Unravelling Oliver

A NOOK in The Fitzwilliam Hotel is perfect for interviewing authors. It’s surrounded by bookshelves, and so puts the authors at ease. But debut writer Liz Nugent is more excited about the photographs on the walls.

“That’s Gemma Craven in London Vertigo,” she says. “It was a Gate theatre production. I worked on it, and, ooh, I worked on that one, too, and that one,” she says, pointing at other photos.

That was in the early ’90s, when Liz was a stage manager. Her route there was circuitous. “I was a bad student, and I didn’t get a place in college. I was the only one in my family not to go; my five siblings and three half-siblings all did law,” she says.

So, she went to London aged 18.

She lived there alone, working in administration jobs and having a ball. But an accident put paid to all that. Needing an Irish specialist, she came home, and spent her convalescence deciding what to do next.

“I’d always wanted to be an actress; which young girl doesn’t? I did a course at the Gaiety school of acting, but I was very mediocre. I discovered the world of theatre there, and I loved it. I studied text, and became an assistant stage manager and then I got the job at the Gate,” she says.

A year in Kilkenny followed. “I lived there with a boyfriend and set up a theatre, then I came back to Dublin and worked as a freelance. And, after seven or eight years as a stage manager, I reached the pinnacle and worked on Riverdance, touring internationally. I toured around America, Canada, and in the Far East, and then, missing text-based theatre, I quit.”

That’s when fate took a hand. Liz was called back for the Broadway run of Riverdance, to cover for someone who didn’t have a valid visa. There she met an Irish sound-engineer, called Richard, who’d been invited to the premiere by Bill Whelan, but who lent a hand backstage.

“It was love at first sight,” says Liz. “I’d seen him lurking around the bar, and after the show we got chatting. We were the only people in the production who’d never been to New York, and we ended up doing all the touristy things together. It was so romantic,” she says.

“Back in Dublin, my last gig was an adaptation of John Banville’s Book of Evidence. That was huge. I’d read and loved the book, but when there’s a one-man show, and there’s just you and the actor and the producer, you get very close to the character and discuss him in depth. And Freddie Montgomery was one of the most interesting characters I had ever come across. He stayed with me.”

Now married to Richard, Liz has since been working as a story associate on Fair City. It was a good, pensionable job; one she needed to contribute to the mortgage, but she yearned for more freedom to be creative.

That’s when Oliver entered her head. A hugely successful author, he had beaten his wife into a coma. Under analysis, he’s wondering is he really a violent man? He has never been so before.

“Oliver started out in a short story; which is basically the first chapter of the book,” says Liz. “I had Oliver doing and saying despicable things; like describing his wife’s disabled brother as an imbecile, and engaging with the tarts who operate by the canal. It got shortlisted in the 2006 Francis McManus Award. I was thrilled, but devastated when it didn’t win a prize.”

To transform the story into a novel, Liz took weeks out, and went to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Monaghan, to write. But she had pretty strange conversations with the other writers and artists at dinner.

“If someone asked me what I’d been doing all day, I said, ‘I just battered my wife,’ or, ‘I burnt down a chateau in France, but I didn’t mean to.’ “It was quite liberating being Oliver,” she says. “I could say the most awful, despicable things. But I could shake him off quite easily. I can easily separate the imaginative side of my brain from the practical.”

Unravelling Oliver is a startlingly good debut. Told when Oliver is 60, it looks back over the events leading to his act of violence. He’s a charmer, seductive and charismatic, so what did his wife, Alice, do to turn him into a monster? There’s a twist near the end that will leave the reader gasping.

But how did the short story turn into a novel? “I had portrayed Oliver as a complete bastard; both despicable and unlikeable, but he was still in my head. He had said, ‘I hit her, but she should not have provoked me’. I wondered what she had done to provoke him. If he’d never hit her before, and he was now 60-odd, what could she have done?” Liz says.

Once she had secured her book deal with Penguin, and sold translation rights to Germany, Liz took time out from RT…. She’s now writing her second novel, and watching, with pleasure, the progress of the debut. It was released in Germany first, and has sold brilliantly there; and the positive early reaction to Unravelling Oliver in Ireland augers well. What of Oliver, though? Is he a monster, or should we feel sorry for him? Does his difficult background excuse the way he was? It’s for the reader to decide.

“If you are a bastard, you don’t know you are; you don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘what despicable thing can I do today?’ You rationalise, and justify everything you do, so I had to find a way for him to justify himself.

“I was surprised when my publishers said he was a complete monster; I felt quite hurt on his behalf. At the end, I felt, ‘how could he have been any other way’? He was never shown love as a child. It’s an explanation, if not really justification.”

Is Liz pleased with the reaction to the book? “I like the fact that it’s controversial,” she says. “Some people are saying, ‘poor Oliver,’ and others are saying, ‘what a complete bastard.’ I think that’s good for the book. One publisher rejected it because it was too disturbing. I thought, ‘wow, brilliant. Disturbing is good’.”