In life some things are better left unsaid

Screenwriter, playwright and director Gerry Stembridge admits to having doubts that he had what it takes to be a novelist, writes Caroline O’Doherty.

Unspoken. Gerard Stembridge. Old Street; £12.99 unavailable as an ebook

FIRST, to clear up what Gerry Stembridge’s latest book is not. It is not, despite being set in the city where he grew up at the time he grew up, a memoir. Stembridge has no desire to go all autobiographical.

“At a certain point the mix of memory and imagination is such that you really do find it hard to pin down any more,” he explains.

“I would never write a memoir because I wouldn’t trust memory. I think memoirs just aren’t true.”

Neither is it, despite featuring public figures whose foibles Stembridge would have feasted upon in his Scrap Saturday days, a satire. He considers that a different enterprise altogether.

“When you write satire, it’s your job to be merciless but if you want to write a decent novel you have to take on all the possibilities of how a person thinks.

“If you are going to be so arrogant as to enter the head of somebody who was alive once then you have to tread carefully.”

So if it features a real place and real people, is it a historical novel? That’s certainly getting warmer.

“What it is, is something I don’t think Irish writers have done much of. It’s more of an English form — the Victorian Novel where the novelist looks at how society at a particular time operates through a selection of characters.

“The kind of thing Dickens and Trollope did. They’re nice comparisons, aren’t they? For Dickens and Trollope, obviously,” he adds feigning condescension, for fear of sounding like he takes himself too seriously.

The society he has written about is Ireland of the decade 1959-1969 and the characters who inhabit it represent three-and-a-half of the four estates — primarily the people, the Government, the media and to a lesser extent the Catholic Church.

We have the working-class Strong family from Limerick [the location is not named but will be apparent to Irish readers] whose story is told mainly through the mother, Ann Strong, and the youngest of her brood, Francis, born as the novel begins.

There are the Lemass and Lynch cabinets, as seen through the eyes of de Valera, reluctantly departing Leinster House for the Áras as the book starts, and the hell-raising Dom, easily recognisable as Donogh O’Malley, who feels his ambitions are thwarted by the Lizard, a deliberately thin disguise for Charles Haughey.

Also featuring is the fledgling RTÉ television, the behind the scenes dramas played out by Baz Malloy, an emigrant lured home from the relative exotica of Granada TV in England, and Gavin Bloom, the gay floor manager whose sexuality is understood but unmentioned by his colleagues.

That’s just one of the unspokens of the title which refers not only to the social, moral and religious taboos that begin to be challenged, but also to the more intimate silences between loved ones.

“Unspoken is a two-way street,” says Stembridge. “We know a great deal about the dark undercurrent of the time and those issues are there but maybe to a certain degree we now talk too much.

“Sometimes things are better left unspoken. Sometimes things remain unspoken for the kindest of reasons. What I wanted to explore was that difficult question of when does it become wrong to say nothing or when is it the better thing to stand back and hold your peace.”

Stembridge had to tackle that question himself in deciding how explicit to be in the book with the result that much is suggested rather than baldly stated.

Young Francis loves school and is unscathed by his Christian Brother masters but then he’s one of the brightest in class.

The violence with which a boy further down the academic pecking order responds when Francis casually calls him stupid suggests less bookish children had a far less favourable experience.

Education is a recurring theme in the novel although Stembridge, himself an unscarred graduate of the Christian Brothers, again pleads for nothing personal to be read into it.

“I was only a teacher for five years — and part-time at that,” he explains.

One legacy of the ’60s was the introduction of free secondary education and Stembridge clearly had fun allowing Dom transform from bad boy backbencher to national hero as the Minister who made it happen, not out of any great desire to allow the underclasses fulfil their potential but purely because he wanted to be noticed at a time when he felt Haughey got all Lemass’s attention.

“It raises this question of how visionary things don’t always happen because the person is idealogically inclined to them.

“Very often it’s the visionary politician who fails to achieve the practical thing where the person who is less inclined to abstract thought will just get on with it.”

Many other historical events feature — Ireland’s first Eurovision entry, the golden jubilee of the Easter Rising, the arrival of foreign industry and the beginnings of urban sprawl — all seasoned with references to the popular books, programmes, music, food and idioms of the time.

But history anoraks beware — Stembridge didn’t embark on thesis-standard research and has taken some artistic liberties.

“I didn’t want the book to become a checklist of dates and events and I’ve interpreted things as the characters might have seen them.

“I researched my own head first. I sat in my room for several weeks trying to see what I could remember,” he says. “I don’t mean I didn’t eat,” he adds quickly, lest that makes him sound too much like a tortured genius at work.

Far from considering himself a genius, Stembridge admits to doubts that he had what it takes to be a novelist. He was 45 before he attempted one and Unspoken is his third but as he is also a screenwriter, playwright and director for stage, television and cinema, he finds it hard to pin himself down.

“I think I am beginning to see myself as a novelist,” he says, although his next project is directing for screen. “I certainly have discovered that I love writing and as I get more grumpy and misanthropic I might disappear back into my room and enjoy doing it more.”

That seems a contradiction because there is no trace of authorly grumpiness in Unspoken. In fact, for a man who tore self-important politicians asunder with the late Dermot Morgan in the landmark Scrap Saturday radio series, who returned to lampooning a few years ago in TV’s The State of Us, and who gave us dark films like Guiltrip in between, his current work is an unexpectedly warm and affectionate portrait of a people and a period, despite their obvious shortcomings.

So which is the real Gerry Stembridge? The sharp tongue or the gentle hand? He has both, he says, but over time he’s become less comfortable with the former.

“There is an age question. Satire is a young man’s sport. We are crueller when we are younger, we’re more apt to poke fun.

“By the time you reach middle age you have too many bad experiences under your belt, too many lies and indiscretions, to go after other people.”

Lies and indiscretions? Sounds intriguing. Pity we won’t see that memoir.