Culture That Made Me: Donal Ryan on Stephen King, The Pogues, and Young Offenders
Donal Ryan: award-winning author. Pic: Anne Marie Ryan
Born in 1976, Donal Ryan grew up near Nenagh, Co Tipperary. In 2013, his debut novel The Spinning Heart was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His subsequent novels have won several awards, including the 2021 Jean-Monnet Prize for European Literature. He lectures in creative writing at University of Limerick.
Ryan is at Cúirt International Festival of Literature, 4pm, Saturday, April 28 at Town Hall Theatre, Galway, and during the summer he will make his first appearance at the West Cork Literary Festival (July 7-14).
The first book I think of from my teenage years is The Stand by Stephen King. I remember being in school and not being able to wait to get home to get reading it. There was the smallest bit of a stigma attached to reading when I was 14, 15. There was only a few open readers from my peer group. What I loved was it had this overarching narrative – this huge story, this struggle of good against evil in a post-apocalyptic world, but there were vignettes that punctuated it. They were nearly more fascinating than the story itself. I remember wondering how he did it and trying to work out how he measured things out in the story and how he constructed it. It seemed impossible, but possible as well.
There was a novel called The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh I read as a teenager. I did understand the word “polyphonic” at the time, but it had an ensemble cast – a squad of cops in a New York precinct. It wasn't driven massively plot-wise. This is what fascinated me. There wasn't a huge mystery involved. It was character-driven. I remember very little of what happened, but I remember the characters very well.
I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as a teenager because I'd heard so much about it. It was clever and beautiful. She seemed so funny, so irreverent – the way she used language; the way she described her own pain in humorous terms. It reminded me of the women in my life, the women I grew up with, that reared me – my mother, and aunts, and her friends. The way they approached things was always so funny, the most serious, deathly things. I didn't realise for years that it was almost a presaging of her own death. I suppose it was a proto auto-fiction novel because it was such a thinly fictionalised account of her own life and her own struggle with mental illness. It had a profound effect on me.
I remember going to see AC/DC with my wife when she was pregnant with our second child at the O2 in London. We were right at the back – she was in no danger of being pushed or anything. We were back in the hotel afterwards and it was one of the most heart-sinking moments of my life as a music fan when I realised the bar in the hotel was full of people who were ironic AC/DC fans. They weren't really AC/DC fans. It was a version of sneering.
Doris Lessing is one of my heroes, especially one of her early novels, The Grass is Singing. I remember thinking this novel isn't enjoyable at all – the characters aren't in any way sympathetic, but I could not look away from it. It's a short book. The tone was so oppressive and the way she described the situation that the characters were in. You're told how it ends on the first page, but still all the way through you're hoping it’s a trick – that it's not really going to happen at all, it's going to be OK. It seems strange to be gripped, so invested in characters you don’t like, but who are very human. It’s fantastic.
I’ve never heard a bad Pogues song, except there was a few dodgy ones when Shane MacGowan was gone. His lyrics, for a start, are sublime. A song like The Broad Majestic Shannon I had in my head writing [novel] Strange Flowers. I kept trying to emulate the spirit of that song. Although anything I created is only a pale pastiche of something MacGowan would write. He has that thing – he can pack a whole life, a whole world into a single lyric. He’s incredible.
I used to read a lot of sports biographies. I loved Paul McGrath’s Back from the Brink. We all loved him so much. We all kind of knew there was darkness and trouble in his life, but no-one knew the extent of it really. It's a great sports memoir too. He describes the games he played and the way he played the game so brilliantly. His struggle with alcohol, what happened to him, was terrifying.
I loved The Fight by Norman Mailer. We had a first edition of the book in our house: a hardback, with a glossy, black-and-yellow cover. I remember reading it when I was very young and being struck by the fact Mailer referred to himself as “Norman” throughout the book, putting himself in the middle of the action in a cool way. I remember a friend saying, “Ah, he’s full of himself that guy.” What came through was how much he loved Muhammad Ali, how determined he was to describe him as a man, as a nuanced, complex, flawed individual, and how he described himself in the same terms in the book. It’s fantastic.
I remember watching the film Garage when I [my novel] The Thing about December was out for submission and thinking: it's nearly the exact same, thematically. There was so many similarities, it was unbelievable, but I didn't mind. I felt buoyed up almost that the screenwriter Mark O’Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson had similar inspiration. Pat Shortt’s performance as the main character in that, if it was a Hollywood film, he would have won an Oscar for sure. It was the perfect performance.
I love westerns. Unforgiven seems like perfection. There's a scene, which I re-enact sometimes with my kids with the handle of a broom as a gun [laughs], where he walks into a saloon before shooting the whole place up: “Who’s the fella owns this shithole?” The line is so pithy, so perfect.
One of the best comedies in recent years was The Young Offenders. Whenever it got poignant, it was never mawkish. There was one episode where Conor's mother runs into Jock’s house in slow motion because Jock’s father is beating the crap out of him. She pulls Jock out of the house. It was so well done. It was so light touch. It was just a moment, which was so powerful. Some of the lines in it are incredible. It was brilliant.
