A
GOOD CONFESSION is your first novel. How long did it take you
to write?
From beginning to end about five years. But I was doing other
things at the same time!
Are any of the characters based on real people?
No, but after I started writing I realised that I was influenced
by Bishop Casey’s story. When working as a priest in London,
he set up Shelter, the campaigning charity for the homeless,
and then went back to Ireland to be bishop in Kerry and later
in Galway. He organised the Pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979
and watching old TV news reports he just leaps off the screen.
Just a year later it was discovered that he’d had a love affair
and fathered a son. The result was disgrace and exile.
What about the places?
Now, they are real, although Islington and Clerkenwell have
changed a lot since the period in which A GOOD CONFESSION is
set. I’ve changed some details. The Sleeping Dog is roughly
where Filthy MacNasty’s Whiskey Café is situated in Amwell Street.
I’ve spent many a happy night in there.
Have you strong views on the Catholic Church?
I’m not sure that I’ve the right to strong views – it’s a club
that I no longer belong to – but I am interested in the human
dimension. The Catholic Church expects a lot from its priests.
They have to be social workers and social animals, event organizers
and theologians, able to preach a sermon to stir the soul and
make the kind of small talk that puts everyone at their ease.
They also have to be celibate. It is the only religion to demand
so much. I think it demands too much.
Your Irish roots are important to you?
Very. I’m London Irish, born and brought up in the area where
the book is set. My mother came to London just after the Blitz
to train as a nurse and my father came after the war. They met
at an Irish dance hall and every summer the whole family would
go back to my mother’s village.
Where do you get your ideas?
From newspaper stories, fairy tales and overheard remarks, from
my own life and other people’s, from what I read and hear and
see and half remember.
The truth is most of the time I can’t trace back the connection.
I was at a talk given by Irish crime writer Paul Charles. A
student identified a character in Paul’s latest novel and he
conceded that he was probably right, although it hadn’t occurred
to him before. ‘Authors aren’t always the best readers of their
own work,’ he told us. Colette Bryce has said the same thing
about her poetry – sometimes readers can be the best interpreters.
And you didn’t start to write until relatively late?
For many years I was a writer who didn’t write. Life got in
the way. I meet people like that all the time in creative writing
classes. A man at the community centre where I am writer in
residence mentioned the other day that he wouldn’t dream of
going out without a pen and a scrap of paper in his pocket.
He hasn’t written much yet, but he will. He’s a writer.
What tips do you have for anyone who wants to be a novelist?
• Don’t show the first draft to anyone you love. They say it’s
wonderful and you’ll just shrug and say to yourself what do
they know. Or they say there’s a bit in the second paragraph that doesn’t
seem quite right and you’ll shrug and say what do you know….
• Find a writers group or class because you do need to share your
work – and I think it should be with other writers, at least
at first.
• Writing is re-writing. Again and again.
• Don’t wait for inspiration. You have to be working at your computer
or writing in your notebook for it to come at last.
Can writing really be taught?
There is a craft to learn. You can’t teach talent or creativity,
of course, but you can nurture it and create an environment
where it can thrive. No one thinks it’s odd for an artist to
go to art school or a musician to take lessons.
