William Wall - who combines the momentum of a thriller with the subtlety of a literary novel - believes a childhood illness crystalised his determination to become a writer, he tells Arminta Wallace
IS IT daft to expect a writer to resemble his books? Maybe. But anyone who has read Alice Falling, Minding Children and The Map of Tenderness might be forgiven for conjuring up a vision of an edgy individual with a habit of glancing uneasily over his shoulder. Instead, William Wall leans into the high-backed chair in the Shelbourne Hotel, as relaxed as you like, delivering yarn after entertaining yarn with the ease of the natural storyteller. There's no sign of the penchant for the sinister which gives his novels their characteristic gleam of menace - but then, of course, it's an ungodly hour on a Tuesday morning, far too early for talk of child abuse, serial murder and euthanasia.
"All three of my books are actually about families," he protests. "I'm fascinated by the way families disintegrate. It can happen so easily; the bonds that hold people together are so obscure. And the idea that blood is thicker than water is rubbish."
Maybe there's something sinister lurking in his own family background? But no - the way Wall tells it, he had an idyllic childhood, growing up in Whitegate, Co Cork, spending his summers speaking Irish on Clare Island.
"It was before they widened the road and built the oil refinery," he says. "Every time there was a northerly wind, the sea would blow up against the windows of our house."
Small wonder, then, that the sea is a tangible presence in his new novel, The Map of Tenderness - or that some of its most tender scenes find the narrator being taught to fish by his father.
"My father was a farmer and my mother a shopkeeper - both with 'small' adjectives," he says. "Comfortable" is the word he uses to describe his early life.
But then he went to boarding school. And when he was 12 . . . well, let's have him tell the story himself.
"I woke up one morning with a very sore throat and a high temperature," he says. "My joints wouldn't work. It was four or five days before the St Patrick's Day break, and I went to see the nuns in the infirmary, who told me to cop myself on and go to class. But it got worse and worse, and on the last morning before the holiday I was lying in bed, completely out of it, when I saw this black figure coming across the floor towards me."
He waves his hands in the air to suggest flowing robes. "It was the Dean of Discipline - and the instant I saw him, I knew what was in store. He was going to beat the living crap out of me. But he stopped at the foot of the bed and looked down at me - and whatever he saw, he turned on his heel and walked away. And it was then I thought: 'God, I must be bad for him to pass up an opportunity like that.'"
It later transpired that young Wall had had a temperature of 103 degrees. He spent the next six months in hospital.
"My muscles boiled away," he recalls. "I was left with permanent joint damage; I have two plastic hips, for instance."
In due course, he woke up to find another apparition at the foot of his bed.
"I can see it as if it were yesterday," he says. "I was being treated by an elderly paediatrician, a very tall man, and there he was with a chubby bald man - the sort of man who might be the leader of the Conservative Party in England - and they were having a blazing row. And I remember hearing the chubby bald man shout: 'You are killing this boy'."
The chubby bald man diagnosed Still's disease, Wall was given a course of steroids, and within days the high temperatures had subsided.
"I've had it ever since," he says, with a grimace. "It's a variation of rheumatoid arthritis and it has . . ." He searches for a way to explain how it has affected his life, without over-dramatising. "Let's put it this way. When I was 12, I did cross-country running and javelin and I was on the B hurling team. Six months later, I could do none of that."
What triggered the disease - does he know?
"Stress, I'm pretty sure," he says grimly. "Boarding school was as stressful as you can get. I hated it. I was lonely. I was terrified half the time; it was a very violent place. Some of my classmates were beaten up by a group of older boys and one of them got a cracked jaw - and, of course, what happened then was that a group of even older boys took the perpetrators and beat them to pulp. And we thought that was great justice altogether." He pauses, shaking his head. "I often think it's an auto-immune disease. That you almost will it upon yourself, as an escape."
This real-life misery, then, is what lies behind the extraordinarily potent description of the boarding school in The Map of Tenderness, which begins: "In Gehenna children were sacrificed by fire and later the refuse was burned. But where is the place that children were sacrificed by cold? In the high rooms of St Keelin's the flesh was shriven by accident.
"There was no purpose in the pain. The windows looked out on a heedless town that stretched along the bank of a black river, which ran recklessly to the remote Atlantic."
In an odd sort of way, though, Wall believes that having Still's disease crystallised his determination to become a writer.
"I had been writing before that, but years of sitting in bed reading, wanting to be out and about, gave me a different perspective. A lot of the time, I think I write out of that experience," he says. "Then, when I was 14 or 15, my parents bought me a typewriter - part of the thing with this disease is to keep the hands mobile. That was when I began writing seriously."
There might be those from a farming background who would raise their eyes to heaven if a teenage son announced his intention of becoming a poet. Not the Walls.
"Ah, they were delighted," he says. "They were both very literary-minded and, though they never went beyond primary school, very highly educated people. Self-educated. The portrait of the father in the book is really an amalgam of both my parents - my mother used to quote Shakespeare, and my father would quote Wordsworth. When my first poem was published, it was a village event. Everybody had to see it.
'THEN my father put together a package of my work and sent it off to John B. Keane. People often ask you: 'When did you first know you were any good as a writer?' Well, it was when a £10 cheque - and that was a lot of money in those days - arrived from John B. Keane with a letter saying it was a prize he had decided to award to the most promising young poet."
After that, Listowel Writers' Week became an annual fixture in the Wall calendar.
"Every year, we'd be loaded into the car along with a half-hundredweight bag of potatoes. I met John B. Keane - oh, it must have been 20 years later - and he said to me: 'How are you, Billy? And thanks for the potatoes.' "
Wall began by writing lyric poetry because, at that stage, he didn't have the stamina to write stories or novels. When he went to UCC to study English and philosophy, he discovered poetry heaven.
"John Montague was there, ostensibly as a lecturer, but really as a sort of writer in residence," he says. "He brought in Robert Graves and Heaney and Hugh McDiarmid - people a small college in the south of Ireland would never otherwise get to see. The atmosphere was alive, and writing seemed like the most important thing to be doing."
Meanwhile, Wall was having the occasional poem published in journals, and decided to collect enough work together for a book. The manuscript was promptly rejected by Peter Fallon.
"I should have seen the writing on the wall at that stage, but I persevered with poetry for another while," he says.
Writing on the wall? But didn't he win the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Mathematics andOther Poems?
"I don't think I'm a poet," he says firmly. "I don't believe in the white goddess, or whatever. I always wanted to tell stories."
It was David Marcus who, having anthologised a story called In Xanadu, prompted Wall to write his first novel.
"I messed for a long time with ideas," he says. "And the end result was a very angry book, Alice Falling. People focused on the child sexual abuse aspect of it, but it's really about power. If you live in Cork, you see the merchant class at work, and it's a frightening sight. It's worrying that a society can be so completely dominated by a merchant class - and Cork is very much like that, a merchant city."
Child abuse of another sort was the focus of his second book, Minding Children, with its memorable opening sentence: "Josephine Strane carried her bags like ungainly carcasses". Wall seems slightly bemused by critical reaction to the book, which was praised by all and sundry for its air of menace.
"I'm actually surprised that people don't find Minding Children funny," he says. "I know there's the dark side and all the pain and everything - but it's also a gothic horror story. The part where she murders her mother, for instance. If you saw that on film, you'd laugh. And there are lots of references to Hitchcock in the book."
A striking aspect of Wall's writing is his ability to combine the page-turning momentum of a thriller with the depth and subtlety of a literary novel. This is evident in his The Map of Tenderness, which has a lyrical, elegiac feel but still packs quite a punch in its examination of what is now, euphemistically, known as "dying with dignity".
"It's a question that exercises me a lot because of the way this disease is going," he says. "I don't know whether there's a dignified old age ahead of me or not. But for me the book is ultimately about love - it's a number of interlocking love stories, with the parents as template."
Which is, when you get right down to it, the story of all of us.
The Map of Tenderness by William Wall is published by Sceptre (£14.99 sterling)