Sebastian Barry tells Kevin Myers about the inspirations for his first World War novel, how its soldiers were based on his builders and how visiting Lansdowne Road made him realise the scale of the Irish casualties.
When Sebastian Barry was a little boy he shared a bedroom with his maternal grandfather, JC O'Hara, major, Royal Engineers, retired. The old man, surrounded by his rustling newspapers, would tell the youngster about his time serving on the North West Frontier or doing bomb-disposal work in England during the second World War. "He was the source of my childhood dreams. In his own way he was a self-written man, an impostor. Because even though, in reality, he was the son of the tailor in Sligo lunatic asylum, he described himself as gentry. And that's what all books are: wonderful impostures."
A Long Long Way is certainly an imposture - and in its fictions it tells a far vaster truth about the Irish in the Great War than any historical work could possibly do. Because its hero, Willie Dunne, a young soldier with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, is a creation of Barry's glorious imagination, he has a freedom to range over military experiences that would have been denied any actual, individual soldier. The fiction thereby creates reality, as his imagination paints on the page the story that was over decades systematically written out of our history books. This grieves Barry greatly, and astounds him. "These men deserved a most wondering thanks for their ordinary, divine courage. That they were not thanked when they came home was a profound indictment of a state that could not find it in its narrowing heart - though in its own way a brave narrowing heart - to include them."
The genesis of the novel lay in a conversation he had with his editor, Jon Riley, in 2002, after the publication of his previous novel, Annie Dunne; Riley mused that it was a long time since anyone had written about the Irish and the Great War. Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme was deliberately limited in its scope, and it had been more than a quarter of a century since Jennifer Johnston's How Many Miles to Babylon?
Barry did not know about what happened on the battlefields of France and Belgium, so he started to read about it. "Even ineptly done, even if inevitably wrong, I wanted to place the Irish experience where it belongs. I wanted to cause in a private individual's heart a moment of thankfulness to those men. What moral person could read about what they went through and not feel it? Eight hundred Irishmen killed on one day in the gas attack in Hulluch, the week of the Easter Rising, and then left out, erased, from the official account. But, oh, what a thing to do for Ireland - only to be followed by the great lie, and then the silence."
No real soldier could have managed to be in Dublin for the start of the Easter Rising and also be on the Continent for the gas attack a few days later, as his protagonist Willie Dunne was. But by such chronological sleights of hand the ghastly paradoxes of history are made evident: the young volunteer who dies in Willie's arms in Dublin is as much a victim of the tragedy of the time as the hundreds of other Irishmen who were to perish only days later. Yet we know that it was the heirs to the relatively few men who took part in the Easter Rising who created the subsequent historical narrative that elided all memory of the far greater host serving in the uniform of the crown.
So truth is not the preserve of history; indeed, the deplorable historiography of Ireland in the 20th century is proof of that. Most of the pioneering work about the Irish in the Great War has come from the pens of journalists or amateur historians such as Myles Dungan, Thomas Dooley, Tom Johnstone and Terence Denman, only to be followed far more recently by admittedly splendid contributions from professional historians such as Keith Jeffery and Senia Paseta. But, generally speaking, Irish historians have been utterly pathetic on this period.
It is a shame that the publishers did not get Barry's manuscript vetted by someone with an understanding of the military and historical details of the time. Hulluch, for example, is in France, not Belgium, and a company sergeant major, as in this account, would never spend his time serving with ordinary soldiers in the front-line trenches. Nor would he ever have been called "sarge" by a private; it would have been "sir" or, more probably, with abject submission, "company sar'n't major".
No matter. Barry knew from the outset that there were going to be errors, and, all things considered, they are few enough in number. For his larger canvases of battle are utterly superb. They are transfixing, appalling, horrifying and - the real mark of war - utterly chaotic. "I brought my characters up to the battle, and then I let them go. They wrote themselves. They knew where they wanted to go."
He captures the dynamics between soldiers with an uncanny insight that seemed hard to believe came from his imagination alone - and indeed it didn't. Before writing the book he was helping builders reconstruct his home, a 19th-century rectory near Tinahely, in south Co Wicklow. "Doing the house was the best thing I could have done. It was the first time I had ever worked with a group of men; writing is such a solitary thing. I discovered that builders are curiously military in their ways - and of course, a great deal of soldiering on the western front was all about construction."
Hence Barry's builder, Christy Moran, finds his way into this narrative as a fictional (and mis-ranked) company sergeant major; the part he should have played is that of a platoon sergeant, but the character is entirely believable, a natural leader, calm, cheerful and brave.
Builders in the Barry home are not alone in being recruited for one of his works of fiction: the author has endlessly quarried his life and its landscape for names, people and places.
He got the name of Private Dunne's original officer, Captain Pasley, from a local churchyard that commemorates two Pasleys who died in the Great War. When Captain Pasley is killed he is replaced by a Captain Sheridan, the name of a remote uncle who served in the Great War. Another character is called O'Hara; Barry's mother is the actor Joan O'Hara.
It is almost axiomatic - indeed, a cliche - that writers are outsiders, and Barry is true both to that axiom and that cliche. Aside from a childhood illuminated by grandfatherly reminiscences about the empire, his parents were very definitely outside the mainstream - never mind his mother; his father was a poet and an architect. When Barry was a child the family emigrated to London, and when he returned to Ireland, a few years later, he spoke with a strong English accent, for which he was given a sound beating in the school playground, until he learned to speak again with an Irish accent.
If his grandfather had had his way, Barry would have also have had a military career; at the height of the Troubles, he discovered that JC O'Hara (Maj, RE, ret'd) had in effect impersonated his grandson and applied for a commission for the young Sebastian in the British army. "Quite mad. It's inconceivable I would have joined at that time or any other, and, anyway, I would have been a terrible soldier."
Instead he became a writer, one whose archive has already been bought by the University of Texas at Austin: high praise indeed. It's a Long Long Way is his fourth novel. He has written seven plays and three collections of poetry. He says he feels as if his life has been moving in 10-year cycles. In March 1995 his The Steward of Christendom opened at the Royal Court, in London, to almost thermonuclear acclaim, which was repeated in Dublin.
It seemed that he could do no wrong, but then along came his play Hinterland, an allegory about the Haughey legacy, which was not so much adversely reviewed as ritually and brutally kicked to death, with RTÉ at the forefront of the mob. "I don't know how I got through that time, that month. I was like a fox trapped in a fence, suddenly realising that these hounds chasing me actually wanted to kill me. They wanted to silence me, to ruin me, and nobody, nobody, nobody knows what that is like until they have been through it themselves. Whatever remains of the soul is punished with a spiked, iron glove. There is no redress, no sleep, no escape. You look at your life, your family, everything, in fear and terror."
If it was the intention of the licence-funded national broadcaster to bully and silence one of our greatest and most original artists - and it certainly seemed to be so at the time - it was unsuccessful. "That was one of the reasons why I wrote the novel."
In writing it, he fell in love with his characters - the hero, Willie Dunne, his policeman father (in essence the steward of Christendom so memorably played by Donal McCann a decade ago) and all those Irish soldiers, O'Hara, Moran, Pasley, Sheridan, and the priest Father Buckley.
When he wasn't writing them he was lonely, and when the book was finished he was bereft, as writers often are when they leave the friends they have created. For they had ceased to be creations on a page and become the companions of his soul. "I was in love. It was enchantment."
Yet it was really when he took his daughter with him on his first visit to Lansdowne Road that he realised the enormity of the subject he had been writing about. The crowd was the same size as the number of Irishmen who had been killed in the Great War. As they poured out in their teeming thousands, he recited to himself: "How many? This many. How many? This many. All for Ireland, or for their version of Ireland. To be followed by silence, total silence, for a generation, or even longer, ignored, forgotten and left to their horrible wounds and hideous asylums."
The silence has in recent years been broken, and most people now recognise a very great wrong was done. Indeed, if there was a second original sin in the founding of the Irish state to accompany the Civil War, it was the shameful, ignoble treatment of those servicemen - and many women also - who had merely answered the call of both churchmen and of elected politicians and volunteered to oppose German aggression. The elision of hundreds of thousands of people from our history books has also meant they have largely vanished from cultural portrayals of 20th-century Ireland.
So Barry's achievement in one sense is an overdue corrective to a pathologically distorted perception of the national sense of self. But it is far more than that: in the year of his 50th birthday he has produced one of the great books about the first World War, which escapes and transcends any merely Irish dimension or location. The Boston Globe has already called A Long Long Way a masterpiece. It is a judgment that is hard to fault.
A Long Long Way is published by Faber and Faber, £12.99