“I think it’s the most plotted book I’ve written,” Austin Duffy tells me over Zoom, as we discuss his new novel, Cross. That it certainly is, with no shortage of violence, action, betrayals, turnarounds and surprises – including inevitable surprises – on the way to its strong ending.
It’s a bit of a break for Duffy, a Howth-based writer who holds down a full-time job as a doctor, as two of his previous three novels – The Night Interns and This Living and Immortal Thing – were inspired by his medical background. But his new one is set in the fictional Irish Border town of Cross, a republican stronghold, at the time of the 1994 IRA ceasefire.
Where is Cross exactly? “I’m from Dundalk. The book isn’t precisely set in Dundalk, but it’s the same neck of the woods. Everyone’s going to make the leap that it’s Crossmaglen, and it would be disingenuous for me to deny that, but at the same time it’s a fictionalised version. I kind of wanted to hang out with the humour of that area, and the language and the geography of it.”
The members of the community in Cross who we meet in the book include old-school Marxist republicans like Francie, who at the start of the book has authorised the murder of a policeman, and Handy Byrne, a loose cannon even by terrorist standards; the widow Donnelly, who’s mourning the absence of her “disappeared” son; and Cathy Murphy, a Protestant whose brother is the “son of a tout”.
But although it’s Duffy’s fourth novel, Cross’s genesis predates the publication of his debut in 2016. “I came across a notebook recently where the first line was written, in 2010. And I was living in America then, and I never thought I’d be home. And maybe it’s an age thing but I was very attracted to that [1990s] era, because I was coming of age then.” Duffy was born in 1974. “We’re coming into our prime!” he laughs when I tell him I’m a year older.
That period, where the IRA ceasefire led, slowly and not smoothly, to the peace process and the Belfast Agreement, seems not to have been addressed much in fiction. “I think so too,” Duffy says. “And whatever you do read about it, it’s very Belfast-focused. So I thought to focus on that area [of Cross] was interesting because there’s a lot of ambiguity there, and hardline sentiments, and these were folk who really needed to be brought along in order for the peace process to be successful. It still blows my mind that it got done.”
‘Stuff comes to you when you’re writing because there’s an active process going on in your brain’
Indeed there’s a scene in Cross where a senior republican politician known as MOC comes down from Belfast to sell the ceasefire to the local members, and meets with scepticism. (I read MOC as a Gerry Adams figure, though Duffy is quick to point out that there are no characters in Cross based on real people – they’re “archetypes”.) As one of the characters puts it, “This is the republican movement. This is who we are. [...] We’re smugglers and thugs. And petty f-cking criminals.”
Cross is an “anti-ideology” book, says Duffy. “There’s ambiguity. If you asked someone who’s the hero of the book, they might say Francie, because he’s this ideological person, but he was not on the side of peace, he was on the side of violence. And the villain might be the MOC character, because he’s devious and you wouldn’t trust him, but he’s representative of the process that’s resulted in long-lasting peace.”
The novel is written in a seductive style, alternating almost stream-of-consciousness internal monologue with punchy, bouncy exchanges between the players – which is also where the welcome humour comes from. Was this fun to write?
“Well, it’s not fun like hanging out with your friends and having a pint, but yeah it was fun, especially once I had got into it. One of my favourite books of all time is The Virgin Suicides [by Jeffrey Eugenides]. I just love that narrative voice, the first person plural. I wanted to write the book the way he wrote it – which is obviously impossible because that’s a work of genius – but I really wanted to get that community aspect. So it kind of mutated a bit.”
As we mentioned above, Duffy is a doctor as well as a writer, with a demanding and fulfilling full-time job. (He blames a long working week – we’re speaking on Friday afternoon and he’s Zooming from a room in the hospital – for his occasional struggle to think of specific words as he answers my questions.) What does writing provide for him that medical practice doesn’t?
“I started writing when I moved to New York in 2006. And so I’ve been doing it for 18 years now. I do it every day [and] if I don’t do it, I feel… I wouldn’t use the word anxiety, but it’s a feeling like you’ve forgotten something. And I’m not very good at thinking on my feet, or talking, and sometimes I need to have stuff written down before I understand it. I just need to write stuff and that’s how I think and analyse. Stuff comes to you when you’re writing because there’s an active process going on in your brain.”
It strikes me that there might be a connection between the doctor and the author – both figures of authority we turn to who will tell us things, different kinds of important truths. “I just wrote about this,” says Duffy. “I was asked to write an essay in The Lancet. And I think there is a connection. When you’re a doctor, there’s a kind of structure: you might be at a desk, the patient might be in a bed, you might have a stethoscope around your neck, they’re kind of props to orient the interaction.
“And as a writer you have this narrative voice that you construct, the persona narrator. So you can play this role. And what also unites them is empathy. As a doctor, if you’re surrounded by all those props but you have no empathy, it’s a disastrous situation. And similarly, with writing – if you don’t have empathy, the book is going to be crap, isn’t it?”
But he disagrees when I ask whether a doctor – and a cancer doctor like him, dealing with people in extremes of experience – can ever draw on what he sees to help with creating emotion on the page. (Writers are magpies, after all.) “It’s not as straightforward as that. I don’t think I’ve ever… where something [happens] and I rush off to my laptop and type away. It’s almost the other way round. You might be writing and something comes to you. Something a shop assistant said, or a bit of rudeness or humour that you witness out in the street. It’s a mysterious thing.”
‘I started writing when I moved to New York in 2006. And so I’ve been doing it for 18 years now. I do it every day’
Who, I ask, does Duffy read for pleasure these days – if he has time with his two careers? “I’m reading Elena Ferrante at the moment. I love her. I’ve read [The Days of Abandonment] three or four times – such an amazing book, I’ve actually gone through that book, copying out passages, I don’t know how she gets the intensity into it. But I’ve never read the [quartet starting with My Brilliant Friend] so I’m doing that at the moment. It’s absolutely brilliant. And Jenny Erpenbeck,” whose latest novel Kairos won the International Booker Prize in May.
Duffy also mentions that he’s reading Anna Burns’s Booker Prize-winning 2018 novel Milkman. “I figured I’d better read this.” In fact there seems to me to be a relationship – step-siblings if not full siblings – between Milkman and Cross, not just in the communities and themes, but in the language, which is often surprising, chewy and has a musicality to it.
And he tells me that what brought him back to books and writing when he moved to New York, after getting “sidetracked” from reading and writing when in college, was the Writer’s Studio in New York, which was a “game changer”, teaching him about narrative techniques.
Before that, had he read a lot at home? Were there books in the house? “I wouldn’t say I read a lot. But my father was always begging to get me to read. He used to tape money to the back of the book, and if I got to the end I could have it.” He laughs at the memory. “It never occurred to me to just take the money.”
