Trevor Byrne's novel, Ghosts & Lightning is a spooky and hilarious debut about a guy returning home after the death of his mother. Trevor's got a real gift for vivid descriptions that make you feel every word you read, as evidenced in one of the answers below.
J: Hi! I'm so sorry it's taken me so long to get these questions to you. I've had a crazy month so it took me a little longer than normal to finish your book. I thought it was brilliant!! Here are my interview questions!
Ugh, this is going to sound so ignorant, but do most Irish writers write in their accent? Yours is only the second I've read in this style and I love it, so I'm wondering if that's the "normal" style in your country.
T: Glad you liked it. No, it's not necessarily the "normal" style in Ireland. Famously, of course, Roddy Doyle's first few novels are written in a working class Dublin accent. I loved those books. But Enda O'Brien, John Banville, Colm Toibin and loads of other Irish writers don't use phonetic dialect much. Since Ghosts & Lightning has a first person, working class Dubliner as a narrator, and a lot of it is internal, I thought it was important to stick to the dialect. I don't think in the Queen's English, so neither does Denny.
J: Have you ever seen a ghost? If so, describe. If not, do you believe in them?
T: I don't believe in ghosts. I'm a hardcore skeptic - Richard Dawkins has nothing on me. That said, a few years ago I lived in a house in Wales with some friends and somehow convinced myself that our bathroom was haunted. It was like a weird collective hallucination. To this day, one of the guys still believes there was something (a little girl) in the bathroom. For a few weeks, I took my showers with the curtain open, facing the room so nothing could sneak up on me. Looking back, I think I had a mini crack-up. (It wasn't helped by a friend saying, straightfaced, that if we were to strip back the walls of that bathroom, 'it would be covered in blood.') Urg. Maybe it was all the Lovecraft I read as a teenager.
J: Your description of a hangover feeling like a pulsating jellyfish is pure genius. How would you describe the feeling of a compound fracture.
T: Thanks. I rarely get hangovers these days (probably a bad sign). A compound fracture? Hmmm . . . if it were in action, and I'm thinking of someone falling on a football field, their arms outstretched and the forearm breaking . . . I felt this sharp wet buckling and when I lifted me arm it fell from twelve o'clock to one.
J: You teach creative writing, and your author photo is pretty sexy. Do your students get hot for teacher?
T: Sexy? I hate seeing myself in photos. Even in a pub, or at a birthday party or whatever, as soon as a camera comes out, I'm under the table. If I lived in Stalinist Russia I'd have saved the airbrushers a lot of money - I wouldn't be in pictures in the first place, so there'd be no need to disappear me. Seinding me to Siberia would be enough - I'd be out of history.
Oh, and the 'hot for teacher' thing. Well, if anyone ever did, they kept it under the radar. I'd be pretty embarassed if a student batted their eyelids at me.
J: Your feelings about Dublin come across as pretty bleak in the book. Do you really feel that way about the city? And if so, do you think you'll get shit from any Dubliners?
T: I don't have bleak feelings about Dublin. There's a lot about Dublin that leaves me cold, that disappoints me, but I think that's pretty normal. Actually I love Dublin. There's a wonderful sense of wild, wilful life to the place. It has an amazing history, modern and ancient. It was a viking settlement, it was bombed into the dust by the British in 1916 when Pearse and Connolly put it up to the empire, Joyce was born there and wrote the most beautiful ending to a short story ever, in the final passage of 'The Dead' . . . it's a deadly place, but it's complex, too. With the money dragged in by the Celtic Tiger, we became a little jealous, we were (to imx our metaphors) the dragon sitting on its hoard, biting and flame-belching at anyone who strayed too near. That bothers me. For a long time, we Irish prided ourselves as the world's friendliest nation, but it hadn't truly been put to the test. I feel we let ourselves down a little when the influx of foreigners began. And the politicians, and the church - urg, don't get me started.
J: Are you a lover or a fighter?
T: A lover, I suppose. From empathy springs all good and fine and true things. But there's a time and place for agitation. Politically, you have to be prepared to make a fuss, to stand up and be counted. You'll often find me at rallies, marches, all sorts. I was dragged off stage by bouncers at a gig I attended recently, which was supposed to mark the end of George junior's reign. It was billed as a celebration, it was supposed to be politically savvy, but the headline act was a moronic cockney dressed like a kids' TV character joke-rapping about fucking dogs and other inane bullshit. Dylan or Billy Bragg or Rage Against the Machine it was not. I jumped the stage and castigated the act and the crowd, who were loving this nonsense, and vaguely remember ranting about how we were collectively awakening from an eight year nightmare, quoting how many Palestinians had just been killed in the Israeli invasion, and here we are listening to a multicoloured dogfucker . . . then the bouncers arrived - I didn't get to finish . . .
J: Do you have any other piercings besides your lip?
T: That's the only one. I have one tattoo, too (that's a lot of toos), a big one on the back of my right hand. It's the symbol of The Undertaker, my favourite wrestler. People assume it's a mysterious, tribal thing (wow, man, what does that mean?) but no, it's an Undertaker symbol (sort of a spiky 'T' with an 'X' through it). I've loved wrestling for as long as I can remember. It's all about stories, about heroes and villians. The tattoo is kind of a link to the kid I was in 1990 when Taker debuted and the person I've become. It's important to remember the child you were - he or she was a lot braver than you are, a lot freer. Ursula LeGuin wrote once, and I'm paraphrasing, that some adults are children who have died (they're zombies!) and others are children who've made it, who've gotten bigger and stronger but are still that, children, in the best possible way. I hope I'm the latter.
J: Please tell me that the scene about an accidental kidnapping of a Down Syndrome child because a guy who was tripping thought she was a goblin is based on a true story!
T: Sorry to disappoint you, but no, it's not true. I did hear a story like that, much truncated, from a friend who said a friend of another friend did really do it. So it happened sort of like it happens in the novel - the teller claims it's true, but the listener is skeptical. It's an unbelieveably horrible story though, funny in the wrongest way. It's an important theme in the book, though - storytelling. It's how often how the characters communicate, how they make sense of their lives and the world.
J: Are you working on a new book? What's it about?
T: Yeah, I've just started on a new book. I don't have a title, but it'll be built around two brothers - one, the narrator, is twelve or thirteen years old and the other is around twenty-one or so. It'll be more plotty that Ghosts and Lightning, has more of a sense of drama and suspense. Much of it sees the brothers on the run from the law, and it'll be interspersed with dark, apocalyptic and occasionally joyous McCarthy-esque scenes from the elder brother's past (he's a drug addict and he's been missing for the five or six years immediately prior to the novel's opening - these scenes partially fill us in on where he's been in that period). I'm pretty excited about it.
J: Why do people like drugs so much?
T: Often it's an attempt to connect, I suppose. We're so divorced from what it is to be human, to live fully, to feel deeply, to connect with other people, that drugs can sometimes seem like a way to bridge the gap. It's an attempt at Michelangelo's god reaching for Adam, a miraculous coming together. Not that I believe in god.
Previously: Lesley Arfin talks with Joshua Lyon.
