Riding high on the crest of a wave
IT'S become the sort of book that's on the must-read list of frequent flyers, commuters and afternoon shoppers. Star of the Sea is everywhere these days. And readers are characterised neither by age nor gender. Even in England, people are entranced by the journey of the eponymous Famine ship.
This is where the story gets strange. Joseph O'Connor's novel concerns the Famine. Despite being our great historical ghost, plots involving the Great Hunger tend to be met with puzzled expressions and disinterested sighs in this country. We learnt enough about the Famine in school and Britain certainly doesn't need to be reminded about it. Except you can't escape the book. On both sides of the pond.
Star of the Sea has been sitting pretty atop the UK bestseller list for more than a month and is enjoying similar success here. Even more unusually, the novel was released over a year ago, but had to wait until now for the sales to match its earlier critical acclaim. There is little rationale to the word-of-mouth concept.
Although in a recent profile of Richard and Judy of Channel 4 talkshow fame, their PR, James Herring, claimed a pivotal role for the pair. On January 21, Star of the Sea was the second book to feature on Richard and Judy's book club, with guest Bob Geldof describing the book as a "masterpiece". That night, amazon.com sold out of copies; the following week the book climbed from number 337 in the UK bestseller list to the magical No 1 and sales rose to 12,272 from 4,441 the previous week.
Certainly, O'Connor doesn't pretend to understand the surge of interest in Star of the Sea. In his apartment, a short walk from the everyday life of Dalkey, where doubtless somebody is immersed in the life of Mary Duane, the writer smiles.
Once in a while, a book touches a nerve and takes grip. That is what his novel seems to have done. "It's a great surprise. In the past month, it has sold more than all my previous books put together."
He offers no explanation, though. He doesn't have one.
Perhaps the greatest mystery of writing is when you become successful. The desire in modern culture for neat packages has deemed this a novel about the Famine, but if it were simply that, there would be no air of excitement, no people putting their lives on hold for it. The Famine interests us only in as much as we read about it in school.
"I can understand why it is described like that," O'Connor accepts. "But it is a book about those people on the ship. I had been interested in the Famine, but there was no conscious desire to write about it. The characters came first. It started with an image, of this man walking up and down a ship all night. And the questions began, why is he sleeping all day and walking around all night. That was Mulvey and there was an air of mystery about him."
Pius Mulvey is a constant presence in the book, the same sort of character moulded from the roguish Irish clay that many of O'Connor's earlier characters developed from like the hoodwink merchants that populated his earlier efforts.
But there is a real maturity to this work that suggests the potential O'Connor has always displayed in snatches is becoming fully realised.
O'Connor, buoyed by winning the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, released True Believers, a collection of short stories, and Cowboys and Indians, his first novel, while still in his 20s. His young voice was acclaimed as assured and promising but these days he cringes when he looks at his earlier fiction.
"I have an affection for all my books but certainly there are passages in my first novel [Cowboys and Indians] that I want to read from behind my hands. But that is what happens. You are always going forward as a writer."
O'Connor's first bit of fiction was a remarkably assured and spare short story, written at the tender age of 14. Unfortunately, it was a John McGahern story he copied out word for word, but over the course of 14 years he changed every word until it made the last story in True Believers completely unrecognisable from its prototype.
O'Connor has rarely looked back since his star shot into the literary sky. While never courting the fame of his more controversial sister, Sinead, he maintained a fairly decent public profile through his Sunday Tribune column, which resulted in O'Connor heading to America for the 1994 World Cup. Most of his friends were avid football fans. O'Connor wasn't. The envy has yet to dissipate.
From that experience and others in that most absurd of countries, The Irish Male books germinated. "Under the reams of purlieu jokes, I can see similar themes between those books and the latest one," he says, joking. Desperadoes possibly his most accomplished work before Star of the Sea followed. With Inishowen, O'Connor made a move towards weightier subjects, and creating a sense of historical time in his fiction. However, there were little clues to what would happen next.
Star of the Sea was well received by critics. Aside from researching that terrible phase in our history, O'Connor returned to the 19th century fiction most of us hated at school or college, like Dickens or the Brontes.
In one of the more striking passages in the book, Gantley Dixon, the narrator with literary pretensions, gets fiercely upset when he is mistaken for Ellis Bell, Emily Bronte's nom de plume for the first edition of Wuthering Heights.
He drew heavily on those books when writing Star of the Sea. "There's a great energy to those books. We think of them now as dusty old tomes we had to read at school, but approaching them later in life, you see they were very revolutionary. They were brilliant story-tellers. Oliver Twist was published over three years and there are accounts of people queuing in their hundreds outside shops in London for the latest instalments.
"Part of the genius of Dickens was the use of cliff-hangers, the twists and hooks to drag the reader back. Because of my book's subject matter, I needed these hooks because nobody is going to read a 400-pager about the Famine. It's a paradox but the heavier the theme, the better the story-telling needs to be."
O'Connor's story-telling gifts were never in doubt, even when he had a dip in form with certain books. He has become a great writer and perhaps there is no mystery to his success because great writing sells books.
There are other things at work in Star of the Sea. While never swaying from the 19th century setting, he manages to convey a contemporary feel through his characters.
"That was a conscious decision, to make the book modern-feeling in terms of its preoccupations. The world still has war and famine and terrorism, a lot of what was described in the book. There is a scene of stowaways dying in the ship and people have said that has a sort of resonance when they read about asylum seekers and refugees."
AND when O'Connor switches on the television, he realises that the human mind hasn't advanced so far from the 1840s.
"The categories change, but we still demonise each other. The enemy is always demonised. In the 1840s, the world was arranged as a pyramid, at the top was the Anglo-Saxon white male and right at the bottom was us. There was extraordinary stuff in the British media about how the Irish was the missing link between the Negro and the ape [a quotation from Punch magazine which O'Connor uses as an epigram].
"Even the way we think about Famine now hasn't changed that much. We think about people starving in Africa, and every once in a while we might give a little money to absolve our conscience but we are not really going to change our lives to make their lives better. We are not going to say: 'let us have less so they can have more'.
"And that is similar to the Irish experience in the 1840s. It wasn't an evil thing; it was just the ability to turn your head and think it doesn't matter."
All the events on Star of the Sea are seen through the eyes of Gantley Dixon, an American liberal voice. As he remarks towards the end: "What happened [on the ship] is one of the reasons they still die today. For the dead do not die in that tormented country, that heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds; so abused down the centuries They do not even have names. They are simply The Dead. You can make them mean anything you want them to mean."
The Joycean evocations, the dead, and the trawl into Ireland's past to construct the best novel, thus far, of the 21st Irish century, are typical of fiction in this country.
O'Connor has constructed a book worth reading, as the person beside you on the train will agree. He is still unsure about the splurge of new Irish writing that has come out in the past five years "too early to say" but remains John McGahern's biggest fan.
At the moment, with all the madness that goes with a bestseller, his new project has taken a back seat.
There is talk of Star of the Sea being optioned and the figure of Joseph O'Connor now looms large over Irish fiction. And all because of a book about the Famine. A book that everybody is reading.
It's true that good writing will always be read.
Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor is published by Vintage/Ebury.
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