W: Ardal, welcome to Waterstones AOH: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
W: It's an absolute pleasure. We're here to talk about Brouhaha, your second novel,
but I'd actually, if you don't mind, like to go back to your first novel, The Talk of the Town.
A 'critical and commercial success' but published 25 years ago.
AOH: I know, it's been a long time coming the second one. I'm not prolific.
W: And I wondered if you could tell me first where the instinct or sort of you know the
inspiration to write at all first came from? AOH: Well I've always loved books. I grew up
in a household luckily that was, I was surrounded by books growing up. My mother was an avid reader
and I think she probably had a hankering to write herself. So I suppose I was
fed books from a very early age. I mean The Chronicles of Narnia, the children's classics,
you know, Robert Louis Stevenson, all of that kind of stuff. And I was always quite attracted to
crime fiction as well, so Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and later Agatha Christie. And then you know
everything after that.So I always loved books. W: As I say talk of the town went down really,
really well but I think you've said about how it was tricky to follow that up immediately
and in fact the second novel was sort of binned. AOH: Yeah it was. So The Talk of the Town,
I mean it kind of came out in a splurge. So I always wanted to write a novel and
you know I was kind of doing a lot of tv around that time and a lot of live stand up. So I carved
out an amount of time to write that first novel and I don't really remember writing it. I always
feel, again this sounds very pretentious, but I feel like I was channeling a higher power
and I remember just like banging away at the typewriter you know and so it came out sort of
almost fully-formed in a way, like for good or bad I don't know but it came out. It came out,
you know, fully formed I suppose in a sense. And luckily it sold very well and I suppose more
importantly from a first time writer's point of view it was reviewed very favourably as well. So
you know, that was very gratifying and so I did want to follow it up and and I kind of made the
mistake of accepting an advance from the publisher when I didn't have a good idea. And I think that's
a mistake. I don't know if other writers make it, but I certainly made that mistake.
So I spent a lot of time working on a second novel and I never had the perfect idea. An idea that I
was absolutely committed to. So I stopped and started that novel many many times and I lost
my grip on it. And the tone wavered dramatically from week to week. So it wasn't a very coherent
novel. Sentence by sentence it was fine, I mean the sentences were well constructed I believe, but
as a novel it just didn't work and my publisher absolutely agreed. And so we just quietly binned
it and that was fine you know. But it was a sobering experience and so I suppose I wasn't
in a mad hurry to write a, you know, that elusive second novel until I was sure I had the right
story and I had the time and I was committed. W: I think you said about how you got yourself
an office space, you gave yourself some time to sit down and write Brouhaha and was that
the thing that made the difference? AOH: I think so yeah. I mean I'd been
looking around for an idea for a long time for a second novel
and I think I was touring my live stand-up show in England back maybe 10 years ago, or thereabouts.
And I was doing my little bit of research on the town that I was performing in one night,
which I do, you know due diligence and all that. And I stumbled upon this story in a local
newspaper. It was a feature-length article about someone who'd gone missing and it became clear
that everyone knew who had done it but nobody spoke out and there were a lot of details in that
story like in terms of misdirection and so on that I found quite compelling. And I thought it would
be interesting to transpose a story like that to the border region in Ireland where I grew up.
Where you know there is a kind of an uneasiness generally, there's a kind of a lawlessness.
Now, you know, I don't want to do the region a disservice, but, you know, given the history of
that region with the troubles and long before that with smuggling over and back across the border,
you know, there is that kind of culture of lawlessness or turning a blind eye to the law at
least. And you know there is that kind of tension you know, a slight uneasiness which I really,
really wanted to capture. So I had the kind of nugget of an idea for the story and I had the tone
and the sense of place. And it's funny, you know, as a writer or even as a comedian, you do go back
to that, to your hometown, to your formative years, you know, for a lot of inspiration. It's
quite interesting, I actually read Colm Toibin recently he wrote a foreword for, I think it was
a Graham Greene novel, and he remarked on that and how you know even in Graham Greene novels like he
keeps harking back to aspects of his childhood and a place that he was very familiar with.
And so that was true in my case and I really wanted to capture that tone that I grew up with
because I think the humour is very, very black and and the demeanour of the people is very deadpan
and the way with words is very special. So I wanted to capture all that
in the context of a, well you know it's a bog standard philosophical novel, like all novels are,
but I wanted to sort of cloak it in you know, as a, not disguise it as a crime novel, but certainly
use some of the tropes of crime fiction which I had always had a love for. So in terms of maybe
the language is kind of more hard-boiled than it might be normally, it's a kind of a heightened
realism if you like. Events or maybe telescoped into a shorter time frame than they would be
because, you know, I read a lot of novels and sometimes the story kind of really
meanders or whatever. And that's fine I mean you know I think mine does as well,
so it's not an out and out pot boiler by any means. Because I think the novel
is a broad canvas and you know you do give yourself the scope to kind of develop ideas
and to digress. I mean digression is a big part of my characters you know and a big part of me,
it's a big part of everyone you know. We digress, we we get sidetracked, we lose our train of
thought but then we get back on track again. W: There is of course huge humour in this book
and there seems to be a lot of Irish art which has this combination of politics, violence
and comedy; which is an extraordinary combination to have but it is very particular to Ireland.
Where does that black humour come from? AOH: Well you know I think it's there,
the comedy and the dark humour is there throughout Irish literature and it possibly goes back to
you know hundreds of years of kind of oppression. For example like you know the Irish people I
suppose were disenfranchised for a very, very long time. They probably didn't have recourse to the
law for example, they were probably hamstrung in terms of you know the kind of jobs they were able
to do and so on. And so all you really do have is your language and you have your imagination I mean
that's really all you have to turn to. And I think you see this in Irish literature time and time
again you know, a kind of a healthy disrespect for authority, for the law, you know, and a kind of
a violent - my violence is quite stylised I think - but you do see it like. So, you know,
dark humour is very important. I suppose it's a way of processing isn't it, and I think it's
telling that you know there's a lot of writers in the north now who are writing brilliantly
and I've just been reading David Keenan who's not actually northern Irish I don't think, he's
Scottish, but you know writing hilariously funny, violent, profane stuff about the troubles there.
W: There's, as I said, so much in here that we could talk about but
thank you so much for giving us some time today. AOH: Thank you very much indeed Will, cheers.