Writers tend to take themselves very seriously; they believe that they not only see more than the rest of us, but that they also think more deeply, even feel more profoundly. Writer Blánaid McKinney is having fun following ideas, writes Eileen Battersby
No doubt, some of them do. Many are truth-tellers, they are also artists - and some loftily refer openly to themselves as such. There are those who confess to a fear of reading current fiction in case their prose becomes infected, their minds influenced.
Whether art or craft or simply the day job of churning out words, writers can make the creation of fiction seem a painful, terribly difficult business. It may be. But Blánaid McKinney is different. She makes it seem fluid and exciting and immediately demystifies herself by saying she is a career civil servant with a wide experience of local government who happens to write. There is no irony, no affectation, no defiance. It is just the way things are. She is no artist in torment awaiting recognition. Ordinary, apparently untroubled, as quick as lightning and very, very funny, with a fluent delivery and a rhythmic Fermanagh accent infiltrated by some years working in Aberdeen, she is having fun following ideas.
She is also a great talker. You find yourself straining not to miss the next sentence as the last remark has left you cackling madly, as did the one before it. As for fearing influences, her mind is as open, well, as open as a book. Information, details, weird asides, snippets, she collects them all, she loves them. Nothing - from old movies, to the attractions of Stephen Fry, to cartoon characters - is wasted.
"I become interested in things, I'm a great believer in the ability to get interested. I used to go out years ago with a guy who was interested in classic cars." As expected, she learnt a lot. Then there was the second World War fanatic; she picked up masses of information from him as well - ask her anything about Spitfire fighter aircraft. Always learning, always watching. She is a walking social historian and a life-student of popular culture. It takes about two seconds to figure out that she is highly political and possesses a subtle forcefulness. "Of course we should vote. Anyone who does not forfeits the right to stand around in the pub blathering about politics."
Still a few months shy of 41, McKinney looks younger - and friendly, quite unlike the rather laconic-looking lady of her author photograph. She says she is the daughter of two dentists, and on cue flashes ordinary-looking teeth, while intoning "Marathon Man" (remember the movie? Remember that dental drill?). She seems more cheerful than might reasonably be expected of an accomplished short story writer who has allowed the central character of her first novel to be perched some 15 floors up, high above the London traffic, as early as page one, and with no way back.
Appropriately titled The Ledge, it is a breezily clever novel about theft. Topicality is both its medium and its prison. Variations of stealing and thievery permeate its pages. It is slick and modern, less menacing than expected - considering the blackness of her vision as contained in the Big Mouth collection (London, 2000) - but for all the gags and digs along the way, it contains its own vision, a truthful examination of lives built on lies and fears. In short, it is an offbeat though deliberate portrayal of modern society as enacted by a group of twentysomethings "all a bit pathetic in their own way", all looking for something not necessarily their own. "Yes, they all want something they can't have."
Written in six months, it is the story of John Kelso, a television personality of sorts, whom we meet on page one preparing to jump off. The novel, for all its punch and Tarantino finale, never quite develops into the fiction variation of a David Lynch movie it initially seems to suggest. The best thing in it is an ongoing sub-plot about an ancient woman in a hospital bed, apparently passively refusing to die. Her story runs parallel to the misadventures of Kelso, who is kidnapped by a fan anxious for his opinion of a script he has written. The old lady - whom McKinney describes as "my Greek chorus",adding "I offer neither explanation nor apology for her" - is suspended between life and death, time and memory.
IS McKinney happier with the short story form? She came to write the novel because she was told to. It was part of the deal when the collection was accepted. At first she found writing a novel "hard work". She does not believe in endless rewrites. "There's only one draft. I try to make it as perfect as I can. If something has to go, well, it shouldn't have been there in the first place." She outlines her structure. "It starts here and ends here, and I have to fill in the spaces in between."
John Kelso is the slick host of a late-night cult cinema/film review programme. He is an obnoxious, insecure egoist. The reader can't help hoping the worst befalls him - and it does. Does McKinney dislike him as much as she appears to? Her reply is not quite clear-cut. "There's a bit of him in me; all the characters have bits of me, I suppose."
Yet they have more than their creator in common. All of these characters first emerged in an aborted screenplay she wrote years ago. The most sympathetic player in the novel is Lynne, a television researcher who seems to love information, facts, details and order almost as much as McKinney does.
Her interest in globalisation and pop culture quickly becomes the dominant theme of the interview. "I read a lot, but I don't seem to read as much fiction as I should. I'm really interested in modern culture, I'm fascinated by it. So I read books on advertising, industry, the politics of culture."
Interestingly, however, one major US novelist appears to have earned a place in her reading - Don DeLillo, whose novels such as White Noise, Mao II and Underworld illustrate McKinney's preoccupations with popular culture.
Writing began for her through that abandoned screenplay with its "cast of thousands". Kelso's obsessions, not just with cinema but with television, cartoon and cultural cross-references, are hers. It was the path that led McKinney, the youngest of five daughters, to a political reading of culture and society. She took a first in politics at Queen's University, Belfast, where she also took a dislike to history and went on to lecture, briefly, giving one of the first papers on women in the politics department. But she did not want an academic career. Practical and social politics, the way workers are treated, the way they live, continued to draw her.
She chooses not to write about the politics of the North: "I don't want to; I don't see why I have to." With a mother from Valentia Island, Co Kerry, and a Dublin father, she grew up in Enniskillen and went to the local convent - but her interest in politics is committed to social policies, not ideologies. Convinced there is ample informed material available examining the conflict, she makes clear she has no intention of offering her political interpretation to the existing stockpile.
Now settled in London, "living the singleton life", she certainly likes writing about what has become her home city, but she will write about anything in any setting. Her whimsy and response to most things means she can see stories everywhere. It would be interesting, though, to see how her quickfire comic intelligence would react to Northern Ireland.
"I was born on the 12th of July" she says. "Until I was about 30, I thought all those drums were in honour of me." Pause.
More laughter. But before she changes pace slightly to discuss her current reading of G. K. Chesterton's magnificent essays - "he really was a genius" - McKinney qualifies the comment about the drums. "When I was about 10, my parents explained the drums didn't have anything to do with my birthday, it was just the Protestants out celebrating the Battle of the Boyne."
The Ledge by Blánaid McKinney is published by Phoenix House, £12.99 sterling