Neil Jordan, whose new novel is published this week, is essentially a gifted writer who happens to make movies, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
Writers need to write. Some make the mistake of writing too much. Others don't write enough. "If you don't publish, your other books go out of print," says Neil Jordan with that rueful exactness that appears second nature to him. He could never be accused of being lazy. Yet,as the screenplays increased and multiplied - he won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for The Crying Game - and helped establish him as an international film-maker, his fiction output remained small, his excellent early writing overlooked and the next generation pushed him aside.
Cinema's gain proved literature's loss. "Not every big project actually becomes something. Movies often don't get made." It has become easy to forget that the Jordan whose first collection of short stories, Night In Tunisia, was greeted by Sean O Faolain in 1976 as the work of an artist shaped by Yeats and Joyce who was well on the road to literary greatness, is essentially a gifted writer who happens to make movies.
The current stable of established and wannabe Irish writers enjoy a pampered star status. In the 1970s, fiction was not as trendy and writers weren't marketed. The young Neil Jordan followed Night In Tunisia with The Past, a masterful and mature first novel, in 1980. Eulogistic most accurately describes the level of reviews it received.
Praise seldom comes richer or weightier. The Dream of A Beast, a blackly surreal novella in which Kafka meets J.G. Ballard followed in 1983. By then, he had made his first first feature film, Angel, which opened in London in November, 1982. Angel handled the conflict in Northern Ireland with eloquent rage. Two years later came The Company of Wolves, a fairy tale exploring suppressed sexuality. Based on an Angela Carter short story, it impressed, showcasing the multiple layering of Jordan's vision. Mona Lisa, a breakthrough film revealing profound emotional intelligence, was released in 1986. The private world of the novelist had been exchanged for the public, collaborative industry called cinema.
Time slides by and somehow a decade has passed since Jordan the novelist last published a book, and that one, Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), a slight effort by his standards, had itself broken an 11-year silence.
There comes a point when enigmatic transcends intriguing and becomes down right problematic. Evaluating Jordan the novelist, increasingly overlooked whenever critics decided to assess current Irish writing, is a little bewildering - like talking about a gifted violinist who had wilfully abandoned music in his prime and taken up motor racing.
His new novel, Shade, was published this week. A couple of hours before the party to mark the publication, Jordan is looking dishevelled but pleased. His knee is a mess having fallen off a bike. The wound has been further irritated by an ill judged encounter with the chlorine in a swimming pool. But as for the book, Jordan is not coy: "It's good, isn't it?" he says. It is. So good it leaves one wondering why he bothers making movies. His belief in language is absolute as is his mastery of it. Jordan doesn't waste words and the ones he uses are invariably the right ones.
Shade, he explains, happened because a big movie project he had been working on, didn't. Although more a tragedy that a comedy, it is a multiple narrative of light and atmosphere that largely centres on the consciousness of Nina Hardy, a sympathetic character who convinces as a woman presented briefly with happiness only to live at a remove from it.
Atmosphere is an element for which Jordan the artist has a natural feel. The novel's beauty lies in the writing, particularly the graceful painterly prose of the descriptive passages. It is Thomas Hardy deferring to William Trevor. This is a very good book possessing an elegiac resonance: "Death envies life. It longs, weeps, pines, retches for that consolation even at its bleakest."
Nina confronts the ghost that is her after she has been murdered by a childhood friend. The novel chronicles her belated coming of age. It explores a major life problem - the dilemma that is growing up. Exchanging the world of the child for that of the adult is never easy, but for the central characters, Nina and her half brother, Gregory, and friend George, it proves an ordeal. If atmosphere, a Boyne estuary setting comparable to a Dutch landscape painting, and the confused despair of love are the elements that make Shade dance and shimmer, the complexities of history dictated the achievement that is The Past.
LIKE A DOCTOR pondering the death of a patient who shouldn't have died, Jordan considers my paperback copy of that novel, a contender for the dubious status of most underrated Irish novel of the 20th century. His expression says it all, before he even utters the words. "The Past was seen as 'very difficult', 'very dense'. People didn't read it. My own children haven't read it. It is overwhelmed by its visual imagery. It was trying to make sense of the present by looking to the past."
It is also shaped by Jordan's powerful sense of Irish history. Where did this awareness come from?
"The history? I studied medieval Irish history at college," and he begins describing an undergraduate thesis he wrote, only to interrupt himself. "It's a long time ago, I, well, I don't want to sound pretentious."
He laughs and shrugs. Has he thought of adapting The Past for the screen? "Never, that wouldn't work."
Why did he move from novel writing to film making so early in his career? "There were all these writers, the Joyces. Screenplays offered a sense of release. Irish writing was all about the short story, there was reasons for there being no novel and there was no Irish cinema. It was a different way to look at narrative."
By nature he appears shrewd, very wary and precise in his observations. There is an interesting edge to him. Born in Sligo in 1950, he has managed to retain his candid boy's face, albeit slightly puffier, less soft and a bit more battered than it once was. Moods march across it. His features have taken on the perennially slightly exhausted cast of middle age. He has brown eyes, a good wide smile, a sense of humour, a well-developed sense of self and an articulate, measured delivery that contrasts with his pulled-through-a-hedge-backwards repertoire of twitching, scratching and gazing over the sea view that stretches across his window.
Although he continues to look younger than he is, Jordan, a father of five 9they range in age from 28 to nine years) who says "I'm 54, but I don't feel that old", has always seemed to belong to an older generation. His cultural references are rooted in the 1920s and 1930s. "I was never that interested in popular culture."
He has always lived in his head and Jordan's imagination seems a terrifying place full of romance, darkness and surreal possibilities. It makes perfect sense that he is currently reading J.G. Ballard's most recent novel, Millennium People. He admires the great Ballard, with whom he shares a surrealist sensibility.
He claims he wasn't "that good" at school, but was clearly good enough. True to generations of arts graduates, he echoes that familiar observation about maths not appealing to him. University where he studied English and history was easier and more interesting because of the reading. Marguerite Duras, Faulkner, Hemingway, "I always liked George Moore - he wrote too much - and Samuel Beckett."
Reading and writing were natural refuges. "There wasn't much to do in the Ireland of the 1970s, except read and write. There was no work, no jobs. It was all very different, not like now." There is no lamentation. Jordan is simply offering facts. He set up the Writers Co Op because there was no place for an Irish writer to publish the sort of fiction he was interested in.
The most non-autobiographical of writers, he does admit however that his emotions inform the work. It helpsexplain the depths and textures he achieves. Theatre does not attract him because of its emphasis on a gesture whereas cinema offers experience. For all the visual quality of his work, he disagrees with US novelist Don De Lillo's thesis that the visual image has supplanted the word. "I don't agree with that. The word, language, endures."
Screen-writing is as much a part of his film-making as directing, so he sees the relationship between fiction and film as a close one. Writing a novel offers greater control but a film is a wider effort.
IF HE IS a writer who also makes movies, he is certainly a European film maker who seems to be making Hollywood movies such is the compromise of making art within an industry. His films are diverse, with no obvious stylistic pattern. They span various genres from the offbeat romance of The Crying Game (1992) and its screen-writing Oscar to the camp dazzle of Interview With The Vampire or the light touch that elevated The Good Thief through the characterisation of the Nick Nolte role to something more than a remake of a caper. "Well, they've all been different." Only his consistent
Most would see him as a writer's film-maker. Anne Rice and Pat McCabe, contrasting writers, were pleased with the way Jordan transferred their respective works from the page to the screen. Interview With The Vampire in 1994 was his witty reply to the big Hollywood movie. Its success went a long way towards easing the irritation of his late 1980s comedic flops, High Spirits - mere mention of which makes him groan - and We're No Angels. Their failures, it could be argued, had been countered by The Crying Game and the over-rated Michael Collins, but Vampire showed Jordan could sustain comedy and could match the Americans in making a Hollywood movie with Hollywood stars. Jordan returned to the intimate intensity of his earlier films with his adaptation of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.
"Greene is a good writer, he can be very good. But I felt he had never been well served by film. I had thought about The End of the Affair, I liked the book but it took a while and then . . ." He likes the way the story looks at the affair from both sides. "The same story is told twice. Bendrix is someone who doesn't understand love, he sees it as possession, as obsession. He can't allow experience beyond his own. He doesn't understand love at all. I thought Finnes caught that so well."
SEXUALITY IN JORDAN'S work is approached with a sophistication rare in Irish writing. Remorse and regret supplant the more usual furtive sexual guilt. It is not surprising Jordan was drawn to Bendrix's obsessional, almost voyeuristic approach.
Jordan's characters battle with complex, often ambivalent emotions instead of mere sex. "Tell me what sin is," asks Danny in Angel, Jordan's début film. "It's a habit Catholics indulge in," replies Deirdre. Referring to Mona Lisa, which remains among his finest work, as well as a movie he is proud of, he says "it shows a man really misunderstanding a woman". Jordan can intellectualise emotion without losing feeling and consistently explores the incompatibility of men and women.
Through his work Jordan tends to look at need, possibly because of the abiding loneliness. Even his early stories avoided the standard sexual urgings. "They were always dark; pretty black for a 25-year-old," he laughs.
Where did The Dream a Beast emerge from? "It was true of the way I was feeling at the time." Written in the first person, it is a account of the narrator's gradual physical transformation, a change generated by a growing self loathing. The narrator's metamorphosis is striking but even more memorable is the evocation of a city writhing in an oppressive heatwave. Ordinary plants acquire a sense of menace. It is a stylish performance, but it lacks the depth of The Past.
In it a man searching for the truth about his parents embarks on an investigation based on old photographs. Ultimately, there is always an elements of hopelessness and helplessness. Quest in The Past becomes discovery in Shade. Just as Nina sees love in the arrival of her half brother, and resentment in the fact her parents had never informed her of his existence, thus denying her a part of her history, Gregory, the half brother, thanks Nina for giving him a childhood. Discovery turns to loss.
Nowhere is this more touching than in 'A Love', a remarkable story from A Night In Tunisia, in which the narrator, once the younger man sharing a passion with an older woman, recalls their relationship and meets his lover, now an old woman.
"I remembered the nights lying in your old creaking bed that looked out on the sea, our movements like a great secret between us, silent, shocking movements, our silence a guard against my father who had the room down, our lovemaking a quiet desecration of the holiday town, of the church at the top if the hill, of the couples you fed so properly at meal times, of my embarrassed adolescence."
Loss is even more devastating in Shade, but there is also a great deal of humour. Permanence and change are juxtaposed. Nina, once the little girl who had played with imaginary friends, before finding real ones that she lost, loses her family. She knows it is time to leave. As she staggers home for the last time in order to prepare for her flight, she looks at a place she has always known.
"The moon was coming up again and the haystacks sat in the field as if they would always be there, but I knew of course that come September they'd be gone."
It is fascinating how a novel which opens with the dead heroine announcing: "I know exactly when I died. It was twenty past three on the fourteenth of January of the year nineteen fifty, an afternoon of bright unseasonable sunlight with a whipping wind that scurried the white clouds through the blue sky" overcomes its own artifice. Nina acquires a personality and a history without ever having achieved a life
JORDAN IS A CITY boy. "I've an urban sensibility. I grew up in Clontarf." He neither mythologises nor romanticises his life. He has a poet's response, but his instincts are practical and he takes everything he has seen or done, even to his habit of walking along the railway tracks, and shapes it into detached, intense narratives. Distance always wins in Jordan's work. If this distance creates hardship for his characters, it enables him to create. It seems to sustain him.
Shade takes the moments of a life, of several lives of characters who see hope flicker and pass. It is a novel of immensely sinister charm with its own geography, as well as a known geography experienced by Jordan as a boy and by his mother who grew up there and shared her memories. On the publication of The Past, a for more ambitious novel, he emerged as a fully developed writer, Shade returns him to that writer. "I hope this is lighter, though, more accessible, more readable."
Cinema may have become his public world - after all as long ago as 1986 he was being feted at Cannes for Mona Lisa - but Jordan has never stopped being a writer. He has paid the price for becoming an international film-maker before Ireland had time to consider the novelist. Shade may be the path to lead readers back to Jordan's earlier work, particularly The Past.