In the days before Louis de Bernieres became known as the man who wrote Captain Corelli's Mandolin (I confess to abandoning it after yawning dutifully through 100 pages), a sizeable cult grew up around his inspired Latin American trilogy: The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992).
It was a joy to find a writer capable of articulating the big picture from Latin America, meshing implacable laws of history with the surreal tropical mood, capped by the black humour typical of the locals, who find material for mirth in even the grimmest of times.
Characters roamed freely through several centuries: the royal Conde de Pompeii, a lost soul from the Spanish conquest, rubbed shoulders with the head of a communist guerrilla band, identifying with her fiery passion. Such is the spirit of the region, where locals in Mexico talk of revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata in the present tense, as if they had chatted with him just the other day.
De Bernieres's trilogy is set in an unnamed country, easily identified as Colombia, where the author, then 19 years old (in 1973) lived in a small village in Valledupar state, half a day's travel from the nearest town.
"Every weekend the locals would go out, get drunk and cut each others' arms off with machetes," recalls de Bernieres, speaking after a reading at the Kilkenny Arts Festival last week.
It was a surprise to discover that the trilogy was written by an Englishman, as the language had the feel of someone writing English as their second language; sentences frequently obeyed Spanish grammar structures and words such as cabron, puta and padrino were tossed in without explanation.
"The first translation into Spanish was a total disaster," de Bernieres remarks. Mainland Spanish, substantially different from Colombian argot, sucked the novels dry of their local inspiration - an error since repaired.
In his Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord, Dionisio Vivo, a philosophy professor, writes angry letters to the press about the impact of the coca trade on the lives of ordinary people. The drug lords try to kill him off but each attempt is frustrated by remarkable coincidences which are quickly put down to sorcery by superstitious hitmen.
One morning, Senor Vivo wakes to find a corpse in his garden, killed in the gruesome manner of the "Colombian cravate", where the victim has his throat cut and tongue pushed through the gash in the manner of a necktie.
Last month Irish Franciscan priest Brendan Forde stepped outside the front door of his home in Uraba province, north-west Colombia, to discover just such a corpse in his garden, a warning by rightwing paramilitaries to abandon his mediation work in a village struggling to break free of state and guerrilla violence.
Father Forde has decided to stay on in the area, although he knows that when paramilitaries deliver a warning, they usually carry it out.
"It amazed me how some Colombians stood up and were counted despite the risks," says de Bernieres, who was particularly inspired by the Colombian judges who prosecuted drug traffickers - "really heroic people who sacrificed not just themselves but everyone they loved".
In the years since the trilogy was published, events have mirrored de Bernieres's fiction, notably the peasant uprising described in The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts.
The Zapatista indigenous rebellion, launched in south-east Mexico in January 1994, was led by Marcos, a philosophy professor with a penchant for poetic correspondence. The fictional Senor Vivo also engaged in lively epistolary warfare, receiving sackfuls of fan mail which were divided into three types: letters of support, declarations of love and declarations of carnal intent.
When the Zapatista leadership concluded peace talks in San Cristobal de las Casas in March 1994, Marcos returned to the jungle weighed down by more than 1,000 letters, as people asked him to mediate in labour disputes or offered martial arts experts to act as jungle bodyguards. Other letters contained photos of women offering themselves for a night of tropical passion, as art once more imitated life.
De Bernieres regards his Latin American books as experiments in magical realism, and plays down their political vision. "Magical realism is a literary trick, not a recipe for political analysis," he says. "It relieves the sense of hopelessness that surrounds daily life."
In de Bernieres's books, the good guys win; in Colombia, the good guys are already dead, the survivors scrambling for a oneway ticket to the US, or cowering behind an Irish priest armed only with gall and reason.
The packed crowd at the Kilkenny reading is mostly middle-aged women, who laugh throughout de Bernieres's short story, a hilarious yarn about a bourgeois French couple setting out on holidays and running into a local Hells Angels chapter, with bizarre results.
The audience loves the story, lapping up its anti-English barbs, the slapstick humour and de Bernieres's superb oratorical delivery, his own laughter interrupting the reading on a few occasions. After the reading de Bernieres spends at least half an hour signing copies of his books and fending off requests for late-night drinks from female admirers.
"I thought he would be terribly romantic," one disappointed woman, clutching her signed copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, says. "But he's a little, bald cockney."
When I pass this information on to the man himself, he looks rather unhappy. In fact, in his natty black suede waistcoat, white shirt, chino trousers and peasant cap, de Bernieres has the air of a well-to-do farmer from Provence, holding forth on the price of brie at a corner cafe.
A snatched survey of the audience conducted before the reading has indicated that those under 40 had read the Latin American novels while those over, the majority, had fallen solely for the charms of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.
I had been told categorically that de Bernieres would not be available for interview, that he didn't do interviews, and felt something akin to disappointment when the PR man whispered "you have 10 minutes" as the reputed grouch took the stage.
"A little, bald Cockney, eh?" de Bernieres repeats, and I realise I should have left that confidence for Minute Nine rather than flashing it around carelessly in Minute Three.
He protests his innocence only of the Cockney charge, putting it down to years spent in London.
De Bernieres visibly winces when I mention Captain Corelli's Mandolin, recoiling in his chair. "I can't bear another question on that book," he says, launching into a description of how his brain goes on automatic pilot when the issue is raised, stock responses emerging from his mouth, his brain elsewhere, parroting phrases repeated infinite times over the past four years.
His face lights up when I reveal my own lack of interest in that book, and he warms to conversation about Latin America. "I hear Venezuela is heading rapidly downwards," he says acknowledging his sources are in the Colombian embassy in London - hardly a reliable source given their hostility to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
De Bernieres admits his view of Latin America had grown pessimistic by the time he reached book three, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, and that he had cancelled plans for a further two books in the series. "I also spent too much time recapitulating what had happened in the earlier books," he says. "I imagined an endless future of back-references in book four, making it almost impossible to get on with the story."
His hands are speckled with white and green flecks of paint, evidence of his current project - painting his house. He has plans for a book which would take place between Co Monaghan and California, USA, but the subject matter is a closely guarded secret.
De Bernieres lives, with his cat, on top of a plague pit in Norfolk; his hobbies are music, cars and DIY, the same as those of Senor Vivo, "to save time on the research" he admitted.
Time is ticking away when I make another brutal faux pas, wondering if de Bernieres has seen legendary punk poet John Cooper Clarke performing the night before. "I don't want to see him again," de Bernieres says, a frown crossing his countenance. "He snogged my girlfriend at a party about 20 years ago. I was so pissed off I left and walked home from Salford to Manchester in the rain."
De Bernieres rises to leave the room, still disturbed by the sudden memory of Senor Clarke's audacity. "Is he still around?" he asked, saying goodbye as he looks down the hotel corridor in a vaguely menacing manner.
The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman and Captain Corelli's Mandolin are published by Vintage (£6.99 each, in UK)