'I'm interested in why we become the people we are'

From her early successes with short stories at Listowel and being long-listed for an Orange Prize, Christine Dwyer Hickey's literary star is on the rise, writes ARMINTA WALLACE

WITH some novelists, you get the feeling that you're reading the same book over and over. Not Christine Dwyer Hickey. Tatty is a gritty memoir of a Dublin childhood, narrated from a child's point of view. Last Train From Liguriais a love story set in Fascist Italy, all plot twists and chiaroscuro. Her new novel, The Cold Eye of Heaven, couldn't be more different – as Dwyer Hickey was assured, in no uncertain terms, when she did a reading at the Mountains to the Sea book festival in Dún Laoghaire recently.

"After I read the second chapter, a woman came up and said, 'I read Last Train from Liguria,and it just didn't seem to me like the same writer'." She smiles grimly. "I don't know whether she was shocked or disappointed." Critics, it must be said, have been neither. "Dwyer Hickey's writing is acutely insightful and perfectly balances sorrow, joy and humour . . . [her] flair is apparent in the smallest touches, such as the 'black apostrophe of a cat on a wall'." was the London Independent'sverdict on The Cold Eye of Heaven.Dwyer Hickey is a seriously good writer. If she were a man, the chances are that she would be spoken of in the same breath as Sebastian Barry and Joseph O'Connor. Does it irritate her that – so far – she hasn't been?

She shrugs. It’s her personality, she says. She isn’t interested in pushing herself forward. “For me, writers are supposed to be invisible. We’re supposed to be in the shadows – and part of me kind of likes that. I mean, when my book was launched there must have been 200 people in the room, and loads of photographs were taken and photographs have been sent to me. And I’ve found one photograph with myself in it. Out of the whole lot.”

Nevertheless, her literary star has been steadily rising. "The last book really took off in the UK and sold an awful lot of copies. With this book, it's my first time to get a review in the Times Literary Supplement." Not bad for a writer who started off doing half an hour a day, practising her writing as a craft. Dwyer Hickey throws back her head and laughs her generous laugh. "Half an hour a day – with my arm in a sling. That's how I did it. My shoulder's still gammy. I wrote half an hour a day for about six months, and then went on to make a few stories out of that." She won the short-story competition at Listowel Writer's Week, twice – and Tatty was long-listed for the Orange Prize.

It was Last Train from Liguriawhich broke her through to a wider audience: a historical novel with a clever frame which manages to link Celtic Tiger Ireland with Italy under Mussolini. How did she get interested in the latter – and was she not daunted by the idea of writing a novel about Italy when there are so many already? "I was daunted," she says. "It's a big subject. But I have a place in Italy – and that helps." A place in Italy? Is it as dreamy, in real life, as it sounds in a sentence? "Well, a few years ago – in 2005 or so – we were looking at these ridiculous prices for quite an ordinary house in Palmerstown. I had always wanted to have a house in Italy. So we mortgaged our house and went out and bought a run-down apartment in Liguria. Everybody thought I was mad. But I'm so glad I did it. You wouldn't get the mortgage now. And it's a lovely little place." While searching for a property to buy she went to stay with an old school friend in Bordighera. "I started to think about what it would be like to live in a country like Italy if you didn't like food. Or you didn't like people touching you. And as I walked up the Via Romana on a really hot day, the character of Bella came to me. And once I found Bella, the book took off from there." She had spent enough time in Italy, she says, to realise that something quite strange was going on, in terms of historical psychology. "You'd see pictures of Mussolini all over the place. Posters. A bust of him for sale. And if a DVD came out about him, it would fly off the shelves. In a lot of places in Italy, they think he was a great fellow altogether – and the Jewish thing just isn't discussed. So that was something I was interested in. Who knows why we write the books we write? In a way, it just happens. But for me it started with the character of Bella."

When she came to write The Cold Eye of Heaven, did she also start with her anti-hero, Farley? She nods. "I was in Italy. I have to tell you that when I'm in Italy I think about Dublin, and when I'm in Dublin I think about Italy. It's ridiculous. But I was looking at these four auld lads in Italy, with their sunglasses on, looking fabulous out in the sunshine, chatting away. And I was thinking about the difference between old men in Italy and old men in Ireland. I think old men are very interesting. Strip away all the expectations of manhood, masculinity and that, and there's something boyish about them. But lots of experience as well."

So she began with Farley, aged 75, lying on his bathroom floor, unable to move after – presumably – suffering a stroke. Each successive chapter then jumps back a decade, rewinding the story of his life. While she was writing the book Dwyer Hickey had a health challenge which meant that her own movements were severely restricted. “I was heavily medicated and I couldn’t comb my hair or open lids of jars or anything like that. I’m still on the medication, but I’m getting used to it now so it’s much better. But at that time I was confined to barracks, in a way. And it sounds a bit dramatic, but I was looking at my own mortality. Writers are like goldfish: we work to the space that we’re in. I do, anyway.

"So I was in this sunroom job at home and it had to become my whole world. When I was ready to move on in the book I looked at the date; so, say it was September 21st, I went into The Irish Timesarchive for that day and the Sunday Independentfor that week. And I put Farley – whatever age he was – into that scenario. In all my books, I think, I'm interested in why we become the people we are."

As the layers of Farley’s life peel back to reveal the person within, these layers of life in Dublin, many of which we’ve half forgotten – the World Cup in 1990, Nixon’s visit in 1970 – are revisited, but obliquely, as Farley moves through at a tangent, living his life of magnificent ordinariness. If the arc of the story is a tragic one, still there are hilarious moments – a conversation with a rat-catcher, of all people, comes to mind. Her gift for comedic dialogue has already earned Dwyer Hickey comparisons to Roddy Doyle, but as Farley wanders on his lifelong odyssey around Dublin, it’s hard to avoid thinking of that other odyssey – Leopold Bloom’s.

Was Joyce a ghostly presence as Dwyer Hickey was writing? She shrugs another of those Irish-Italian shrugs. “But sure what can you do? It’s Dublin. Obviously, anybody would be flattered to be put into the same sentence as Joyce – though you can get whipped for it too, you know? But what can you do? I’m from Dublin. I’ve lived in Dublin all my life. And you have to write what you have, so . . . ” She flashes a wicked grin. “Ah, I’m sure he’d let me off with it.” Do you know what, I reckon he would.

The Cold Eye of Heavenis published by Atlantic Books at £12.99 in UK