Paul Murray is an ambitious writer who pulls it off – ‘it’ being layered, sprawling novels that sharply survey Ireland’s institutional systems and do so with energy, warmth and humour. His debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was described by Ali Smith as ‘a huge, hilarious elegy’ in its satirically poignant take on class, cash and the working world. This was followed by the Booker-longlisted Skippy Dies (2010), an epic whirlwind of a novel that weaves concepts of string theory and Irish history through the human drama of the schoolchildren and overgrown schoolchildren who alternately attend or run a Catholic boarding school. His latest novel, The Mark and the Void, turns on the meta-textual collision of a sensitive, philosophical banker (Claude) with a despondent swindler/writer character (Paul). The book skillfully reflects on art, money and humanity in an Ireland deeply compromised by a crisis both economic and ethical in nature.
The new novel reflects on the way art works in a hyper-commercial society, and how we might value writing or other forms of art in times of boom and in the subsequent crash. I was interested in the character Paul’s annoyance at the writer being considered a type of ‘meaning-monkey’; at the expectation that even in a morally and economically screwed world, people want art to keep acting as a repository of meaning. Is it fair to expect that kind of gift from books and art in this kind of society?
I think that gift, as you call, it is still something we want and need, but that disconnect between art and commerce is only getting worse. Arguably the situation with books isn’t as bad as it is in music, where Spotify has effectively pauperised a whole generation of musicians. But there’s a sense, nevertheless, that books sort of drop out of the sky, that they’ll render the world meaningful for us, but that that transaction can be totally one way – I mean, we don’t feel like we have any role or responsibility in helping artists to survive in this increasingly money-obsessed world. Paul, the writer in the book, has given up on people altogether – he’s decided the world doesn’t deserve his gifts, such as they are. So the novel is partly about his journey to find some kind of point or worth in making art in a mercantile world, and to rediscover some tiny shard of humanity within himself.
In terms of the ‘meaning-monkey’ line – I don’t know, I think that certain readers want novels to be exclusively about the past, about other people, other countries – blue collar workers, people in authentically poor countries and so on. You get home from your hard day at Goldman Sachs or the arms dealer or wherever, and you want to settle down with something meaningful, something authentic. You might not know what that is, but one thing that definitely seems not authentic is you. You and your life feel horrifically compromised and complicated and schismatic, and you certainly don’t want to read about that. So the rich guy wants to read about the poor ‘real’ guy around the corner, and I find that somewhat vampiric and exploitative.
One reason why novels and books have a dwindling appeal is because people perceive [writing] as an inauthentic art form, which constantly has to have recourse to the past, to give people – privileged people mostly – a safe redoubt of ‘aesthetic experience’ – depictions of authentic people in cinematic weather doing manual labour. No one tells a joke. That would shatter the illusion of purity, the message that something serious is happening. Any time a book tries to impress upon me that something serious is happening, I immediately get suspicious.
Similarly, the reviewer character Mary Cutlass in the book only wants to know about writing that deals with crisis, famine and death. Where does humour fit into this vision of the literary?
That attitude seems to me a reductive view of what suffering is and what the tragic is. It’s the difference between reading Primo Levi’s account of being in a concentration camp and some 21st century novelist’s poetic account of being in a concentration camp. Primo Levi’s account is full of shit, and absurd humour, and grotesquerie. It’s not trying to ennoble the suffering. It’s telling you, the suffering is fucking horrible and it’s not there to make people cry 70 years later, it’s real.
Maybe it’s easier to read something difficult but put a character away if they’re a 2D stock figure, or entirely defined by their ‘authentic’ suffering rather than if you have to see them multi-perspectivally, with humour, as someone who can laugh, who’s similar to you and still totally alien to you – as a real person, essentially.
Yes, exactly. The novel as a form needs to find a way out of this kind of simplification, and should be finding a way out of this simplification. When people ask about humour in books or literature, I keep coming back to Waiting for Godot. You couldn’t look for a more existential play: it‘s staring death and nothingness right in the face. But there’s a moment where – I think it’s Gogo – is about to kill himself. He takes off his belt to hang himself with, and his pants fall down. And that’s the whole thing. Life is embarrassing. Suffering is embarrassing and humiliating and abject, and it’s not quite right to represent it as something other than that. The idea that some things are not worthy of writing about, or that some styles are not the stuff of literature, is absurd.
So, there was the Irish Times review of the book which got a lot of attention [In which reviewer Eileen Battersby wrote a critique of The Mark and the Void described by John Banville as ‘scathing’, and by John Boyne as ‘deeply unkind’]. And there were a significant amount of responses defending the book, which created some debate on the ethics of reading and reviewing in general. You’ve said before that you don’t read reviews.
Yeah, I don’t read them.
To move away from the specifics, then, the reaction afterwards was interesting in terms of how writing gets read and received here in general. A lot of the debate that was sparked focused on whether Irish reviewers should write strongly negative reviews of Irish books. That seems to me a less interesting question than looking at whether there’s maybe a category error that’s still happening when Irish books get reviewed. Is there a sense that Irish writing in general is still being read according to a certain standard of realism, or even parochialism – where absurdity and caricature are seen as failures in the writing – for some reason ignoring our rich history of literary satire, parody and absurdity?
Well, I think that trying to present the problem as whether Irish reviewers should or shouldn’t review Irish books was just The Irish Times trying to cover its tracks. It had nothing to do with her being Irish or not. But satire, caricature, humour even – you’re right, I think to a certain degree, or to certain audiences, those aren’t considered the stuff of proper literature. I don’t think it’s necessarily just an Irish thing, it’s an establishment thing and it’s a fairly old guard establishment thing. Everybody has her own preferences, of course, but it seems crazy to me to say that some subjects or styles aren’t worthy of being in a novel. If you look at the history of the form, in a college undergrad course, the first thing they show you is Don Quixote, and Don Quixote is obviously not a realist novel. It’s a crazy hotchpotch of things, sending up this guy with his fantastical delusions, and it does this through a mix of registers: the realistic and the romantic and the absurd. Cervantes even puts himself in the second part, warning the hero about pirated editions. So it’s postmodern avant la lettre. And the novel has continued to roll in this vein ever since.
So this idea of a ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ novel is almost an invention in itself, and maybe a construction that never quite existed…
Yeah! Think of how non-realist Tristram Shandy is, a novel that literally never starts. And that was written in what, 1759 . . . But I think this relates again to the demand for ‘ authenticity’. If you’re doing a creative writing course in America, for instance, there’s a certain amount of push to write about your Dominican grandfather or your Russian grandmother as ‘real’ material. When the world outside is so confusing, and so interpenetrated by different ideas, the novel is supposed to be this safe place, this pure thing. But that’s the opposite of what the novel should be.
The novel in its historical form uses a lot of different registers, is often written to make fun of things, and shows us up to be foolish and deluded a lot of the time. It makes fun of the dominant stories we’re told: do this, do that, buy this, buy that. But also, almost because of that foolishness and delusion, it is capable of warmth and care and compassion. Those things are also in there, in the original form of the novel. And it seems to me that, as a form, it’s particularly well-equipped to deal with our weird, multi-layered, baffling, continually distracting, atomising world.
But there is a literary establishment, here and elsewhere, that wants books to be like opera, this niche form of entertainment for rich people.
The Mark and the Void and Skippy Dies, seem particularly drawn to describing these ‘dominant stories’ or grand narratives of system-thinking – and then tearing those down and showing them as a fiction that benefits only the few. In this book, it’s Ireland’s faith in economic knowledge and Celtic Tiger ‘progress’ that get dismantled.
We all want to understand the world, and we’re all drawn to strong narratives that claim they can explain the way things are to us in some conclusive, airtight way. Growing up in Ireland, I was told God made the world, and was given a bible, and I thought, ‘Well, this must be the way it is’. And then obviously in the 1990s when the Church collapsed – and the money simultaneously appeared – the explanatory myth changed again.
Transitions which took 200 years or more in the rest of the world happened in a few decades here. We went from being this rural, agrarian religious country to being this super postindustrial state. But the narrative was still very simple: instead of the priests, you had entrepreneurs, wealth creators, and these were the guys who knew the score. Like the priests [we were told] their knowledge was very complex, and only people with special training could understand it, it wasn’t for the ordinary person to understand because it was so complex. So we had to just trust them, and do what they told us. But of course they didn’t know what they were doing. Life is very complicated! No one knows what’s going on! Yet even though on some level we know that, you still see, not just in Ireland but the world round, these big stories, master narratives, be it the rise of the internet, the war on terror, Apple – one big explanation that will make the world legible and clear for us…
The need for satirical writing – or writing that makes fun of the dominant stories, in yours – seems even more pronounced in Ireland then. Do you think satire plays an important role in Irish culture?
I don’t know if satire is an especially Irish form. It certainly was in Swift’s day, but since then… Hmm, could you consider Joyce a satirist? I don’t know. We do have great cartoonists, and a culture of sketch radio and TV, Scrap Saturday and so on. I think we could use a lot more satire, and again [the lack of this] comes back a bit to this expectation of the realist novel.
The rights of the Irish author with regards to satire are a timely issue. Parody website Waterford Whispers recently received a ‘Cease and Desist’ letter from Denis O’Brien for publishing an article entitled ‘Denis O’Brien receives 20 year jail sentence for mobile phone licence bribe in parallel universe’. It seems ironic that they’re the ones being punished, in this context. . .
Culturally speaking, I think there’s a really serious problem in Ireland with consequence and punishment and justice for people above a certain wage bracket – which is to say it doesn’t exist. Arguably the artistic community has a role to play in that, in terms of not turning its attention to these things. In ways Ireland is a weirdly submissive culture.
It feels like there’s still a culture where people are scared of what will happen if they cross power, and power does nothing to disabuse that fear. Our political class which should be protecting our sovereign rights as people of Ireland instead seem to be constantly siding with the billionaires, and saying these people are more equal than others. The current lingo is that they’re the wealth creators, the entrepreneurs, so they get a special dispensation.
Yeah, once the magic phrase ‘creating jobs’ is invoked, there is a sense that we need ask no more questions; that more work can only be a good thing. Maybe we’re not encouraged to ask what kind of jobs and who they benefit.
The Onion had a great headline a while back, about George W. Bush campaigning to create ‘500,000 new shitty jobs’. It’s the same attitude, as if we should be grateful for whatever crumbs are available. Meanwhile, we have people like [these billionaires], conducting his war on democracy from [their luxury homes abroad]. We should be on the streets about that.
Yes, we don’t have a strong protest tradition. The novel shows the quiet suppression of something similar to the ‘Occupy’ movement. Were you consciously drawing on real situations, showing how public dissent isn’t really tolerated here?
Personally speaking I was really disappointed by the lack of response to Occupy in Dublin. . . We often forget, this is a really right wing country. That’s what I was trying to get at in the book, the idea that during the boom we all learned to think like bankers or estate agents. And we’re having difficulty transforming back.
The Mark and the Void is out now, published by Hamish Hamilton.
Words: Gill Moore
