Home is where the hurt is

A moment's carelessness on the part of a parent, and a child falls from a bridge to his death; a man falls in love with his lover's 13-year-old daughter; a mother goes out to get her son a comic, and disappears to America for 30 years. Families? Forget it. The families Kate O'Riordan dreams up would make you wish people were reared in nice, safe, clean, steel cages like battery hens. Cautiously, therefore, I inquire - when I meet her on a sunny Saturday morning in Dublin - about her own upbringing. Her reply is, at first, reassuring. Born in London, moved back to Bantry when she was two, father a butcher in the town, mother at home with the kids. And then she adds, in her mellifluous, Kerry-tinged voice, that the town slaughterhouse was just behind their house and that a favourite childhood game was paddle in the drainage channel - "the soft, still-warm blood oozing between their toes like heavy cream", as she puts it in her second novel, The Boy In The Moon, which is published this week by HarperCollins. I look up sharply, expecting to see - what? Some sort of demonic glitter in the eyes, perhaps? An axe tucked away under the table? But no - Kate O'Riordan, dressed in a white, two-piece outfit, is sitting on a sofa in the Westbury Hotel drinking coffee and chatting affably, the picture of goodwill and good sense.

"Although it seemed strange to other people," she is saying of the slaughterhouse, "it was perfectly normal to us - though I remember, as well, the house always being full of sawdust. That was the one thing I did notice was different to everybody else's house." As a child, she loved reading and writing stories. And even those first childish attempts at fiction, it seems, were graced by a wry sense of humour and a fondness for the slightly surreal: "I started by writing fairy stories. I still have a copy of one, which must have been the first, or maybe the second, story that I ever wrote, and at the end I've got; `By the way, the mother was dead'."

On leaving school, however, writing stories for a living didn't seem like an option, so she went to Los Angeles and worked in an Irish travel agency for a year, mostly sending pilgrims to Mexico. "I hated Los Angeles - so plastic, and if you didn't drive you were completely marooned wherever you were." She returned to Bantry, got married, and headed for Canada with her new husband. "Which lasted three months because we couldn't get our permits. So we headed back to London and stopped there." She has been living in London for 14 years now, working first at Air Florida, then at Virgin Atlantic. All the while, she was writing stories and had managed to get quite a few published. But it was when she won the Hennessy / Sunday Tribune award in the early 1990s that she decided to try writing for a living. Her first novel, Involved, was well received, short-listed for the Dillon's First Fiction Prize, and won her an entree into the lucrative world of television screenwriting. She adapted it for HTV, and has just finished a treatment for a movie about a Dublin priest who goes to Tory Island. "And I did a Casualty," she adds, almost as an afterthought.

What - Casualty, the BBC TV drama series? "Yes. It was a total disaster," she admits. "I just couldn't get it right. "I'd been trained all along to do everything possible not to make characters say what they're feeling; to find ways to show it through the action or in a roundabout way - a facial expression, or a glance - but in Casualty there is always a moment where they just spill their guts. Everybody does. They'll be in a cubicle and they say `you did this to me and you did that' - and I just could not get it out. So in the end I just went for a storyline credit. That was bad. But, to earn a living you have to do other things - novels don't pay enough by themselves." She has also written two plays, Jaws Of Darkness, and She'll Be Wearing Silk Pyjamas, which began life as a story, re-emerged as a TV drama and is shortly to be staged at a fringe theatre in Richmond. "I don't think there's anything else I can do with that," she says, with a grimace. Ironically, the horrific moment when the child in The Boy In The Moon falls from the bridge is not a million miles removed from some of the horrific accidents portrayed so graphically on Casualty. Can she say where the idea for the book came from? "Normally I can never answer that question, but in this case it's easy. I mean, it's purely fiction but it all came from a moment when my husband put my son on a bridge - a small stone bridge outside Lismore Castle in Co Waterford - and I turned and saw him. And I just completely froze, because it is about a 40-foot drop, and a kid moves so fast; and I've heard so many women tell similar stories since. Everybody seems to have a horror story. "I don't know whether men are less vigilant or whether it's to do with wanting their children - sons, particularly - not to be afraid. Although obviously it's wrong to generalise. Anyway, I couldn't get it out of my head all of that Christmas - I had started another novel, but that image kept eating away at me."

The book traces the efforts of the boy's English mother, Julia, to come to terms with her grief. She leaves her Irish husband, and their suburban London home, to live with her father-in-law, a strange, taciturn man, on the old family farm in rural Ireland, close to where the boy is buried. When she discovers an old recipe book-cumjournal which belonged to Jeremiah's dead wife, she starts to unravel the secrets of her husband's past - including that of the death of his twin brother who, strangely enough, fell over a cliff.

The characters are vivid and the observations tartly accurate, but the most immediately striking element of The Boy In The Moon is its pacy, thriller-like plot. Was that a deliberate strategy on the author's part?

"Yes. I was trying to do it in layers, so there are three stories running in tandem - and then once I opened it up and brought in the 1960s it became great fun for me, because that was my time too. And I'd totally forgotten the era of mini-skirts and Muriel Spark. It was a real turning point for Ireland - I mean, I know mini-skirts were probably shocking in England too, but they had more resonance in Ireland."

The contrasts between the two countries, and the areas where complex realities undercut stereotypes, is something which interests Kate O'Riordan, living as she does in London with a young family. "I did want the central characters in this book to represent stereotyped ideas of Ireland and England - the husband is apparently very easygoing, a chatty kind of guy, whereas the wife is much more reserved and uptight. "Of course when you leave London and go into the Home Counties it's just as provincial as parts of Ireland; it may look more developed, with better roads or whatever, but a lot of the attitudes are very provincial."

Would she set a novel there? "I don't know. I like to do half and half. There's something more dramatic about Ireland; the landscape, for one thing. I'd be afraid I might end up in Joanna Trollope territory." Oops - not a Trollope fan. Who does she read, then? "I love E. Annie Proulx and Anne Tyler, I love Martin Amis. Millions, actually - I like Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle." A healthy proportion of young Irish writers in that list - so what about this rumour that Irish writers are flavour of the month with London publishers and are raking in loads of dosh? "I wish I was one of them. I don't know who they are! It's mainly male Irish writers I hear of nowadays. I know Marian Keyes got a big advance - she's earning big money all right. People believe the hype; they think that everybody who's writing is earning a fortune. Most people I know earn very little."

The Boy In The Moon is published by Flamingo for HarperCollins, price £12.99.