“I don’t feel I have a capacity to make up a novel,” the writer Timothy O’Grady tells me. We’re talking via Zoom from his home in Poland (“50 minutes away from Toruń, where Copernicus was born”), where O’Grady, 74, has lived since 2007.
This might be a surprising statement, as we’re here today to talk about O’Grady’s new novel, Monaghan – his fourth. What he means is that he doesn’t see his strength as “mak[ing] up a character [or] situation”. Instead “they come kind of surreptitiously” and sometimes from real events and people.
That is certainly the case with Monaghan, which as the title suggests (“It’s just such a beautiful word”), is a book about and around Ireland, set in Belfast, Monaghan and south Armagh, as well as in San Francisco. It centres around a number of men, all conflicted by their acts and history.
First is Generous McCabe, a man known “for his wildness and wealth” who was “as old as the century himself” – and a republican, a gun runner for the IRA. He is based on Martin Walton, O’Grady says Walton had been “out in the [1916] Rising and in the IRA. He’d been interned in Ballykinler, and he gave violin lessons in the internment camp to his fellow prisoners. When he came out, he had all these violins to sell because the truce had interrupted his lessons. He sold them quickly through a newspaper advertisement, and out of that became the largest retail musical instrument dealer in Europe” (Walton’s Musical Instrument Galleries).
More central still to Monaghan’s story is the character known as Ryan, an artist in San Francisco who, in a previous life, had been an IRA man responsible for brutal killings. He too is based on a real person. “I can say his name now. It’s Frank Quigley.” (Quigley died in 2022, and O’Grady wrote a tribute to him.) Quigley had “stepped into this world of extreme violence”, says O’Grady. “They thought they were going to solve this 900-year-old dilemma with great enthusiasm.”
But Quigley “had always wanted to be an artist in his youth. He was imprisoned in Portlaoise and he asked the prison governor if they had art classes. And they didn’t, but they did have embroidery classes. So he took the embroidery classes in Portlaoise. And eventually when he came out he did a degree in an art college in Belfast.”
That friction between creation and destruction – between art and violence – is at the heart of the novel. How does involvement in acts of terrible violence (“the peelers took him away in a bag” is the outcome for one victim) square with the creative impulse? “I was just wondering how you would get the self-belief to make art,” says O’Grady.
As part of the preparation for Monaghan, he “asked these different people what it’s like to kill someone, and each of them said: you can’t go back to who you were”. Of course, the people they killed also can’t go back to who they were. “The story could look like I’m gullibly romantic,” admits O’Grady. “The Irish-American kind of coming home with sentimental ideas about it. And people could say that’s fair enough.”
But O’Grady has family experience in this area too. “My cousin was in the Vietnam War. He was this very glamorous, witty, charismatic character, and he went to Vietnam and came back and more or less retreated into this husk, and drank himself to death for 40 years.” (This pain finds an echo in the novel, where a character “blew out his brains” 20 years after returning from Vietnam.)
I was straining for some kind of comedy. And it wasn’t at all funny
The story of Monaghan, then, is invented but inspired by reality. Finishing a painting is “an anticlimax,” according to Ryan in the book, but from O’Grady’s account of the gruelling gestation of the book, for him it may have been more a relief. “I thought this book was finished in 2018,” O’Grady says. “Then I sent it to a friend whose opinion I respect and he said, ‘I can’t relate to this guy’. [The artist-terrorist character of Ryan.]
“And I couldn’t get this out of my head, you know? So I rewrote it, to win his approval, if not to please him. And I sent it again in 2020, and he declared himself satisfied!”
But that was just the beginning: the book is published by Unbound, and went through a long crowdfunding process. “And they finally committed to the book, and I reread it last year – and I was horrified by it. The characters were just too cartoonish. I was straining for some kind of comedy. And it wasn’t at all funny. So I rewrote it in three months.”
Even when a story comes to O’Grady from other sources, the challenge is that “I have to make it live”.
“It’s a very different experience,” he says. “You feel miserable most of the time when you’re writing. At least that’s how I find it. You’re just throwing yourself at it and failing, most of the time.”
There’s another aspect to Monaghan that we haven’t mentioned yet – many of Ryan’s paintings are represented in the text, illustrated by the artist Anthony Lott. (They’re reproduced in black and white in the book, and there’s a QR code to view them in full colour on Lott’s website.) O’Grady was inspired to do this by reading John Berger’s novel A Painter of Our Time, and wanting to see the paintings described in it.
This is something that O’Grady has done before. Many readers will have come to him through his 1997 novel I Could Read the Sky, which included – was built around – photographs by Steve Pyke. What’s the appeal of this approach?
“It relieves you of the text,” he says. “It works in a different part of the consciousness. It’s more subliminal somehow.” With I Could Read the Sky, he adds: “It relieved you of all that stuff you normally have to do with a novel, setting up all this stuff, describing everything and interconnecting everyone. I could go straight in.”
“With [Monaghan], I just thought you should see them [the paintings]. I liked the humour and the imagination in them. I mean, some people don’t think they belong. There’s no place for this stuff.” But O’Grady came of age as a reader in the 1970s, when writers like Gabriel García Márquez were gaining popularity in the West. “And it’s just so full of life, and not worried about what is or isn’t permitted in the novel. He didn’t care, he just wrote it.”
Now that the long process of writing Monaghan is over, O’Grady says he’s working on “helping Stephen Rea write his memoir”. Is it difficult to write in another person’s voice? “In a way,” says O’Grady, but “I’ve known him for a very, very long time. I met him in the 1970s when he was doing Playboy [of the Western World] and Endgame and all that stuff. And he’s my daughter’s godfather. [So] I’m very familiar with his life and his voice and his opinions.”
“But if I was asking him questions…” O’Grady adds. “If he’s asked a question, it’s like you’ve thrown a bucket of cockroaches on him. He just can’t stand it. So we’re co-authors, and I have some licence.”
O’Grady was born in Chicago in 1951 and moved to Donegal at the age of 22, and lived in Ireland, England and Spain before settling in Poland. His father’s parents were from Kerry, and on his mother’s side, “further back, there was somebody named Daniel O’Connell, who apparently had children all over the place”. But “I didn’t grow up in a very Irish-American world”, he says.
Although O’Grady still visits the US and says he loves being there, he doesn’t expect to move back permanently. Largely this is because “I like very much where I am now”. But he is, unsurprisingly, not enamoured of the current political climate there.
“Well, it isn’t as if there was a democracy there particularly over the last 30 years,” he says. “I just thought this morning, the [multi-billionaire conservative political donors] Koch brothers are running the world. Whatever they decide seems to be happening.”
“But now, this is…” O’Grady is almost lost for words. “You know, people in black balaclavas [ICE agents], picking people up off the street and throwing them into vans. The blizzard of unconstitutional activity. They have no regard for the courts, they have no regard for the Constitution. It does seem fascist.
“You know, I saw [Bill] Clinton talking in Berlin,” O’Grady says, “about a doctor who had got up before him, talking about extending life. And he said, ‘I hope they hurry up, because I don’t have that much time left.’ And then I thought, will Trump be wearing laurel wreaths and a toga in the year 2187? Is this what’s going to happen?” He laughs – because what other option is there?
Monaghan is published by Unbound. Timothy O’Grady will be speaking at the Hinterland Festival on June 29th at noon.
