Narrative Focus

We spent last week at our house in Leitrim. I needed a break from looking after grandchildren, helping people write novels and trying to find time to write my own. I'd spent a week in which I found myself constantly having to explain about narrative focus to people who seemed never to have thought of it before.

Leitrim was as magnificent as ever. Autumn was raging around the countryside, driving the rain before it and tossing great handfuls of leaves into the air. Once we reached our house I spent most of my time sitting beside a roaring fire, reading, with a cup of tea and a buttered scone at my elbow. On the opposite chair sat my wife, similarly occupied. The only sound was the crackling of the logs as the fire slowly devoured them.

We went to bed early each evening and slept late. Nights in Leitrim are as dark as at any time in the history of the world. And they are entirely silent. Going to sleep felt like embarking on some great sea voyage.

Sometimes I would wake from confused dreams in the the small hours and it felt as though our ship had put into port to take on more supplies. Up on deck the crew were busy loading and unloading but there was nothing for me to concern myself with. Satisfied that all was as it should be, I would tumble back into sleep once more.

On the Sunday we went to the little town of Strandhill on the Sligo coast and walked out along the dunes, watching as the great grey sheet of the sea constantly unmade itself. Far out to sea a little group of surfers were dancing across the cold white foam with extraordinary skill. Now that's narrative focus, I thought to myself.

Too late we saw the the squally clouds racing across the sky towards us. We turned for home but were soaked to the skin long before we got back.

Do You Go To Dublin?

I spent last week in Ireland at our family house in Leitrim. The drive down from Belfast was wonderful, the gorse blazing away on the hillsides, the hedgerows frothing with cow parsley. Then we left the main road and made our way across the border via a road like a green tunnel, through the little village of Kiltyclogher where you could safely lie down in the middle of the road without worrying about the traffic, up the hill to Straduffy, where there is no TV, no landline, only intermittent mobile reception and no internet, and where each morning and evening a hare comes lolloping around the house, grazing on the snow-in-summer that grows beside the path.

Our days and nights were silent except for the birdsong, the bewildered cries of sheep and cattle in nearby fields and the frenzied buzzing of bees in the sycamores. On occasions we wandered down around the broken stones of the old house where my father was born, following the stream that runs through our land in a series of waterfalls. On all sides the bluebells were running riot and here and there orchids peeped shyly from the grass.

It was a blissful few days until, towards the end of our stay, I was obliged to drive into Sligo town on an errand. I like Sligo with its old grey stone buildings and its ridiculous over-supply of bookshops, but it still felt like a betrayal of something to venture back into the busy world we had so briefly and willingly left behind.

As I was leaving, my business conducted, my attention was caught by a man in his late forties standing outside the supermarket. He was smartly dressed but in a strangely unfashionable way, so that he looked as if he had somehow materialized from the early nineteen sixties. There was an unreadable look on his face: anxiety and hopefulness, eagerness and embarrassment, innocence and guile. I couldn't place it.

As I watched, he approached a woman in her twenties who was coming out of the supermarket pushing a trolley. 'Do you go to Dublin?' he abruptly asked. She looked at him in confusion. 'No, I don't,' she said. 'Why do you ask?'

'I just thought, you know, you looked like you might,' he mumbled, crestfallen. Then the eagerness returned to his expression. 'Where are you from?'

'Round here,' the woman said, but she was beginning to edge away from him.

People are friendly in the West of Ireland. It's very common for someone you don't know to speak to you in the street but I realised, at about the same time as the young woman, that the smartly-dressed-but-strangely-old-fashioned man was not just being friendly. He was either slightly unhinged or, more probably, 'going to Dublin' was a euphemism, for what exactly, I leave to your imagination.

It spoiled the picture for me, but it also made the picture. The serpent in paradise – it's peaceful without him but there's no story.

This Is The Why

I was in Ireland in November, driving down from Belfast to our house in North West Leitrim. Everywhere I looked the countryside was ablaze with colour – the yellow gorse flowers, the golden leaves of beech and maple, the skeletal orange larches, the vivid hawthorn berries and the occasional outlandish splash of purple from some imported prunus. It was a magnificent sight.

When at last I arrived, I opened the door of our house and stepped inside. The air was as cold as in a tomb. No one been there for months and in the meantime the radiators had filled with air. But we soon had a fire going and for the next few days we did little else but sit in front of it, reading books and only getting up to throw on another log.

The house stands on an isolated spot. My father grew up on that land, though not in that same house. When he left it as a young man to come to England the old house tumbled down and later on the new one was built.

He and I did not often see eye to eye and whenever I asked why I should carry out some order, my father was fond of raising his right hand and saying, 'That's the why,' meaning that I would feel the weight of that hand if I didn't do as I was told.

I was thinking of this as I wandered down a little path that leads away from the house, seeming to end up nowhere at all. The path was spread with golden leaves and when I reached the end I suddenly felt as if I stood upon the brink of that Other World of which so many stories have been told. I could almost see it trembling before me like a picture painted on silk.

All my life I have looked for such a path. As a child growing up in London I searched for it in deserted places wherever buildings conspired with their shadows And here it was at last.

'This is the why,' I said to myself and to my father too, in case he was listening.

The Tug At My Finger

I have been in Ireland for a week, in North West Leitrim to be precise, in the house my father built on the land on which he grew up. It's a modern house standing on a hill and on a clear day commanding a view of three counties but it is dominated by the fallen stones of the old house further down the hill and the memories that they hold.

The leaves were turning and everywhere the countryside was coloured gold and umber. As usual at this time of year, flocks of fieldfares wheeled across the sky in search of berries, settling here and there on tall fir trees and chattering noisily among themselves before suddenly erupting again in ragged solidarity.

I spent much of my time watching the clouds marching across the sky in innumerable variations of grey tinged with cream, rose and purple. However, all the while I could feel a tug at the index finger of my right hand. Normally I spend two days a week looking after my grandchildren and it is this finger that the middle child takes hold of whenever he wants something. 'Come!' he commands with all the confidence of eighteen months. And I follow him to the toy chest or to the kitchen cupboard where the biscuits are kept.

I was supposed to be on holiday this week but instead I simply felt bereft. I kept imagining what my grandchildren might be doing. Would they wonder where I was this week? Or would they, in my absence, forget my existence entirely?

Outside the land was very wet. Trees dripped. Leaves clogged and mashed underfoot. The sound of running water was everywhere. I thought about the generations of people who had struggled to make a living from this boggy, stony ground and how unbelievably easy my life would seem to them by comparison. I doubt whether they would recognise anything I do as work.

But they would recognise the tug at my finger.

photo: Kenneth Allen

The Sky Over Leitrim

I know I haven't posted for ages but I've been working all hours, seven days a week and that's the truth. Recently, however I had a week off in our family house in North Leitrim which, for those of you who don't know it, is a lovely and largely unspoilt part of Ireland.

I say a week off but in fact a great deal of my time was spent doing things like standing on the top of a ladder which was itself perched precariously on a wooden bench, clutching a bucket and spoon as I ladled out from the guttering years of sediment which had coalesced into a thick black mass with the consistency of Christmas pudding from which innumerable tiny sycamore trees were attempting to colonise our roof.

However, the evenings were a different matter. Rosie and I sat in silence gazing out at the vast dome of the sky, something that you never see in London. We watched the great cloud masses, forming, dissolving and reforming, throwing up transitory images of animals and demons, boats and chariots, warriors and great grey-bearded giants, all the while descending through a parade of colours from buff, through pink, lilac and purple to inky black. I did not care if I never wrote another word. It was enough just to sit and stare.

We also caught up on a bit of reading and among the titles I devoured was Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn. It quite took my breath away. So rarely do I read something that seems to me to be absolutely perfect but Brooklyn is such a book.

I was reminded of Jane Austen which sounds ridiculous since Austen is so quintessentially English and Tóibín is so very Irish. But both writers concern themselves with the way society, particularly through the vehicle of the family, bears down on the emotional life of the individual; both use dialogue and detail to such cunning effect; and both dissect embarrassment with such forensic precision. My only complaint was that it had to end.

The same could be said for my week away. All too soon I found myself gazing at the heavily made-up and absurdly dressed stewardess as she informed passengers that in the event of an emergency oxygen masks would be released from the panels above our heads. And then before I could even locate the nearest emergency exit I was back in London where the skyline is strictly rationed, where allowances are decreasing daily and where my computer will tolerate no idleness.

Notes From A Field Near Blarney

It was my cousin Michael’s funeral yesterday. Michael was at the hub of my extended family, a man of immense heart and great generosity, and there were considerably more than two hundred people at the service. But then Irish funerals are always big affairs, involving the whole community.

Afterwards, as we stood together in a bleak, windswept graveyard, I found the words of the service particularly arresting. ‘Saints of God, come to his aid. Angels of the Lord, hasten to meet him,’ the priest intoned.

When Richard Dawkins, Fellow of New College Oxford and the UK’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, describes religion as like ‘sucking on a dummy’ he is displaying a pitiful lack of imagination. Religion is a precious repository of cultural imagery. A prayer is a piece of language that has been carefully constructed in the light of a tradition as old as mankind. To deride these things is to deny a part of our humanity.

As I watched my cousin’s body being lowered into that forbidding hole in the ground I imagined beings or another order, more elusive even than a Higgs Boson particle, imbued with a purpose more difficult to comprehend than multi-dimensional geometry, moving urgently towards the gate of death. And I was glad to be part of such a moving piece of spiritual theatre.

West Of Ireland Writing Tip Number Two

The first evening back at the family home in Leitrim I found a task awaiting me that could not be postponed. The sinks were not draining properly. Upon investigation, the problem turned out to be a blocked gully. The only way to clear it was to put my hand down into the depths of the drain and start pulling out whatever debris I found there.

The culprit turned out to be many years’ accumulation of leaves. Indeed, I found so much decayed matter that it was like encountering a miniature peat bog in the bottom of the gully. I half expected to uncover the remains of a Neolithic settlement at the bottom of it.

I was reminded of my friend Teresita who told me how once when facing the same problem, she thrust her hand into several inches of scummy water and grasped something soft and wet which felt a bit like an old glove, or perhaps a woollen hat. Chuckling to herself, she drew her hand out of the water to find that she was clutching the bloated corpse of a dead rat.

Teresita is a strong and independent woman so I’ve no doubt that she handled the situation with grit and aplomb. Whereas I would probably have yelled, hurled the rat as far as possible and rushed for the shower.

I know I’m overdoing the writing metaphors at the moment. But I’ve just been looking at a manuscript by someone that ended so weakly, after promising so much that I couldn’t help another one coming on. So here it is, Brian’s West of Ireland Writing Tip Number Two: you’ll have much more impact if you end your novel with a swollen and grisly carcass than if you leave the reader with nothing more than a handful of wet leaves.

Panic In Leitrim

I’ve been in the West of Ireland for the last few days and what a pleasure it was. The fields and the hills were dressed in so many different shades of green, yellow, orange and brown. Ragged-winged crows hung in the air, riding the wind and obviously enjoying themselves enormously; flocks of fieldfares wheeled around the house, settling in the nearby forest and chattering noisily as evening descended.

One of the things I like most about the house where my parents lived is the silence and the darkness of night; though sometimes it can be too intense. I remember once several years ago waking in the middle of the night, wanting to visit the bathroom. It was so dark that I had no idea where the light switch might be. I blundered around hopelessly, stubbing my toe, bashing my shins against unidentifiable objects until I walked painfully into the wall.

I thought that if I simply felt my way around the room by following the wall I could not go wrong. But I must have started at a point very close to the light switch and begun travelling in the wrong direction. My sightless navigation seemed to take forever and I began to panic, wondering whether I might actually be dead and that life after death might consist of an eternity spent stumbling around in the dark. Then finally to my great relief I found the curtains and drew them back to gaze out on a night sky blazing with stars.

Afterwards it seemed to me that this was a perfect metaphor for writing – rousing oneself from a comfortable torpor to answer an urgent call, setting off in the wrong direction, causing oneself real pain by blundering into obstacles, beginning to doubt that one will ever achieve one’s objective, and then finally, more by accident than design, being granted a glimpse of real beauty.

Where Nothing Is Forgotten

I am off to the West of Ireland on Thursday, to what used to be my parents’ house. It’s a thinly poulated area, very green and very beautiful. The land is no good for farming. Too much bog and heath, too many rocks, lying everywhere like the toy bricks of giant children. But that’s all right because I’m no farmer. I can spend hours just gazing at the view. And on a clear night the sky is pierced with a million stars.

There’s nothing glamorous about this part of Ireland, no jaunting cars for the tourists. But there’s a music festival once a year. People cram into tiny bars to hear local people play fiddles and bodhrans. Children get up on hastily erected wooden stages in the village street to show off their skills at Irish dancing. Old men with broken teeth sing rebel songs and are cheered on by their friends,

It’s a landscape that still carries the scars of famine and poverty despite the brand new Japanese cars that occasionally zip up the winding road from the village, heading towards the nearest town where commercial properties thrown up in the days of the Celtic Tiger now stand empty, waiting for the next boom.

And everyone is related to everyone else. The local cemetery is full of Keaneys going back centuries. Once a year, for the blessing of the graves, that cemetery is full. People stand beside their family plots and recite the rosary. Nine times out of ten, the rain slants down on them mercilessly, coming from the mountains, and the prayers have to be rushed through before everyone is soaked to their skins.

It’s a place where nothing is forgotten, a place that is so steeped in memory, you expect the stones to talk. It’s where I go to remember who I am and why I became a writer.