'I wanted it to be a love letter to Cork': Lisa McInerney on her new novel
Lisa McInerney - "the pull of Cork is pure magnetic" Pictures: Dan Linehan
began for me with an image of a woman doing Pana, tickled that all around her were people oblivious to the fact that she’d just killed someone.
The character that came out of that image was Maureen Phelan, from Mayfield but with 40 years in London under her belt, and she spends much of trying unsuccessfully to wreak havoc on Cork City.
, the third book in my mad cycle set in the Real Capital, sprung from different notions, one being of that same accidental killer leading bemused German tourists on a wonky tour from Shandon to the English Market, where she reckons they’ll be able to buy great sausages (Germans being, she says, pure mad for sausages).
I left Cork a couple of years before I wrote .
It was in the grip of recession, and like the rest of Ireland the place felt angry, and rightfully so. I only left because rent had climbed too high; landlords were certainly not of the opinion that we were all in this together.
I went up to Co Galway, where I was born, and wrote as a way of keeping my accent and dealing with my despair at feeling pushed out of Cork.
And so the Cork that appears in is a hard place, unsentimental and impatient with its natives, indifferent to how much it is loved. It’s a little less so in , post-crash and open to new ideas, though it’s still a place that the protagonist, 20-year-old Ryan, thinks is divided, classist and unforgiving (which it’s probably right to be, given his carry-on).
But by the time I was writing , I’d been away from Cork so long I was riddled with nostalgia, and we were far enough on from the crash for things to feel full of potential again.
We’d gone through two huge referendums, both won by grassroots movements and the desire for kindness in a country that had not had much room for kindness in years previous.
I was at the end of a sprawling, three-part fiction cycle and it felt only right to give my cast of characters the connection to home that they’d felt was missing. Cork seemed like it’d be up for it.
A lot of the characters in are in some state of homecoming. Ryan — the heart of all three novels — is returning to Cork after three years in exile, and Karine, his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his son, finds herself thinking about what this means for her, and about her own place in the city.
Mel, who grew up on the same Northside terrace as Ryan, is back after four years in Scotland, and finds that Cork will not tolerate too much examining of the past.
Maureen has just accepted herself as Corkonian again after so many years as an emigrant when she’s rattled by the accomplishments of another Cork-born emigrant, Mother Jones.
Georgie, arguably the most wretched character in , has also come home from London and, like Mel, finds herself nonplussed at the conditions attached to her being made welcome. Cork is, in , very keen on forgiving and forgetting, and expects that to go both ways.
That is to say that I was careful not to give my nostalgia free rein in writing
I wanted it to be a love letter to Cork, without apologising for making Cork seem like a harder place in the preceding novels.
Cities have a mind of their own, I think sometimes. If that’s the case you can only imagine how highly strung Cork might be. A male place, as Kevin Barry said in his essay a thing Maureen feels keenly, and it drives her bananas.
I was up and down to Cork like a yoyo before the pandemic, visiting family and friends, participating in literary events (a weakness — I’ll generally say yes to anything that’ll bring me to Cork), or just spending a couple of nights in town and wandering around, a very happy gom.
The essence of Cork hasn’t changed. I remember town being jammers during the crash as well.
You could make a pint stretch if you had to and sure people-watching was free; you could always spend the day going up and down Oliver Plunkett Street listening to the chatter, the singsong of the Corkonian back-and-forth that, shrewd as it is, seems more sincere to me than the wordplay you get elsewhere on this island.
But other things have changed and it seems they’ve changed for the better. There’s a bit in where Maureen sits in a cafe with her wayward son, the dangerous black market chancer Jimmy, marvelling at flat whites and at the trendy young fellas who so carefully prepare them.
I have it in my head that they’re in Soma on Tuckey Street.
Only a week or two before the first lockdown, I was in Soma with my cousin Louise (Carrigaline bred, Cobh settled, the hero to whom this novel is dedicated), where we planned a foodie traipse through the city for the summer.
There were all sorts of places we wanted to go for a munch: neither of us had been to Izz yet, she had been to Iyers but I hadn’t, we had yet to be lucky enough to find a bloody table in Cask, we were both totally up for having our minds blown in Ichigo Ichie and damn the expense.
Far from this kind of craic we were reared, but we were all for incorporating this kind of craic into our experience of the city, of Ireland in general.
We felt, I suppose, like we’d waited long enough for Cork to take its place among the cities of Europe, or maybe that we’d waited long enough to feel like every corner of the place was available to us. I’ve never had money when I lived in Cork; be nice to see what the gaff is like for the other half.
So Louise and I sat in Soma, eating some sweet little yokeys we got from beside the till, petting a friendly dog that was chilling on the floor next to our table, and Cork felt at once comfortingly familiar and brand new, and we were happy as Larry.
The foodie traipse is still on the cards for when we finally get to grips with this pandemic; how encouraging and inspirational to see those restaurants and cafes thrive during this most difficult time.
This is what I mean by there being some new energy in the place: the innovation shown by small businesses, and the support shown by the community. Without blame being so easily apportioned, as was the case during the crash, we have fight in us.
My postponed foodie spree was in my head when I wrote about Mel traipsing all over Cork, tempted by delicious treats: Takashi Miyazaki gets a mention, as does Denis Cotter, as does the Farmgate and Arthur Mayne’s.
‘Raingod’ was in my head when I wrote Maureen listing off famous alumni of the North Mon. Elsewhere in the novel, the memory of childhood summers in Mountrivers in Carrigaline proved useful, similarly, the noise of the estates in Fairhill. As did the buzz and flap of town on an early Friday evening, the wild-eyed chats you’d have out the front of the Crúiscín Lán, the tourists stuffing themselves in the English Market, the vocabulary you don’t get anywhere else, my old boss from Tower Street joking about being on the Missions when he worked above in the Sunbeam, the snazzing up of Barracka from the state it was in when I used walk it every day.
Would I have been able to write without being away from Cork and missing it so much? I don’t think I would. It’s a book about homecoming, about reunions and reckonings, it’s a song for a city that might finally be in the mood to welcome my cast of latchicos. It’s about a pull to place, and it helps when the place is pure magnetic, like.
- The Rules of Revelation by Lisa McInerney is published in Trade Paperback by John Murray, €16.99
