I don’t really believe in lead characters. Or, more accurately, I believe there are eight billion lead characters and that’s kind of the same thing. I have always preferred ensembles to solitary heroes standing alone. My favourite stories were about groups: The Wombles, The A-Team, The X Men, Stephen King’s The Stand, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, CS Lewis’s Narnia books, The Wire, Mad Men, the Six O’Clock News, Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori.
But what really drove it home for me was the last 20 years I’ve spent reporting and writing journalism. People – and, oh my God, I have spoken to so many people – just don’t align with stereotypes.
On the surface a person might seem like their just in a walk-on-role, but if you talk to them for more than five minutes their true and wonderful weirdness rises to the surface. Everyone is the lead in a strange story of their own. Very few people are out there unthinkingly servicing the plot of a self-imagined lead character, and those that do are a rare breed of natural born fascist (I’m making an exception here for the parents of very young children – all babies are lead characters and there’s nothing we can do about that).
Consequently, my favourite form of reporting is not the celebrity interview or political profile; it’s approaching “people” in “places” and asking them questions about “stuff”. It’s the thing many journalists hate – the dreaded vox-pop. In its debased form, it can seem like pandering, thoughtless page-filling. Send a reporter out to get a view on a new government policy: “I like it,” they say. “I do not like it,” they say. And, also, “Politicians are clowns.” (They often are, in fairness.)
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When I do this job, however, I have only a cursory interest in what the news angle is (don’t tell my editors) and I just want to gnaw on my interviewees’ life experience like some sort of journalistic vampire. Usually, I spend far too long talking to them, which is the best way to talk to people. They slowly veer away from the character they’re playing and become the person they are. I love it when the slightly dishevelled man feeding pigeons on a hot day says, “of course, that’s when I was a banker in Germany”, or the Brexit supporter in London’s Parliament Square mentions casually that his father was an acolyte of the occultist Aleister Crowley.
I’ve spent time wandering Britain ostensibly asking questions about Brexit. I went door-to-door with a postman in north Dublin at the height of Covid. I once spent 24 hours on O’Connell Street chatting to everyone who would talk to me – flower sellers, evangelists, homeless people, musicians. I did something similar in Temple Bar. And on Parnell Street.
My novel, Experts in a Dying Field, is at its core, the story of a band called the Heathens who were active until a tragedy in the early noughties, and then reconnect, sort of accidentally, 20 years later, but it ended up being a sort of portrait of Dublin. Or at least my version of Dublin. And that Dublin is very busy and filled with people.
It’s a story told from the close third person perspectives of recovering alcoholic barmen, homeless vagabonds, financiers, migrant care workers, retired secretaries, struggling office workers, mundanely mystical priests, overly precocious children, musically gifted barflies, punk rockers turned suburban mothers, an urban fox and God. It’s ultimately about ageing and creativity and loss and failure and death. All the good stuff. It is, I hope, sometimes funny and sometimes very sad.
[ Doing the coronavirus rounds with Joe the postman in Dublin 3Opens in new window ]
I love all my characters. None of them are based on real people but they are, in a way, remixes of all the people I’ve met in and around this city and over the course of my life (including the fox). I stole the name of one of them, Snoopy, from a real local music industry stalwart who otherwise has few of the fictional Snoopy’s characteristics.
The Heathens’ singer Joss Boland, who dies in tragic circumstances, has some of the qualities of my close friends Barry Jordan and Paul Clancy, who died as very young men. But largely I channel the experience of grieving them. I also stole Joss Boland’s first name from the brilliant Dublin drummer Joss Moorkens, and his second name from my friend and colleague Rosita Boland, but I’m only realising that now.
One of the things I learned early on when trying to move from non-fiction to fiction was that people in fiction had to be far more “realistic” than people in reality. Real people aren’t very realistic at all, and they feel no responsibility whatsoever to be plausible or to ring true (no offence to any “real” people reading this). They say bizarre things all the time, which if you put into the mouths of fictional characters would fail any metric of verisimilitude. Humans really do say the darnedest things.
Some of my favourites novels have multiple voices. Critics call these “polyphonic novels”. They include Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, the decades spanning tale of a sprawling blended family, and Jennifer Egan’s Welcome to the Goon Squad, in which seemingly disparate stories told from the perspective of different characters in and around a music scene blend into a holistic whole. Both are incredibly moving and follow many people across time and space. In fact, I reread both those books as I was starting Experts in a Dying Field to see if I could “borrow” ideas. I couldn’t really.
In the end, my book held far more resemblance to the work of Jaime and Beto Hernandez, two masters of the polyphonic graphic novel (comic books). Like me, they’ve told stories frequently and at length about the wider community in and around a very specific music scene in a very specific parts of Spanish-speaking LA. It was only when rereading their stories recently that it occurred to me that they were probably the biggest influence on Experts in a Dying Field. Their stories have numerous characters ageing realistically and surreally across history and geography.
In her interview with Martin Doyle in this paper, Wendy Erskine, the excellent author of her own polyphonic novel, The Benefactors, talks about how there might be something more egalitarian and left wing about the polyphonic novel, a collective reckoning with reality when compared to the more individualistic solipsism of the single narrator. Séamas O’Reilly, author of another excellent Northern novel, Prestige Drama, suggested to me that polyphony might be the only way to represent the fractured, contested narratives of his home.
All I know is that writing this sort of book felt right to me at the time I wrote it. I wanted to write about Dublin and the people who lived there and that didn’t seem right coming through just one voice. My novel is also a psychogeographic novel, a work of polyphonic psychogeography. That overcomplicated description basically means I have my many characters travel through places (and, also, that I probably need a slap).
I really want readers to feel like if they wander Dublin they might hear these voices and maybe see glimpses of the characters. In the book they wander the gleaming docklands (“the city’s ungrateful child,” Snoopy calls it), and O’Connell Street, which I have always loved in all its faded grandeur. They jump off O’Connell Bridge (to save a rabbit), visit soup kitchens in Smithfield, attend parties in south Dublin suburbs, sit in corporate meeting rooms, fly across the skyline in disembodied form, read tarot cards in prison, encounter the large shrieking head of Luke Kelly down by the canal, and hang out in a fictionalised version of Whelan’s on Camden Street. Or maybe it’s the old Dice Bar down near the quays. I’ve kept that a bit vague.
Some of the characters hark from Kildare and Cork originally, but little time is spent in those places (sorry Kildare and Cork). The band at the core of the story visit Cardiff at one point but they don’t have a great time there (sorry Cardiff). They also go to Galway, but bad things happen on the way home (sorry Galway). For the most part it’s a Dublin novel. I’m no James Joyce (please don’t argue with me). Joyce stuck carefully to Thom’s Directory as he wrote Ulysses, I just went by memory and a frequent yen for plot convenience.
So the book doesn’t completely obey the geography of Dublin because occasionally I wanted to get someone from A to B in an unrealistic period of time and the easiest way to do that was the cheat. Sometimes, in fact, I kept things in my fictional version of Dublin that have ceased to exist in reality, like Ballymun’s seven towers. This is my Dublin book but it really is my Dublin, filtered through hazy dream logic and filled with echoes of the people I’ve known there. I’m not too proud to say I’m glad I wrote it. I think I’ve said what I had to say.
Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne is published by Penguin on June 11th.
