Interesting to hear Jeffrey Archer discuss his latest book on RTÉ a while back – and to learn of his lucky break at the outset of his writing career with his novel Kane and Abel. I don’t know how many books Archer has had published but my tenth has just hit the shelves. A couple of people have said to me: “Have you made it yet?” They see little merit in having had a book accepted for publication, unless it has a good chorus in tandem: an advance. I don’t earn my living from writing. Why write, then? I just do.
In 2002 I left the Irish army. Before changing career path, I’d already had two novels published, one of which won the John B Keane/Sunday Independent Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Irish Fiction Award, alongside the likes of Emma Donoghue, Anne Enright and Joseph O’Connor. In addition, I’d landed a deal with a major international publisher...so, the roses were in full bloom. Although everything appeared to be flourishing, within six months of leaving the army the wheels fell off the literary wagon.
It was a bit like going outside my house one morning to find that all of my tyres, including the spare, lying flat as a politician’s promise. One moment I had Salman Rushdie’s editor praising my work to heaven and beyond – a novel that was given a star rating by the Bookseller – and the next, I’m wondering what else could possibly go wrong. A lot, as it turned out. A TV deal fell through, a new novel was declined, and a mixture of things went awry in my personal life. Aside from those, there was the first year blues – that disconnect after you leave behind a career that had been a huge part of your life for 21 years. There is a wrench – no matter how well prepared you think you are to push on.
Now 16 years on from the first publication, seeing the 10th book out and about and breathing, brings with it a curious sort of feeling. Delight, obviously, courses the veins, but something else too. Pride? Ah yeah, that sinful thing, but that is a passing foible. What there is, I think, is relief. Sheer and utter relief to have survived the crash of 2003, when, after Simon and Schuster had published my third novel, I ended up pretty much done and dusted as a writer.
Now I look fondly at my family of books: Us. After Kafra optioned for TV, The Broken Cedar (a murder mystery set in south Lebanon); The Silence of the Glasshouse set during the Irish Civil War; Valley of the Peacock Angel about the chemical weapons attack in Iraq; The Only Glow of the Day exploring the plight of the Curragh wrens; a memoir, The Lebanon Diaries; and two short story collections: Deadly Confederacies, and The Mango War, the title story of which won RTÉ’s Francis MacManus Award. For some bizarre reason the judges Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright and Dermot Bolger believed it to have been written by a foreign national!
Black Rose Days is the youngest addition to the family, and its heart and its star is Mena. As a young girl she witnesses a horrific accident that violently changes her life trajectory. She sees the pictures hanging crooked in a room and wonders if they’d been hung crooked to begin with or is she altered, askew?
The story has another mystery at its core, as Mena is believed murdered, her body found on the edge of the Curragh Plains – and her husband, the one person who truly loved her, returns to Ireland with his new wife, many years later, to try and determine who had killed his young wife – an apparently callous killing for which he was originally believed culpable.
Sown into the novel are layers of the shameful social divide that exists in Ireland, and what happens when someone like Mena threatens to step above her class by getting in with a young man from the right side of the fence. Only recently I heard in a conversation the following: “You can take the boy out of the council house but you can’t take the council house out of the boy.” And in the same tract of conversation a young, recently qualified teacher asserted that she would never ever claim social welfare.
Meat for the writer, these slippages of the mask. But the book isn’t intended as a social reflection – I simply needed to go there to give us Mena’s roots.
Just waiting now to “make it”. Or nought.
Martin Malone’s novel Black Rose Days has just been published by New Island Books
