Author Joseph O'Connor talks to us about his latest novel My Father's House and the impact that music has on the written word.
Joseph O'Connor was born in Dublin. His novels include Star of the Sea, Ghost Light (Dublin One City One Book novel 2011) and Shadowplay. Among his awards are the Prix Zepter for European Novel of the Year, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, an American Library Association Award and the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature.
His work has been translated into forty languages. In 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. Joseph's latest novel, My Father's House, is published by Harvill Secker on 26 January 2023 and is also available from our catalogue.
There were always books in the house – novels, short stories, fairy stories, works of history, the Ladybird books, Just William, Agatha Christie, the folk tales of the Irish writers Sinead de Valera and Lady Gregory (I grew up in Dublin), ghost stories, collections of Edgar Allan Poe, and there were albums of Philip Larkin’s poetry read by the poet and of Dylan Thomas’s work read by Richard Burton - but my first real sense of wanting to be a writer myself happened powerfully one night when I was six or seven and my dad was watching ‘The Odd Couple’ on the television.
At the end, among the credits, was the fact that it had been written by Neil Simon. I genuinely think that until my father explained to me what a playwright and a screenwriter did, I sort of thought actors made up the words as they went along. So, I was entranced by the idea of Neil Simon and thought his occupation was just the most wonderful way to spend your time. After that, I worked hard on being a better writer, by being a committed reader and learner.
It was an immense blessing that, as a teenager in first and second year in college, I got summer jobs working at the Sunday Tribune newspaper and Magill magazine in Dublin. Their offices were more or less across the street from each other, and the most extraordinary collection of writers came and went between them: Colm Toibin, Fintan O’Toole, Gene Kerrigan, Nuala O’Faolain, Mary Holland, Nell McCafferty and others. To be around them and to see how they worked was a brilliant education. It left me with the most useful ability any writer can have, in that I don’t wait for the muse, I’m able to write to a deadline and a wordcount. I’m hugely grateful to have been in the presence of such marvellous writers at a young age. They cared, rewrote, worked on getting the words right.
Star of the Sea, which all these years later still sells around the world, in more than forty languages, was the sort of experience every writer should have at least once. A pure pleasure. I continue to be deeply proud of the book, which I wrote for my children. It was the first book of mine where I had to become a better writer in order to write it. It taught me a huge amount.
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s heroism in Rome during the Second World War is gripping and inspiring. It always had the makings of a tense psychological thriller, and that’s what I hope I’ve written. A novel in the same vein as Star of the Sea. But there are other nuances and meanings to his story.
Born in republican north Cork, brought up in County Kerry, he came of age around the mistrust of England that was one tragic bequest of history. Yet he came to live insistently by his own moral code, even when faced with the threat of death, and at the risk of being ostracised by his Vatican superiors.
In siding with the British prisoners of war to whom he was called to minister in the fascist prison camps in Italy, and in assisting thousands of them to safety when they escaped and fled into Rome, O’Flaherty revealed himself as a person who wouldn’t blindly follow orders, whether they came from friend or enemy. Complaints were made about him by the Irish government, whose policy was strict neutrality, but he ignored them, saving the lives of some 7,000 British and American prisoners.
As for the experience of writing the book, I approached the technical aspects in pretty much the same way that I’ve approached all my novels since Star of the Sea. I write a fairly complete outline and draw it out on a sheet of A3, using a sort of schematic I’ve adapted from the Syd Field screenwriting paradigm, and I pin that to my office wall, but then I revise, reshape, mess around with it for a while. I’ll draw maybe six versions, never throwing any of them away. When I have a shape that I feel I can work with, I feel freer, and my chapters and sequences become more explorative. I’ll do that for a year or so, then write the final version.
I’m not positive as to when and where I first heard Hugh’s story but I think it may well have been in the town of Listowel, County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland, where there is an annual literary festival. I’ve been attending for thirty years. At some point, someone told me about a man from Kerry, Hugh O’Flaherty, a Catholic priest in the Vatican during World War Two, who saved thousands of people from the Nazis.
My next two books (I’ve started the first of those) will be about members of the Escape Line nicknamed The Choir that appears in My Father’s House. The book I’m working on now, entitled The Operation, has the Contessa Landini as main character, and the next one, called Legal Tender, will feature John May, jazz saxophonist, pre-war Soho frequenter, and butler to the British ambassador in Rome.
Very few writers have the sort of fame that means they’d be recognised in public, and I’m hugely happy to say I don’t have it myself. I think fame is the worst sort of curse because it comes disguised as a blessing. There’s certainly a lot of music in My Father’s House, as there will be in the next two novels also. This is because the characters in the books are always trying to work collaboratively for the Escape Line, and I think the greatest things we do are all collaborative in nature. Especially music.
Even a solo performer is working in collaboration, with the people who came beforehand in that musical tradition, like in folk or blues, or the people who built the instrument, as in classical. And, of course, all musicians are working with that most important collaborator, the listener. To me, words are sounds before they are anything else. The novelist writes the sheet music but it’s the reader who sings the song.
I’m hugely fond of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, all the novels of Elizabeth Taylor, True History of the Kelly Gang, and Oscar and Lucinda, both by Peter Carey, my writing hero. I return to all of them often but don’t return to any of them as often as I come back to Aretha Franklin’s recordings for Atlantic, the choral music of Palestrina, or the works of Muddy Waters, my all-time favourite works of art.
I love the music of how people speak – I find I’m always listening out for different accents and phraseologies – and any work that is in part driven by how people speak will always have pleasures to offer. For that reason, I continue to be excited by songs, ballads, the blues, spoken word poetry, and, lately, the amazing verbal dexterity and linguistic skill of stand-up comics like Stewart Lee and Tommy Tiernan, who are such extraordinarily gifted storytellers.
I also adore the comedy work of Monica Geldart and Hayley Morris on TikTok. They are such brilliant writers, full of truthfulness, but laugh out loud funny. Hayley Morris has a book coming out soon, and I can’t wait. She’s fearless and hilarious in what she writes about.
I love reading but I get bored easily. I very often don’t finish a book. I find that this bad habit is growing worse as I get older. I just think, nah, there are still so many great novels and Bessie Smith blues tracks I’ve yet to get to. If I’m not grabbed within the first ten pages, I’m out.
What else? In 1985 I was arrested in Nicaragua for visa violation, and I spent a day in prison. But that’s another story.
