Gerard Donovan is the only Irish novelist on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize. Shane Hegarty talks to him in the run-up to the September16th shortlist announcement.
When the Man Booker Prize longlist was announced earlier this month, a few scratched their heads at the inclusion of Gerard Donovan. The sole Irish representative, Schopenhauer's Telescope is his first novel. It was greeted warmly by critics upon publication, but has yet to reach the wider audience the acclaim suggested it deserves. Donovan, however, was a little less surprised.
"In one way I was expecting it," he says. "It's sort of an unusual book. It was one of those that was either going to be championed by somebody or ignored by everybody, so I guess I'm really happy that somebody liked this and wanted it on the longlist."
He remains largely unknown in Ireland, partly because the 44-year-old Galway man has lived in the United States since 1989, where he teaches English at two New Jersey colleges, and partly because Schopenhauer's Telescope is not a book interested in any way in Irishness. Instead it's an allegory of human nature, specifically good and evil. It is an astonishing work, ambitious and profound, yet in no way intimidating to the reader. The setting is simple: in a modern, unnamed, war-torn country, a man digs a hole during a snowstorm while another watches, and as they talk, and the horror of their situation begins to grow, a vibrant dialogue springs forth, encompassing philosophy and mankind's rich history of violence.
"It's a curious thing," observes Donovan. "In the States the reviews have been mixed, the sensibility is different. Some critics seem to think that the book is too expansive, too broad, it's as if some people have taken it personally. And I find it interesting because the book is about the ethics of survival, it's about what decisions people have to make when they're faced with life and death issues: should I betray my friends and neighbours in order to live? Or is it better to die honourably and not betray or kill people. I don't know whether it's that some people in the US haven't been in that situation - or not - but some critics just don't seem to be getting it, while in Europe everybody gets it immediately."
The novel's effective but unconventional structure sometimes deliberately moves towards surrealism. Genghis Khan's conquests are relayed through staged TV reports from the 13th century. A mock-trial involves a talking cat. Yet it is a book which never flinches from describing horrors in forensic detail ("I was practically telling the reader what they were having for lunch," he says of the Genghis Khan chapter), and is equally interested in man's capacity to forget.
"The scale of Genghis Khan's atrocities - 20 million dead - this is factual," Donovan says. "He took over most of the known world. Now everything is about September 11th. Not that that was something that one ignores, but what I've not been saying to my friends here is that in the scale of things, September 11th is not a gigantic occurrence. Other things have been going on, and they get forgotten and that's the problem."
The Beckettian setting was not deliberate. "Not at all, because again I was trying to avoid any flavour of overt Irishness, to use that word - I get a shiver down my spine when I say it. But I really wanted to avoid any of that. The situation called for two men to be in a field. In the back of my head I knew that people will be saying 'wow this is Beckett', but I can't abandon the vision I have for this novel because then I'm actually being controlled by the very thing I'm trying to avoid."
As the book was being written, Donovan was simultaneously doing research for a thesis on landscape in Irish literature through Trinity College, and spent much of the time in Ireland. It meant taking strong measures to avoid "falling into the cliches" of Irish writing.
"I put blinkers on in a sense," he says. "It meant not writing in one place. I wrote in my sister's house, in cafés, in a notebook, on a computer. I wrote some of it in Ohio. I was trying to make it as uncomfortable as possible, so that I wouldn't write about what was going on around me. Ireland has crept into two or three of the short stories that are coming out next, but as far as the novel's concerned, I really had to eat garlic and put a crucifix around my neck."
Until Schopenhauer's Telescope, Donovan was known as a poet. His most recent of three collections, The Lighthouse, was released in 2000 and will be his final one. He has stopped writing poetry, even as a literary exercise.
"My first published piece was a short story, so I had the instincts of a fiction writer but spent an awful lot of time writing poetry," he says.
But his ideas were changing, he was bursting out of the poetic form all the time and his poems were getting longer and longer, "and there's a certain aspect of poetry that is self-referential and I just felt I needed to write about things that weren't about me". The poet in him, however, was important to the development of the novel.
"Poetry is pithy," he says. "It's tight and condensed language, where every word counts; in fiction those really don't apply. It's a much wider field and an ocean of temptation of language." He hopes that the poetry has helped in a sense that it's focused some of his language.
He shares a New Jersey farm with a pit-bull terrier, a hound dog, a Rottweiler, three Peking ducks and a flock of guinea hens. A brother of Richard Donovan, who recently ran a marathon on each of the seven continents, Gerard completed the gruelling Marathon Des Sables through the Sahara in 1999. Although "a busted knee" is keeping him away from the roads at the moment, he's considering running it again, although he may also consider the North Pole marathon.
He is working on a second novel, set in a near future in which drug companies have inordinate power. He is also close to finishing the book of short stories, each featuring a man who is missing something. They will both be published over the next two years, although he is unsure yet as to the order. In the meantime, he waits for the Man Booker Prize shortlist to be announced on September 16th:
"It's the type of book that's either going to be loved and admired or not, so the fact that it's got this far is a good sign . But I'm absolutely taking nothing for granted, and if this is as far as it gets, it's been very far and I'm very delighted."