Culture That Made Me: Paul Lynch on Iron Maiden, Tokyo Story and The Hardy Boys
Irish writer Paul Lynch poses on June 29, 2015 in Paris.
Paul Lynch was born in Limerick in 1977. He grew up in Co Donegal and lives in Dublin. In 2013, his debut novel Red Sky in Morning was published to acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.
His novels have gone on to be translated into over 30 languages. They include Prophet Song, which won last year’s Booker Prize.
He will read at the West Cork Literary Festival, on Wednesday, 17 July, at the Maritime Hotel. See: www.westcorkmusic.ie.
When I was eight or nine, living in Co Donegal in the mid-’80s, I discovered The Hardy Boys and began to read them with unrestrained enthusiasm. One Easter, my grandparents arrived from Limerick with a battered suitcase full of old Hardy Boys hardbacks that my uncle, the writer Gerard Stembridge, had bought as a kid. The story went that he had walked to school every day, pocketing the bus money to buy Hardy Boys books instead. I read every book in that suitcase and kept going until I had read 70-odd of them. I cannot remember a single thing about those books now.
I was a metalhead as a kid and got my first C90 cassette tape when Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast (1982) and Piece of Mind (1983) were sent to me by my uncle when I was eight years old. But the album that really blew my mind is their fifth album Powerslave (1984). Maiden’s greatest album has an Egyptian theme undergirded by an ornate, baroque influence.
Adrian Smith (my favourite guitar player) and Dave Murray were never better and no band ever sounded like this. This was the moment they transcended the new wave of British heavy metal and achieved classic status. My nine-year-old daughter plays the drums (but can’t be bothered to practice) and it is my dream that one day we can jam along to the song 2 Minutes to Midnight.
When I was 16 I had to read Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge for the Leaving Cert. I remember staring at the joyless, old-fashioned cover thinking, why on earth do I have to read this? And then the discovery, the transportation, the gut-wrenching feeling that came at the end. Poor Michael Henchard! I sat on my bed and bawled. I saw suddenly how literature could be a mirror to life and the doorway to serious reading was open thereafter.
I grew up in a town, Carndonagh, without a cinema so going to the movies was a rare treat. Late one night, just before I left home, I turned on BBC or Channel 4 and realised I’d missed the start of a film but continued watching anyway. The plot seemed to revolve around mysterious coincidences and everything was suffused with deep red colours. I remember how the camera was always alert to the wondrous and the film had a profound effect on me. I had just discovered one of the great films of the 1990s, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s classic Three Colours: Red (1994). That was the moment I understood that cinema could be so much more than standard Hollywood fare. I later became a film critic.
I have rewatched Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) many times. This might well be the greatest film ever made about disappointment but that would be to put a label on it — all great works of art encompass so much more than their themes. It tells the story of an ageing couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children but nobody has the time to deal with them. The poignancy that Ozu achieves in this film is breath-taking and it is shot in his famous minimalist style with a camera that is always at the height of somebody seated in traditional Japanese fashion on a tatami mat. This evokes an attitude for watching or listening and it creates an easy intimacy.
I also adore the work of Michael Haneke, who I believe is the best filmmaker of the modern era. He has been a powerful influence on me — his precision and commitment to the truth. For a time, I thought Caché (2005) was his greatest film, but as the years pass by, it is apparent to me that The White Ribbon (2009) is his towering achievement.
The White Ribbon is shot in luminous black and white and is a study of repression and religious cruelty in a small Protestant village in Germany before the First World War. The film is an allegory for the origins of Nazism and is remarkable for Haneke’s probing of the German psyche.
My grandfather played tuba and double bass in big band ensembles but I knew nothing about the modern jazz of Miles Davis or John Coltrane. One day I heard a snippet of music from a pianist called McCoy Tyner. Without access to the internet, I went into a music shop in Dublin as an 18-year-old student and bought a CD called The Real McCoy. I immediately regretted it. What was this dense, wild, knotty jazz? But I persisted and slowly my ears learned how to untangle the music. Unwittingly, I had just bought one of the great Blue Note albums of the mid-’60s. I am now something of a jazz nut and collect jazz LPs. America’s modern jazz of the 1950s and ’60s is the greatest explosion of musical genius in the twentieth century.
For a period of time in my twenties, I thought I might be a photographer. I have a decent eye but I don’t have the chops to be an artist. I always admired the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer and pioneer of the decisive moment. He is one of the great street photographers and his work is the essence of naturalness — nothing is ever set up and his images are guided by intuition and spontaneity. When I worked for The Sunday Tribune I kept a beautiful hardback volume of his photographs on my desk but then somebody stole it and for whatever reason, I’ve never gotten around to buying it again.
Benjamin McEvoy’s Hardcore Literature podcast deserves some recognition because he’s a passionate and brilliant articulator for great literature. McEvoy is a university lecturer turned podcaster and has built up a unique library of lectures about many of the great books. His podcasts are accessible, passionate and deeply informed and his enthusiasm is infectious. I would love to have had him as lecturer back in the day and I always come away from his podcasts with the feeling that I don’t read enough, and that is exactly the point. He is a big believer in the importance of re-reading the classics. As Nabokov once said, “one cannot read a book; one can only reread it.”
