The Birth Of The Book

I was content to begin the writing of this novel and reluctant to persist with it. Initially, it was the persuasion and determination of Bill Buford, then the editor of the magazine Granta, now literary editor of The New Yorker, that made me begin. But, after some of the early sections were written, and two of them had been published in Granta, I began to lose interest. Part of the reason for this was that I was so busy with other things, including the editing of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Partly, it was because at that stage, somewhere between 1988 and 1991, I had not decided what it was I wanted to write. Some of the material in the novel as it now stands had already appeared, in somewhat cryptic form, in poems that I had published over 10 years earlier. Some of it had only been part of a standard repertoire of anecdote that I had known since childhood. After 1991 I decided, under pressure from Buford, that I must complete it and so I then began to give it my full attention. It was only at that stage that I realised that this was not, could not be, a memoir; but, equally, it was not and could not be very far removed from the autobiographical. The problem then was to find a form that would allow me to negotiate between these competing demands. I needed to find out positively what kind of work it should be rather than successfully convince myself over and over what kind of work it should not or could not be.

It was only after I had gone into the later part of the novel, writing and rewriting and overwriting the ending several times, with the result that the whole piece was becoming more and more unwieldy and melodramatic, that I realised the solution to the problem had already been given in the early sections. It was simply a matter of forming a pattern out of small, highly decorated pieces; of mimicking the impressionability of a young child, encountering a mass of information, rumour and anecdote that finally begins to take shape in itself and in his mind. Once I could see that the formal problem, the question of how to shape the story, was there, everything thereafter became comparatively simple. All the melodrama, or most of it, fell away. Some of the self-consciousness went out of the writing. This left it less stretched, took the adolescence out of it.

Finally, I suppose I can say that the novel finally became rhythmic. It hurt to write it but it was also a pleasure; it was a simple story that had many complications; it was a personal narrative but it was also a little parable about the problem of knowing and of course about the problem of growing, especially in a diseased society like that of Northern Ireland. But once it had that rhythmic quality, it felt both invented and inevitable. It always had its own pace and measure. I just had to learn to listen for it.