Author interview: ‘You’ve been swallowed up and absorbed into the ecology’

Carlo Gébler's 'A Cold Eye' looks back over his 35 years living in Northern Ireland one day a year

Writer and university teacher Carlo Gébler in woodland near his home in Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Picture: David Barker

• A Cold Eye 
• Carlo Gébler
• New Island, €19.95/ Kindle/ €10.77

When Carlo Gébler moved from London to Co Fermanagh in 1989 he didn’t expect to stay there. 

Relocating with his wife and two children, this was a research trip for a book, and once he’d completed it, he imagined the family would return to London. But he’s still there, 35 years on. What happened?

“It’s down to lethargy,” he says, “or that’s the closest word. We came here. We rented a flat, then we bought a house — the schoolhouse where I’m talking to you from now. It was very inexpensive.

“Then the children start going to school, and then they’re doing exams and then you have another child, and then another two, and that extends it, and you realise after a while that it’s too late to move.

“You’ve been swallowed up and absorbed into the ecology. 35 years later you wake up and think, what on earth have I done? Where did my life go?”

After the move, Gébler started to write a daily journal, partly as a limbering up exercise to ready him for the day ahead. And having gathered 34 years of material, he was anxious to do something with it.

“But I can’t publish 34 years of journals,” he says. “That would be incredibly repetitive, so when I read Christa Wolf’s One Day a Year I realised you could have a conceit, and take one day from each year, although for me, not the same day, then I could make use of all the material. So that’s what I did.”

Process not as easy as imagined

He set to during covid, going through all the material, making his selection, then editing, polishing and burnishing it all. But the process wasn’t as easy as he had first imagined.

“I thought, well, 2010 is terrible. It’s going through the same material as 1998, I have to change that. But as soon as I do, oh no! the new 2010 is in conflict with something else. It took a long time to get the right 34 bits.”

It was well worth the effort, because the resulting book, A Cold Eye, provides a perfect balance between the political and the personal. 

And by the time I put the volume down, I’d gained a deeper understanding of Northern Ireland’s troubled history, and how it felt to live there, yet I never felt lectured or talked down to.

There’s lightness in the sections on his family — on a Christmas without electricity, and a bike ride with one of his sons; and he recounts meetings with writer Fay Weldon and Tony Blair’s father-in-law, Tony Booth. 

And these juxtapose beautifully with the most hard-hitting accounts.

On August 31, 1994, the day the IRA announced their ceasefire, Gébler was being driven to Coney Island on Lough Neagh by a taxi driver who virulently opposed peace. 

Ariel view of the "H" Blocks at the Maze Prison, near Belfast, Northern Ireland where many IRA prisoners were held. Gébler visited the prison for many years, teaching the inmates how to write. 

Explaining that he had spent years in prison — he said that he hadn’t done anything wrong. A passionate loyalist, he’d been raised to believe that ‘doing’ a bad boy — in other words murdering a hard-line republican — was the opposite of a crime. It was patriotism.

Gébler visited Long Kesh, (The Maze), and Maghaberry prisons for many years, teaching the inmates how to write. 

And it’s through his insights into political organisations, and the stories he heard there that make for the most powerful sections of the book. How did he manage to listen with such tolerant objectivity?

“Many years ago, someone who also worked in prisons said to me, ‘The thing is, you are in their world. You follow their rules. You should behave as if you have been invited into the village of a tribe in South America who had never been visited by the outside world before.’

“You treat them with maximum respect. No comment; no judgement; no getting yourself entangled. That is what I tried to do.”

A long-time member of Aosdana, Gébler has a varied and prodigious career. 

There are 10 novels, two memoirs, five volumes of non-fiction, four plays, two volumes of YA fiction, and a collection of short stories.  And that’s before you take in his numerous TV documentaries. 

But then, he’s inherited a strong work ethic and love of writing from his late mother, Edna O’Brien. 

He was just six or seven when O’Brien’s debut, The Country Girls was accepted for publication, but he remembers the day clearly; his mum bought him a huge ice-cream to celebrate.

“There was this magical connection between publication and success,” he remembers learning. “You wrote a book; you got money.” He wasn’t much older when he learned about non-fiction.

“I was outside the greengrocer on the Wandsworth Bridge Road with my mother and the great English writer Nell Dunne, when Nell said to my mother, ‘Jeepers, It’s JR Ackerley coming.’

“The two mothers disappeared into the greengrocer, and I thought, I must see this figure of terror. He came along with his coat open and two bags of soda syphons on his way to the off licence.

“He was this old English writer, and he had the look of a drinker and a smoker.” 

Nell Dunne then lent him a book by Ackerley.

“It was called 'My Dog Tulip' and described Ackerley’s relationship with a London criminal, his wife, and their dog, Tulip. It’s a fantastic book.

“I read it and thought, ‘Oh my God! You can do with nonfiction what you can do with fiction’. You’ve thoughts, characters, dialogue, lyrical bits and polemics, and none of it is made up. That was a revelation.”

Currently reading a lot of the genre, Gébler now teaches the art of nonfiction to undergraduates at Trinity College Dublin, as well as teaching fiction and writing for a living. 

He has written much about the rocky relationship with his father, Ernest Gébler in his famous volumes, Father and I, and The Projectionist, but has said less about his mother.

What, I wondered, is it like to be the son of someone who is so revered in literary circles?

“As a writer, it doesn’t impinge,” he says. “We all feed into the sea of literature.”

Was she proud of him? “I think so, but she wasn’t that kind of person. Conversations were much more likely to be about what was going on in the world as opposed to what one was doing.”

There is something that really irks him, and that’s when people assume that the huge changes that have taken place in Ireland are a consequence of her writing.

“And not just because of what has filtered in from her writing, and changed people’s expectations, but that it was a conscious ambition on her part that these changes should occur.”

It’s difficult to communicate that the writer’s primary relationship is not with political ambition of what changes they would like to see happen, but with their unconscious.

“A writer spends their life in dialogue with the secret, hidden, largely inaccessible part of their psyche from which their writing springs. You have to look after your psyche, or you are not going to get anywhere.”

At 70, Gébler has no plans to retire. “The act of writing and the act of existing become confused and emmeshed. Writing is a prophylactic against death.

“I’m trying to write something about my grandparents — my mother’s parents in Clare,” he says, telling me that an excerpt is to be published soon in an American publication, “and I might write some short stories about Fermanagh in the last 40 years.”

But as he ages, he noticed that he is increasingly drawn towards nonfiction. 

“That seems to be the way my mind is going. I’m now a revenant who can testify to things that happened a long time ago. That is now my role.”