrate it into the narrative - that was the big challenge of writing this novel."
It's a challenge Ryan has met head-on in a story woven around historical detail gleaned from afternoons spent delving through boxes of radio transcripts in an army barracks in Rathmines.
"The research was probably the best part of all," he recalls. "It started off around the discovery that there actually were Irish language broadcasts from Berlin to Dublin." One such broadcast makes for a pivotal moment in South of the Border, where the protagonist, Matt Duggan, is called in to translate for a shadowy Republican figure named Costigan. "Every single word in the novel coming from the broadcast is based on fact," says Ryan. "All the songs, the cookery recipes ... they're actually all in the original transcripts." His eyes light up.
"Once you're on to something like that it's a very good kickstart around which to build imagined narrative."
The narrative in question revolves around Balbriggan-born Matt Duggan's sojourn as a teacher in a country school, and his infatuation with a skittish young girl sent to live with her maiden aunts. Matt, at once brazen and naive, is a welcome contrast to the pervading caricature of the socially inhibited country boy cowering from the opposite sex, and this refusal to recreate the cliches of Irish fiction is part of what marks South of the Border an accomplished work. "I feel very drawn to the idea of breathing real life back into figures who have been reduced to cliches," says Ryan.
The priest, the guard, the headmaster are all present in this novel, but none in the stock form we have come to expect in depictions of Irish rural life. "I'm consciously going out of my way to avoid that," says Ryan, although he is aware of the risks he takes in reshaping such familiar fictional landscape. "Readers mightn't be willing to recognise that people did exist in other realms, other than what we defined by family and church, by scripture and by de Valera. I think sometimes your readership wants you to produce the cliche. The past is not written in stone, and whether we like it or not, we engage with the past."
The gap between official records of historical moments, and how these moments resonate personally, is what really galvanises Ryan as a writer. "The kind of space that the author occupies here is between how things are publicly recorded and how things are privately experienced," he explains. "This is the privilege of the novelist, that you can place yourself in that very amorphous space and try and see if you can merge the two together."
It is a challenge that has led Ryan time and again to play through the past in his fiction, and the notion of setting a work in the present day holds little attraction for him. "I think that [ if you do that] you run the risk of reducing your work to that of just a mere chronicler," he says. "There's a great value in chronicling, it has to be done and should be done, but I don't think it's the job of the novelist to do exclusively."
He pays tribute to writers who can capture the energy of a particular moment from within it, but adds modestly that it is something he doesn't think he could ever achieve himself.
"I'm too reflective, at this stage, unfortunately," he says, "and also, the current phase is still not over. People are trying desperately to kill the [ Celtic] Tiger. The Tiger is dying a long and protracted death, and everybody is dying to see what its legacy will be, yet I think you have to know what the fallout is before you deal with the era."
He is wary of attempts to make fiction writers - particularly young novelists - into the "voice" of this era, leery of the way the industry can thrust them into the spotlight and put pressure on them to churn out books at a dizzying pace.
"I was picking away at my first novel for years and years," he recalls of his own start in writing.
With the writer Mary Lavin as his mother-in-law (and Irish Times Literary Editor Caroline Walsh as his wife), he was reluctant to raise his head above the parapet until he was absolutely certain he had something to show.
"There was always that fear of being the son-in-law with the novel in the drawer being turned down by 500 publishers, so I did keep it quiet until I was fairly sure that it was working," he recalls. "I had a publisher before I even told my wife." He recalls this circumspection as he embarked on his writing career with some amusement. "Looking back now, I needn't have been so precious about it because, so what? You write a novel, you go down a certain road, you give it a spin." There is, he feels, too often a mythologising of the writer's life that can be dangerous. "The world of writing is as fragile and as delicate and as finely balanced as any other life, and you can be very well settled into it, and it can let you down." He pauses. "In other words, it's not an arrival point at all."
In fact, the writer's life, as James Ryan describes it, is not that far removed from the realities faced by most of us daily. "I spend my day dodging," he admits, adding that part of the problem lies in "excavating your own psyche". "This is not always very appealing on a Monday morning at nine o'clock when you might just want to continue listening to the radio and sipping coffee and doing something less intense," he says. "It's a very intense business." To balance the intensity of this writing business, Ryan continues to teach creative writing at UCD, and this marrying of education - his first calling was as a secondary school teacher - and writing is something he particularly enjoys.
"I have found teaching at the particular level I'm teaching now very fulfilling," he admits, though there's little danger of writing being left behind.
Having published three novels since Home From England first appeared in 1995, Ryan is clearly set to continue his exploration of a craft that patently delights him. "I do enjoy it," he says decisively. "I like talking and thinking about process quite a lot. And I like the fact that a lot of the people who are in the business of writing are very often astute commentators on various things and this, of course, makes for good company." He will take a break after the publication of South of the Border, but there are signals that it won't be gone for long.
"I'm quite tempted by aspects of memoir," he says teasingly, but like any good storyteller, he refuses give too much away too soon. "We'll see."
South of the Border is published this week by Lilliput Press, €20 hardback, €15 paperback