'This isn't the Cork of Frank O'Connor, it's a bit more garage forecourt-ish'
Danny Denton has just published his new novel, All Along The Echo. Picture: Monika Gorka
A simple question for Cork author Danny Denton that causes him a bit of bother. How would he describe his second novel, All Along the Echo? “It is a novel in radio," he eventually declares. "Part of the medium of the novel is a phone-in radio show, and through that people are talking and telling their stories and figuring out who they are. And at the same time, the characters who are involved in the radio station - some who phone into the radio station - you get to look at who they are as well. That's about as close as I can get to figuring out what's going on on the pages.”
It’s a good attempt at describing the followup to his 2018 debut, The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow. All Along the Echo is odd, overflowing with ideas and storylines that take a while to reveal themselves as we get the machinations of its protagonists. Tony is host of Cork phone-in radio show Talk to Tony, while his producer is Lou. It's also rewarding, with laugh-out-loud parts sitting easily with poignant moments. With snippets of Tony’s interactions with his listeners throughout, it’s almost like a love letter to the medium of radio.
Pointing to the likes of radio presenters Joe Duffy and PJ Coogan as influences, Denton says they're good at trying to antagonise everybody equally. "PJ Coogan is great at that. He's great at telling someone that they're being a snowflake and then telling someone else that they're being anti-snowflake at the exact same time - not using the word ‘snowflake’, or any of that kind of stuff. But he can antagonise both sides.”
That’s a good thing, adds Denton. “As we narrow our existence, we actually distance ourselves from people we disagree with. And the further you are from the people you disagree with, the less likely it is you're ever going to find common ground.”
Denton’s journey is an interesting one. Leaving Passage West after his Leaving Cert at 18 (“I was like, ‘Never darkening the door of this place again”) and inspired by his grandfather who had been in the merchant navy, he had environmental science and maritime science at the top of his CAO form, but instead made a break for China.
One of about seven foreigners in a city of 100,000 that he compares to Bantry, it was an hour or so from Wuhan. He taught English, explaining that the best education he ever got in grammar and syntax was from the short TEFL course he did on the North Mall. He was in China at the time of the 2002 World Cup, but didn’t find out about Roy Keane and Saipan for a few days.
“When Ireland got knocked out, I was bawling crying," he recalls. "I think that was just homesickness. I've never cried at sports since.”
He did a lot of travel in China, started a diary, read a huge amount, and eventually came back to Ireland with a strong desire to be a writer. He got his English degrees but still had the travel bug, and ended up away from Cork from 2006 to 2016, living variously in London, Girona, and the US.
It all fed into All Along the Echo. In Girona, “Everyone was speaking Catalan all the time around us. I was starved of Englishness and the way Irish people speak English.” Hence the first kernels of his love for radio. “So I found myself listening to some of these shows, almost just to hear the Irish accent and to hear what people were talking about at home. To the point that I became almost obsessed - I'd be ringing my mom saying ‘There's a sewage leak on the Cobh road, be careful driving home’, or chatting to my dad, I was saying, ‘Isn't it amazing that bus fares have gone up again?’. He's like, ‘Have they?’ 'Yeah, 5%. It's an outrage.'”
Denton did eventually return and settle in Cork, first in the city centre before moving with his partner to Passage, where they have two children. Having just hung up his editorship of the acclaimed literary magazine, The Stinging Fly, Denton is lecturing in creative writing at UCC. He says the job has offered him an extra grounding knowing he’s going to be there for years to come. “I can start really planning ahead and thinking about the things that I want to say.”
The release of All Along the Echo has Denton in a reflective mood. “One lesson I think I've learned from a being-a-writer perspective, is, when you're trying to write your first book, you don't know that it'll be published. Nothing is guaranteed, you're doing it all on faith. You think it has to be perfect, you think you have to write the perfect book. And it has to be the best thing it can be. And it does have to be the best thing it can be, right, any book, the writer's job is to make it the best thing it could be, but it doesn't have to be perfect.”
That attitude is something he tries to get across to the young, prospective writers at UCC, too.
Cork is almost like a character in itself in the new book. The radio chat is thick with the vernacular, while the journey of the book takes us across the city streets as well as the suburbs.
He wanted to write about Cork in the way that John McGahern might write about Leitrim, trying to capture how a place recedes. “When I say I live in Cork, and I spend all my time in Cork, I spend huge amounts of time in transitory spaces like dual carriageways, in Aldis - I'm not down the Criterion pub in Passage communing with my fellow humans over five pints every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday night.
"This isn't the Cork of Frank O'Connor, it's a bit more globalised, homogenised, it's a bit more dual carriageway-ish, shopping centre-ish, and garage forecourt-ish and I think I was trying to capture a bit of that too.”
Like all writers, he’s already well into planning his next novel - it’s about someone who doesn’t want to go to college, but just wants to be a really great barman - and starting to see a whole body of work that might come to define him. “Hopefully, this is a vocation, I don't really wanna use the word 'career', because it's a horrible word to think of in terms of writing. But hopefully, this is a vocation that I think of myself now as being someone who, over the course of his life, might publish 10 books - and none of them have to be perfect. But each one I could just try and do the idea justice.”
- All Along The Echo is out now via Atlantic Fiction. Denton launches the book at Hodges Figges, Dublin, on Wednesday, April 6; and Waterstone’s, Cork, featuring a Q&A with Lisa McInerney, at 6.30pm on Thursday, April 7. He is in conversation with Claire-Louise Bennett at Cúirt Litfest at Taibhdhearc, Galway, at 4pm Saturday, April 9.
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