Irish thoughts from Berlin-based Julian Gough

IRISH writer Julian Gough, who satirises our banking crisis in his witty novella, Crash! How I Lost A Hundred Billion and Found True Love, says living in Berlin gives him perspective on home.

Gough will be in conversation with writers Kevin Barry and Patrick McCabe at Triskel Christchurch on Sept 21, as part of the Cork International Short Story Festival.

Gough’s novella, set in a country called Squanderland, recently topped the Kindle Singles hit parade. It features his regular protagonist, the hapless Jude, who becomes embroiled in the European debt crisis.

The first volume of the Jude series was published in 2007, as Jude: Level 1. That was followed by Jude in London. Jude in America is set to follow next year.

Gough, born in London and reared in Tipperary, says that “it has always been handy for Irish writers to get the feck out of the place. Not that many stayed at home. Ireland is so small that to get a perspective on it, you need to be standing outside it. Also, because it’s so intimate, it can be hard to tell the truth or to be too honest about the place. But if you’re in Paris or Trieste or Berlin or even London, you’re far enough away.”

Despite depicting Ireland as a basket case, Gough’s writing has been well-accepted here, and he is surprised. “I always get a surprisingly good reaction from Irish people. When I wrote Jude: Level 1 (the title was later changed to Jude in Ireland), I thought I was going to be hammered for it back home. I wrote about a thinly disguised version of the Christian Brothers. I did a reading in Dromineer, and the parish priest of Clough Jordan came up to me afterwards. The piece I had just read was savage. But he shook the hand off me and said he loved it and roared laughing. So that was fantastic.”

Some reviewers have detected anger beneath the comedy in Gough’s writing. But he says that is readers projecting.

“I have actually tried not to be angry. When I wrote Crash!, it was hard not to get angry about the aftermath of the property crisis, and the Europeans taking over our economy, and the bankers getting away with it. Anger can be a very powerful engine, but what I’m doing is deliberately trying to feel compassion, even for the bankers. In my book, the big banker (Finian O’Driscoll) is a dreadful character.

“But I don’t want people to hate him. In a way, it must be a terrible thing to be him. What happened to the bankers is, in a way, what happened to the priests during my life-time. They were looked-up-to, respected and feared.

“The bankers were in charge of the ‘religion’ of the country, which was finance for a while. They got carried away, there was a lack of self-knowledge among these people and when the arse fell out of it, it was crippling, humbling and painful for them.”

Gough says much can be said, critically, about Ireland if it’s done affectionately, and he cites the TV comedy, Fr Ted.

“Over the years, I’ve become a lot more affectionate about Ireland, possibly because I’m outside it now. Ireland drove me up the walls when I was living there.

“But as you get older, (Gough is 47), you mellow and realise it’s just human beings doing their best. And there are a lot of reasons why we are the way we are. When I was a teenager, starting at university, you couldn’t buy contraceptives. I got the tail-end of the old Ireland, which is actually very useful for a writer,” he says.

Gough is an admirer of Ireland’s “brilliant tradition of satire, from the likes of Jonathan Swift. I like Flann O’Brien a lot. I think he’s the road-less-taken in Irish literature. Joyce had too much influence and O’Brien didn’t have enough. There’s too many flowery sentences in Irish literature, where the poetry is not earned.

It’s just gratuitous floweriness. The sentences dance around the place, drawing attention to themselves, but not actually doing very much else.” An obsession of Gough’s is finding a metaphor “for the abstract economic stuff.” In Jude in London, a single block is an asset that has leverage. It is invested in and becomes one hundred blocks, which are made into a wall. Then, a hedge is put in place to protect it.

“I love finding a way of writing about economics so that you can see how ludicrous modern finance is. People are going to look back in 100 years at this era, and they’ll be stunned that we believed what we did. Economists are now having arguments over what money is and where it comes from.

“It’s like hearing theologians argue about the existence of the Holy Spirit. The arguments really remind me of the Christian theological debates in the Middle Ages. There is this complete inability to nail where money comes from.”

Gough laughs at the mention of the Anglo tapes. “There are lines in Crash! that are practically in those tapes. I thought I was satirising, doing a wildly over-the-top portrait of people demented with self-belief, based on a complete catastrophe and being completely blind to the consequences of their actions. It’s very hard to write satire about modern Ireland. How do you keep ahead of it?”

Looking back on his apprenticeship as a writer, Gough says life was uncomplicated when he learnt his craft, through practice, while living on the dole for ten years. During that period, he was also the front man for the band, Toasted Heretic. He is now delighted to be part of “the new digital publishing world,” with his hit novella. “So many books are too long. The novella is a really satisfying length for writers and readers.”