Author Chris Binchy explores contemporary Dublin in all its rapidly expanding glory. He talks to Róisín Ingle.
The fact that his latest book, People Like Us, is resting face-up on the table at the sushi restaurant in Dublin where he used to work as a chef is making Chris Binchy ever so slightly embarrassed. Pushing it into a less obvious position, he chooses some sushi from the bar and expertly mixes wasabi into the soya sauce with his chopsticks.
The writer has had a heavy weekend. It was supposed to have wound up quietly the night before with dinner in a friend's house and then "seven bottles of wine later you wake up sweating on Monday morning".
He sounds, just for a minute, like the main character in his first novel, The Very Man, which chronicled the demise of Rory, a returned emigrant trying to keep his middle-class life together through a haze of drink, drugs and ill-fated romances. Binchy is one of a handful of Irish writers currently exploring contemporary Dublin in all its rapidly expanding glory. His new book is also based in Dublin and is about urban sprawl and family connections and that very now and very ephemeral phenomenon, status anxiety.
In People Like Us, Paul, a fortysomething father, is finding it hard to cope with a move to the suburbs away from the coffee shops and general comfort of his former life. The new house on a sprawling estate has a big garden and more space inside for him and his wife and his children. But with dissolute young locals such as young rebel Robbie lusting after his teenage daughter, Clare, he can't shake off the nagging feeling that this new place is just not meant for people like them.
"You hear the word 'knacker' from the mouths of some terribly comfortable people who really should know better," Binchy offers, explaining the undercurrent of groundless fear that pervades the novel. "There are presumptions made, and there is a writing off of certain sections of society that is quite ugly, which I wanted to explore."
Does he see it as a kind of racism? "Well, I didn't want to be overly worthy. I didn't want it to be that I was ticking my own middle-class liberal boxes, but if the Robbie character in the book was black, Paul would have given the kid a lot more leeway, because he wouldn't have seen himself as someone who was racist. But a guy in a tracksuit hanging around is something you are allowed to be openly terrified of. That is somehow OK."
Estate life has always interested him. "The concept of all these houses facing out at each other is interesting. I had a specific place in my head but the atmosphere is kind of the same wherever you are."
He is thinking particularly of his own area, Stoneybatter, in Dublin's inner city, where young people hang around on street corners at night, an innocuous enough activity on its own.
"They are there every night, kicking a ball against a wall, and the ball might go out onto the road and the car beeps and they say 'f**k you' and it's nothing at all really," he says.
"But then you hear it in the shops and around the place that people are terrified by it. They live and breathe this stuff. There are people living in terror of this nothing-at-all."
There are challenges in keeping things current. Contemporary Dublin is "a moving target" and he is more interested in character development, in using the city as a vehicle to explore differences between people, the things that are said and left unsaid, and the interesting gaps in between.
An English graduate and former chef, 33-year-old Binchy was first published when he came second in a new-writing competition in an English magazine. It was only when he was accepted on what was then the brand-new creative writing course in Trinity College in 1997 that he began his writing career proper. At this point, the son of academic and campaigner, William Binchy, left the catering business and moved back in with his parents to became a student again.
His father is not his only well-known relative. Binchy fields questions about the influence of his famous Aunt Maeve politely, but with the weariness of someone who is asked the same questions again and again. "She was always there," he says. "When you are writing short stories in college you keep on hearing about how few writers get picked up and how if you do get picked up how unlikely it is that you will make any money. There is always bad news where writing is concerned.
"The fact that she was around, a published author, making money and being successful was a reality in my life and a lot of people wouldn't actually get to see that. So because of her, success as a writer didn't seem so remote."
He says she never tried to get involved - "I mean that in a good way" - and managed to be encouraging without being interfering. He has never given her his work in draft form but when it is published, she reads it "and oohs and aahs and tells you how wonderful you are. I don't give drafts, and of course after it's published she would be far too polite to say, 'you could have done better'."
Does he enjoy her work? He laughs and says "yeah, of course, absolutely". He sees her as the pioneer of "a particular style of writing" and remembers that the advance she received for her first book, Light A Penny Candle, was huge at the time. But he didn't use her agent or her publisher, and he doesn't think the connection has ever been used as a selling point. "And now, new from the gene pool that brought you Maeve Binchy " he jokes, imagining a fictional advertisement for one of his books. "No, it's a question that gets asked but there is not a huge amount that I can say about it."
Binchy gives the impression that he is not as disciplined as he might like and says he writes more productively when the rest of us are sleeping. "I think you are often more reflective at night," he says. He starts at around 10 p.m. and finishes at around 4 a.m. This suits him better than the previous arrangement when he tried to work nine to five. "My girlfriend would go to work for 9 a.m. and she would come home at 6 p.m. and say, well, how did you get on? There were the morning phonecalls, the constant lying. 'Did I get you up?' Ah, no I've been up for an hour, that kind of thing."
After a two-book deal with Pan Macmillan, now complete, he is a quarter of the way through his third book, for which he has yet to find a publisher. "I will feel secure when I get the next deal. There is always uncertainty, wondering whether the publisher will be clamouring to keep you on or whether they are just going to lose interest."
He says he will continue using contemporary Dublin as a vehicle for his disconnected male voices. "I'm not inclined to start writing about people living in apartments in Prague or anything," he laughs, before finishing off his green tea and heading off into a grey Dublin afternoon.
People Like Us, by Chris Binchy, is published by Macmillan at €13.99