What was the first book to make an impression on you?
Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson.
What was your favourite book as a child?
The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler, published in 1968. I still have the book.
And what is your favourite book or books now?
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole; The Butcher Boy by Pat McCabe; Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell.
What is your favourite quotation?
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now” – Beckett. It applies to any art form, I think, but I certainly identify with it as a writer.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Ignatius J Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces. A wonderful, larger-than-life (no, really!) crazy, anarchic, sad, hilarious one-off.
Who is the most under-rated Irish author?
Mike McCormack slipped off the radar for a while, but I'm glad to see his Forensic Songs has led to his earlier work becoming more widely available, and read, again.
Which do you prefer – ebooks or the traditional print version?
Every available surface in the house is stacked with books. There’s an ebook reader thingy somewhere underneath one of the piles. You see – they can be crushed. You can’t crush real books.
What is the most beautiful book you own?
A very small, leather-bound and illustrated copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that was given to my late father as a gift in 1967, and which he later passed on to me.
Where and how do you write?
On the couch in the living room. I write on a notebook that my wife and two daughters bought me for my 50th birthday. “Write something, or there’ll be no cake.” Which has really become my motto.
What book changed the way you think about fiction?
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. Apart from his dazzling wit, Flann (Brian O'Nolan) demonstrated that, as long as you can make it all hang together, you can go anywhere with a novel.
What is the most research you have done for a book?
I did a lot of research for Perfect Shadows, a play I've written about Christopher Marlowe. If I could time-travel, I'd go back to the Rose Theatre in the early 1590s, when Marlowe's plays were taking the London stage by storm, and Shakespeare was (possibly) acting in them.
What book influenced you the most?
The Butcher Boy by Pat McCabe. The voice of Francie Brady still reverberates around my head, and I sit down and have tea with him regularly.
What book would you give to a friend’s child on their 18th birthday?
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. There are lots of translations, but I like the 2003 translation by Edith Grossman.
What book do you wish you had read when you were young?
I just read whatever was available, really, and if I didn’t have it then, I’ll have read it since. I read everything we had in the house when I was growing up, which mainly consisted of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Timmy the dog, all having a whizzing time solving mysteries the local constabulary couldn’t crack, and then celebrating with yummy cake and lashings of ginger beer. There was also a lot of Biggles books. I wish I hadn’t read so much Biggles.
What advice would you give to an aspiring author?
Read widely, write regularly, and don’t panic – it’s a long game. When you get into a piece of work, stop reading similar fiction, as it can overwhelm your own voice.
What weight do you give reviews?
As a reader, I’ve discovered some wonderful books and authors directly from reviews I’ve read (thank you, Eileen Battersby!) so I do value them, and I’m certainly not anti-critic. It really depends on who the reviewer is. Is it someone who knows what they’re talking about, or are they just (lazily) stating they liked this, but not that? Do they command respect? Do they place the work in any kind of context, and do they have a solid set of reference points in which to discuss the work? Not everyone that writes a review is a critic, in the true sense.
Where do you see the publishing industry going?
I don’t think even the publishing industry knows, but as long as it keeps promoting good storytelling, it will be fine. It’s what people always want. Of course trends come and go, and all publishers, I guess, would like to get on the crest of an occasional wave to boost their own coffers!
What writing trends have struck you lately?
I’m not sure how conscious I am of trends, because the older I get, the further back I tend to go with what I read. I did notice an upsurge in vegan vampires wearing sharp suits a while back. It seems that old vampires never die, they just succumb to faddish diets. But at least they don’t bring out their own cookbooks. But I do think that Irish people often like their fiction with a dark edge.
What lessons have you learned about life from reading?
That no matter where people are in the world, or what their circumstances may be, human beings share a longing to understand, connect, to make some response to the business of being. I’ve always liked the late Seamus Heaney’s line about writing “to set the darkness echoing”.
What has being a writer taught you?
That getting the right words in the right order takes time and patience. And a lot of work. The notion of just dumping it all out onto the plate and expecting to serve that up as something worthy of attention just doesn’t hack it.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Kafka, Joyce, Poe, Mark Twain, Grace Paley, Emily Dickenson, Elizabeth Bishop, Robin Robertson, Alice Oswald…what sort of a budget do we have?
What is the funniest scene you’ve read?
There's a scene in Spooner by Pete Dexter about an exploding mule that ends like this… "There were popping noises at first, then a small explosion as the mule split wide open, and an instant later Spooner inhaled a putrefaction that energized itself instantly and forever in his brain, and for as long as he lived, whenever he was truly scared – those times when he thought he was dead or as good as – he would catch a whiff of that exploded mule." But you have to read it all.
What is your favourite word?
I’m not Jewish, but I say “Oi vey” a lot. It seems right for so many situations.
If you were to write a historical novel, which event or figure would be your subject?
The great Anthony Burgess beat me to it, with his novel A Dead Man in Deptford about Christopher Marlowe. London in the late sixteenth century, particularly around the theatre quarter, and the printer's shops around St. Paul's Cathedral. My wife Paula and I went to the Globe last year, and I had goose bumps for the entire time. Maybe I was there before…
What sentence or passage or book are you proudest of?
"When I was ten, my father went up a tree and never came down." From my recently published novel, Forsaken.
What is the most moving book or passage you have read?
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. There's really nobody like Faulkner. He pulls you in by the scruff of the neck and you never forget his language, his characters, his downright beautiful strangeness.
If you have a child, what book did you most enjoy reading to them?
The Very Noisy Night by Diana Hendry, illustrated by Jane Chapman.
Gerard Lee is an actor, writer and theatre director. His first novel is Forsaken (New Island, €13.99)
