INTERVIEW:Screenwriter Mark Macauley's debut novel is a coming-of-age confessional set in 1960s Ireland that he describes as being 'like England in the 1920s'
ASKED WHAT HE thinks of Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel in its current incarnation, Mark Macauley concedes that while caring little for the pictures on display, otherwise he thinks the place "is just great". This may, of course, be a literal instance of not biting the hand that feeds you since Macauley has spent the past week staying at the hotel, which plays a key role in his newly published novel, The House of Slamming Doors. But since the book is set in 1963, the hotel he describes looked rather different from that known to visitors today. Then again, so too is much else in the Ireland recalled by Macauley.
The book, Macauley's first, could erroneously be summarised as a Big House novel, a genre peculiar to Irish fiction since making its debut in 1800 with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrentand reinvigorated in the 1980s by the works of Molly Keane. The standard Big House in these instances is shabby genteel, its owners more engaged with sporting pursuits such as hunting than with maintaining the family property.
Such people appear in Macauley’s novel, but only peripherally since his protagonists represent another stratum of the Big House genus that only arrived in Ireland from the mid-1940s onwards: the affluent refugee. In the post-war years a number of wealthy British families moved to this country in order to escape the tax regime imposed by successive Labour governments. Property in Ireland was relatively cheap, as were wages and other costs; at a time of high emigration, any employment here was much valued.
So, in the early 1950s Macauley's parents exchanged England for Ireland, buying a large property in Co Wicklow not unlike that in The House of Slamming Doors.
The book is something of a roman à clef, the milieu it depicts having been Macauley's own. Like his teenage protagonist Justin Montague, he found himself perceived as English in Ireland and Irish in England. There are many other parallels between Macauley's own circumstances and those of Justin, not least their parents. As with Justin, Macauley's mother, a daughter of the newspaper publisher William Berry, first Viscount Camrose, came from an affluent English family, while his father William Macauley was Canadian, and possessed of a terrible temper. "My father used to get bloody angry with people and shout and roar," says Macauley. "He was quite volcanic, but I don't think he meant it. He didn't realise the effect it had on someone of my age."
In the book, Justin not only has to deal with the customary traumas of early adolescence but also with the fact that his father seems to be permanently in bad humour – rather like the character of Farve in Nancy Mitford’s novels but without the comic relief – and the book’s title comes from the manner in which many of its scenes end. Again as with Justin, Macauley’s mother was Anglican, his father Catholic and this seems to have been one cause of conflict: an incident in the novel where Montague senior insists his children eat fish on Friday so they won’t be turned into Protestants is, says Macauley, based on an occasion in his maternal grandmother’s home in Surrey where this occurred.
Lest it be thought he had a miserable upbringing, Macauley stresses, “my childhood wasn’t as bad as all that. It was a fantastic set-up in Wicklow. Ireland in the early 1960s was like England in the 1920s. It was like this huge family. There were 46 wages paid out on the estate every week; people came to work there and remained for the rest of their lives.”
Nevertheless, despite the element of pastoral idyll in a big country house, the abiding impression is of a remote mother and a permanently angry father, of a family at war, with every meal providing an opportunity for overt hostilities to break out.
Though both his parents are now dead, Macauley has five siblings, not all of whom have yet read the book and he admits being worried about their response even while insisting what he wrote is a work of fiction and not a memoir. A screenwriter, his initial intention was to tell the story as a film, but having sent it to director John Boorman – incidentally another English migrant settled in Wicklow – he was advised to try fiction.
He found the experience of working in an unfamiliar form difficult: "I don't know any long words because I didn't work very hard at school. But then I re-read Salinger's Catcher in the Ryeand realised that was the way to do it – see everything through the eyes of a small boy who doesn't necessarily understand what's going on."
He still intends to make a film of the story and thinks it unlikely The House of Slamming Doorswill ever be followed by a second novel. In this respect, and many others beside, it is a one-off.
The House of Slamming Doors
, by Mark Macauley, is published by Lilliput Press, €12.99.
