Interview with Paul Murray

Paul Murray’s three novels, while very firmly set in Dublin, challenge and complicate much of what springs to mind when one thinks of ‘Irish writing’. They are urbane, dense, funny, brainy, unpretentious. Bret Easton Ellis loves him. Donna Tartt loves him. Awards love him: he has been shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Costa Novel Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award – as well as a longlisting for the Man Booker Prize in 2010, for his second novel Skippy Dies.

His third book, The Mark and the Void, has just been released in paperback. It concerns Claude, a mild-mannered Parisian working in Dublin’s IFSC. He is shaken out of his dreary existence by an encounter with Paul, a struggling writer, who wants to make Claude the protagonist of his new novel. Set in the midst of Ireland’s banking crisis and crash, it’s both hilarious and enraging … but mostly hilarious. I talked to Paul about fatherhood, his stint as a bookseller, and diving deep into the world of banking.

I read somewhere that part of what drew you to Claude was the challenge of writing a character ‘without qualities’. Was there something counterintuitive about writing a character like that – a void, essentially?

This idea of the ‘man without qualities’ is one that turns up a lot in books and in movies – someone who just seems to be going through the motions and doesn’t have any discernible personality of their own. I think the reason it’s attractive is that that’s really only a slightly more extreme version of the way we live ourselves. We think of ourselves as unique and different, but we’re all on one kind of a treadmill or another – doing what we’re told, following a career path, filling the rare free hours of our lives with the distractions that are offered to us by the dominant culture. Claude is a displaced salaryman who lives to work and works to live, but really the main difference between himself and the people around him is that he’s aware of it. The others are just as boring as he is, but they’re lost in the illusion that they’re special and important and so the isolation they exist in doesn’t bother them.

That’s partly what interested me about setting a book in this very homogenous environment of finance – initially it seems very alien and sterile, but actually more and more of the world has come to resemble it. More and more of us have unconsciously learned, in the last decades, to think like bankers – to see things in purely monetary terms, to shut ourselves off from any relationship that’s not going to bring us a profit. Claude’s actually quite a sensitive soul, and I think Claude’s flaw is one so many of us share – he feels like there’s something missing, but he’s not quite brave enough to do anything about it.

Of course, Claude doesn’t remain a void for long – he’s brought back to life by his encounters with Paul, the novelist. Would you characterise Claude and Paul’s relationship as a romance of sorts?

For sure. Or a bromance, even. I love buddy movies and that’s one way I conceived of the book – sort of like a stationary Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Paul the novelist seems to Claude initially like he’s got all the answers – like he’s got access to this world of art and meaning and as such can escape the directionlessness that’s haunting Claude. But in fact Paul’s another lost soul. Neither of them can find anything in the world around them to grab onto. And then they find each other.

Most Irish people have been in Claude’s shoes – watching on in horror and fascination as the economy implodes. Was that part of what drew you to this character and this scenario?

It was an accident, really. I’d begun writing the book years before the crisis. It was very different – much more of a romantic comedy, with banking just as a backdrop. I didn’t know much about banking or finance at that point, I just thought it would be a funny place to put a man without qualities. I wrote about half of a first draft, but it didn’t have enough darkness to it, so I set it aside. Then, in 2009, I was trying to think of a new book, and the news every night was dominated by these stories about the banks and their chicanery. It was just frightening and so grim, like watching the country being dismembered, piece by piece. And I wondered if I could do something with that idea I’d had before, and obviously this time around there was darkness in spades. Still I was wary, because a novel set in a bank seemed inherently undramatic. At the same time, it felt to me, at that moment in history, like anything else would have been escapism. It felt like this was where the real Irish story was located and to ignore it in order to write yet another novel about the Individual would have been genuinely immoral.

The book is quite critical of Ireland, and much of the critique comes from outsiders. For example Jurgen, Claude’s German boss, describes the Irish as a ‘slave race’. Do you think this is how we are perceived, or just how we perceive ourselves?

Well, the crash took out the whole Western world. It wasn’t a specifically Irish phenomenon. The beauty of Ireland, from a writing perspective, is that so much of history and so much of modernity seem to converge here that you can tap into subjects that resonate far, far beyond the island itself. In this case, you had banks coming here from the US and Germany and wherever else to do their dirty work, so Dublin, or the IFSC, became the scene of a crime whose perpetrators were thousands of miles away. When I was growing up, Ireland seemed so removed and detached from everything, and writing about it seemed such a boring prospect if you wanted to be, you know, Don DeLillo. Now, Ireland’s right at the centre of global capitalism. Everything’s happening here. Much of it bad.

At the same time, I wanted to write about my city, and what had happened here specifically, which seemed even more extreme than what happened in other parts of the world. It felt like we went down some dark paths in the years prior to the crash. It genuinely seemed that from about 2001 on, everything was for sale; conversely, if something didn’t have a monetary value, it was worthless. It’s not that much of an exaggeration to say that any sense of compassion or care went out the window. Instead, being a massive asshole suddenly became an okay thing to be. That was a real 180 for Irish people, who previously to that had always traded on the idea of being authentic, being charming, winning others over in very covert, deft ways. Like, being a soulless husk had never been cool here the way it had been in, say, London. But now the blandest, most awful corporate shills were being held up to us as heroes. The music of the time is a useful microcosm. In the eighties and nineties, U2 were dominant. I was never a big fan, but I could appreciate that they were genuine about what they were doing. Even when they were being postmodern, they were trying to do something new. But in the 2000s, you had Westlife, who weren’t trying to do anything at all except make money. They seemed to be quintessentially unIrish in that way, but we were supposed to be proud of them and of Louis Walsh because they were making so much money. I’d go abroad and instead of saying, ‘Ah! You’re Irish! U2!’ people would say, ‘Ah! You’re Irish! Westlife!’ And I’d feel ashamed! And Dublin, by the same token, had been turned into this red-light zone for bankers, and we were all supposed to be proud of that too.

With regard to the slave line – it’s important to keep in mind who’s saying it. But I suppose I had in mind Nietzsche’s master-slave dialectic. To give a very crude, cartoon version of it, the idea is that the master is someone who decides his values; he decides for himself what the good life is, and then lives it. But the slave is someone who sees himself only through the eyes of others. He can only think of himself as worthwhile if he feels others are impressed by him. And even if he’s a millionaire, he still thinks like a slave – he covers himself in gold and jewels in this desperate attempt to impress others. He’s totally dependent on others and he has no idea who he even is. Far from being an Irish phenomenon, it seems to me that’s the way the whole Western world has been taught to think in the last 30 years or so. This emphasis on accumulating, the endless competition with others, the unvarying obsession with ourselves, the terrifying insecurity and sadness behind it all – that’s pretty slavish. Jurgen’s a slave too, by that reckoning – doing this creepy amoral job so he can have power and status and a big car.

Among the novel’s brilliant comic creations is Remington, Paul’s four-year-old son. You’re father to a boy around the same age – in what way has fatherhood affected your worldview, and by extension, your writing?

Fatherhood is amazing. It’s a major shift in perspective. You’ve spent your whole life thereto making yourself into a person – working to develop particular skills, articulate a particular worldview, etc. All of these ways you have to say to yourself and to others, This is who I am. Then you have a kid, and all of that stuff becomes irrelevant. Suddenly you’re secondary in your own life. It no longer matters what you might be thinking or feeling, or rather, it only matters once the child’s needs have been met. It’s quite liberating. But it’s also quite surprising. I think for a writer the challenges are particularly pointed because being a writer you have to be quite selfish – you need to be kind of territorial in order to get your work done. And getting that work done, writing itself, plays such a huge part in how you think of yourself. When you have a child you have to face up to the fact that that’s a luxury, in a way. You have to put food on the table! And you have to be in the world as opposed to in your own head. It’s hard. But it’s great. And for a writer, I think it’s invaluable, not just because you get to watch someone grow up, and you realize just what that entails, but because you understand what other people’s lives are like, the pressure they’re under, just to get through an ordinary day.

What did you want to be when you were a kid? When did you realise you were going to be a writer?

I remember when I was seven or eight telling people I wanted to do something in cybernetics. I’m pretty sure I got the idea from Doctor Who, but I was always interested in other worlds, other realities, the borders between truth and make-believe, how you could map one onto the other. The spectral, the virtual, whatever you want to call it. I used to write a lot of stories about talking animals working as detectives in space. When I got a little bit older I realized that working in science would not involve actually building Cybermen. Every job in fact turned out on investigation to be much more boring than I’d imagined it. So I suppose the solution was to just keep on imagining it. Writing was the only avenue that didn’t seem to entail some enormous let-down. I was writing from when I was very young; I don’t think I really separated writing from reading. There was just a continuum there that I assumed you could go in and out of as you pleased. If you didn’t have a story to read you wrote one yourself. I kept writing all the way through school and college but I didn’t think of myself as a writer or even that I would be a writer. That seemed to involve a transformation that was nothing short of miraculous, like Pinocchio becoming a boy, or a Cyberman becoming a man.

You worked in Waterstones before doing the Creative Writing MA in East Anglia. Did you like working as a bookseller? Is it good training for being a writer?

I found working as a bookseller alternately wonderful and terrifying. My colleagues at Waterstones were an absolute joy. Most of my friends from college weren’t huge readers, so to be surrounded by all of these smart people who read books and talked about them non-stop was great. It was one of the best years of my life, no question. At the same time, it brought home to me that publishing was an industry, and that industry was not one that necessarily cared about books. When I started working there, Waterstones had just been bought by HMV, the record shop, who cared only about the bottom line. Suddenly this very prestigious bookshop, which had been very lovingly curated by the booksellers working there, was flooded with crappy promotions, kitten calendars, etc. That got worse in the years after I left, and it was really hard on the staff there. It seems to me that bookselling has turned a corner in the last few years and that it’s been handed back over to the people who have a passion for it. I hope it stays that way. In terms of training for writers – yes, it was really useful. You read a lot of books for one thing, you read new things, you read outside your comfort zone because you’re surrounded like I say with people who are basically professional readers. But also you gain a useful awareness of the cold hard truths of the marketplace. I used to think that if you wrote a book, people would buy it. I didn’t know why or how, I just assumed that was how it worked. When I started at Waterstones, I’d see twenty books coming in from a particular author, and then, three months later, all twenty copies being returned to the publisher. Even after strong reviews, for whatever reason, some books just didn’t click with the reading. It made me realize that writing’s a very, very precarious business, and that writing the book is only half the battle. If even that. I realized you needed to offer readers something, you had to have something that would pull them in; it certainly curbed any ideas I might have had to write the next iteration of Finnegans Wake.

How you go about plotting a big, sprawling novel like The Mark and the Void or Skippy Dies? Do you spend a lot of time outlining/researching or just dive into the draft? At what point do you show it to others?

I usually start researching at the same time I start writing, and I’ll keep researching really until I finish the book. When I’m writing I’m trying to free myself up from my own preconceptions and a good way of doing that is to plunge myself into a world I know nothing about – economics or World War I or string theory. I usually have a hunch that it ties into the lives of the characters that I want to write about, but nothing more concrete than that. It can take a while before I understand what I even want from the research – and then I’ll chance on something that’s totally perfect for the book, and it’ll go from there.

Plotting is unquestionably the hardest part of the process for me. I find myself writing these multilayered stories with lots of characters and twists. That makes the first half of the process really exciting, because there are so many variables and possibilities that I don’t know myself how it’s going to turn out. In the latter stages, the editing, though, I often curse myself for not writing something with two guys in a locked room. It’s a major challenge to make everything consistent and logical; that editing stage is much more technical, almost like engineering.That can be tough because it can feel like the fun stuff, the creative stuff, has been done, so all that’s left is hard graft – which might take another two or three years.

I can plan ahead to a certain extent, but what always happens is that fairly early on that plan will become redundant, because it turns out not to fit the characters, or because something else has occurred to me that seems much more interesting. I make charts on A3 paper with lists of everything that needs to happen, and then I’ll find them again a few years later and realize that everything on the list has either been cut or never even made the draft.

The ending is where all of these issues become the most pronounced. I like postmodern authors like Pynchon et al, but unlike them I find myself drawn to tight endings that tie everything together. I like the formal elegance of that, the idea that all of these random ideas you’ve thrown together at the start have all converged in a single point. It’s like a game of Tetris, where you’re giving yourself all of these obstacles and trying to manipulate in that such a way that at the end they go clear. In practice, that’s really tough – the ending is where it becomes most obvious that a particular plot direction is just not going to work. That’s why it makes sense to me to work linearly – you can’t tackle the ending until you’ve written and understood everything that’s gone before.

As for showing it to others – I like to have a strong draft complete before showing it to editors. In fact, I usually think it’s done at that point. Then I spend the next two years revising it.

What’s the most important habit a young writer should cultivate?

Endurance/faith/perseverance. You kind of need to be like Rocky and get used to staying on your feet while being punched in the face. You’ll get knockbacks from agents and publishers early on; later, you’ll get criticism from reviewers or Goodreads, or your book won’t sell, or it won’t win a prize, or whatever. The opportunities for feeling bad and doubting yourself are endless. So you need to be able to shrug these off and retain faith that what you’re doing has worth. The best way is to make sure that your work does have worth, and the best way to do that is to make it absolutely as good as it can be. It can be really hard to go keep going sometimes: the toughest opponent you’ll face is yourself. Inevitably you’ll reach a point when the piece you’re working on seems completely unsalvageable and you’ll just want to give it up. Or, it might be in reasonably good shape, but you can’t bear the idea of going through it one more time and having to face its flaws. Everything sucks till it’s good; persisting on those days when your body and soul are screaming to run away is what will make you a writer.

From issue #2: spring/summer 2016

About the Author
Paul Murray is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and Skippy Dies, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void is his third novel. He lives in Dublin.