INTERVIEW:Author Joel Hynes has put his Newfoundland home on the map with tales of arson, murder and cat killing, transforming both his life and those he grew up with, writes Arminta Wallace 'I used to know Dublin like the back of my hand, you know? Now it seems I don't. But it still smells the same. I still love the smell of this town. Like a mix of old Guinness and diesel'
IF I TOLD YOU I'd been reading a blast of a debut novel about a hard-drinking, tough-talking teenager called Keith Kavanagh, which is based on the life of its author, Joel Hynes, and that it's laced with liberal amounts of "language", and in the first couple of chapters the young protagonist loses his virginity to a married woman, sets fire to his home town and kills his girlfriend's cat, you'd probably assume I'm talking about the latest book to be published by the newest bright young thing on the Irish literary scene.
But you'd be wrong. Joel Hynes is from Newfoundland, and Down to the Dirtmoves between a remote town on the Labrador coast, the island's capital, St John's, and the city of Halifax in Nova Scotia. (This might also be a good moment to point out that nobody dies in the fire, while the cat business is a mercy killing.)
Last week Hynes crossed the Atlantic to mark the Irish publication of his book by Brandon. Since it first came out seven years ago, the gritty Down to the Dirthas netted him a fistful of awards and prize nominations. It has been compared to Roddy Doyle's work and Trainspotting, and called a "21st century Huckleberry Finn".
It has also been made into a play and film, with Hynes playing the role of Keith on both stage and screen. But how, I wonder when I catch up with him in a Dublin hotel, did it go down on his home turf? Did anybody accuse him of unwarranted northern exposure, or take offence at his - let's say - idiosyncratic portrayal of Newfoundland family values?
"I wasn't setting out to point the finger at anybody, or hurt anybody, or expose anybody," he says. "I just set out to be as honest and as open as I possibly could. And I thought that if I could do that, and maintain a kind of humour in there, and strip it of any self-pity - which I don't go for, in what I read, anyway, so why would I go for it in what I write? - then I had my bases covered, in a sense." Young Keith, he points out, is harder on himself than anyone else, and is certainly not in the business of finger-pointing. But Hynes admits that certain people in the small town of Calvert, where he grew up, were nervous about the whole idea of one of their own turning into a published writer.
The town's population peaked at 350 in the late 1980s; nowadays, it's probably around the 200 mark. The tale he tells of Calvert is a long, long way from the stories we're currently hearing about boomtown urban Canada.
Hynes worked in the local fish factory from the age of nine. "Like, I always had $100 in me pocket since I was nine years old. I'd be lying in bed in the morning and I was so intimate with the fishery that I could tell who was coming in the harbour by the sound of their motor.
"The cod fishing all closed down in the early 1990s. I was about 13 then. In the year I was born, 1976, there were 16 boys born in my home town - and that's not counting 1977 or 1975. So there were a lot of kids around, right? And now, if you're up there, you do a double-take if you see a kid on a bike. You do a double-take if you see a horse or a sheep. Nobody's having kids no more. Everything is grown over - the meadows where we used to play. It's just people of my parents' generation, who are just there because that's their home."
Listening to Hynes talk, I'm doing some double-takes of my own. His speaking voice - like his literary voice - is eerily familiar, with all Irish phrases and cadences. "This" and "that" come out as "dis" and "dat"; "13" as "turteen"; girls are "young ones". Hynes removes his wraparound sunglasses and smiles. His eyes are the pale, clear blue of glacier meltwater. "My accent and dialect is watered down now," he says. "If you heard me mudder talking. Or me brudder, you'd swear he was from the southeast somewhere."
What sense did he have of his Irish origins, growing up in a town full of O'Briens, Keoghs, Powers and Sullivans? "Not much," he says. "I often heard the story of me grandfather and his brothers coming over from Kerry, and me grandmother's crowd from Wexford, and all that. But there was never any contact with anybody over here."
He did find, however, as a voracious teenage reader, that he connected instantly with Irish - and, to a lesser extent, Scottish - writers. "I don't know why. I just felt like I got the humour. The black humour, in particular. The dialect. I never looked towards America or Canada."
Dermot Healy was a major influence, along with the playwright Conor McPherson and, at various times, Roddy Doyle, Seamus Deane and the more literary side of Dublin crime fiction. Of course, Hynes adds, when the fishery collapsed and Newfoundland's predominantly Irish southern shore was in crisis, the whole "Irish identity" business became just that - a business. "You either packs up and you goes to Alberta - which is a f***ing hellhole, right? - or you stays. And I guess they decided to cash in on their Irish roots for tourism purposes.
"So now you got the Shamrock Festival, and the accents are a little bit more musical, and it's renamed the Irish Loop, and it's all whale-watching. And salt fish is more the currency of theatre now than it was - you know what I mean? Now, it's all the rage to have Irish roots where I come from. But it's the flouncy part of it. The stereotypical part. It's all" - he nods grimly - "shamrocks and leprechauns."
Having spent eight months in Dublin in 2000, living in Clontarf and studying at the Temple Bar Music Centre, Hynes has never been under any illusions of the leprechaun kind. "I used to know Dublin like the back of my hand, you know? Now it seems I don't. But it still smells the same. I still love the smell of this town." What sort of smell? "I dunno. Like a mix of old Guinness and diesel and all that. I love this town very much. I came over here when I was 21 years old, and it really changed me."
Like the central character of Down to the Dirt, Hynes left Calvert for St John's as soon as he came of age. The circumstances of his break with his family were not, one assumes, particularly happy. Were they pleased when his debut novel made him into a household name in Newfoundland?
"I never have any in-depth conversations with them," he says. "I got out of town when I was 16 or 17 and never really went back, except for a visit here or there. Now, if I do something - a play or a book launch or something like that - yes, they're going to be around and be supportive and all that. But it defied, I think - not my choosing to do it, but being accepted at it and successful at it - sort of defied their expectations of me in a big way."
The success of Down to the Dirtbrought Hynes a whole new set of personal challenges. "With my second book I got swept up by the industry," he says. "By festivals and reviews and awards ceremonies. And for a fella like me, who came from - you know - up out of the gutter, really, spiritually, socially, physically and psychologically, it was an added whirlwind. Because one day you're this and the next day you're that. So suddenly you transcend class and all that old stuff. You're invited to hang out with politicians. It was strange for me."
Despite the steep learning curve, Hynes produced a second novel, Right Away Monday, various bits of television and short fiction, and the stage plays The Devil You Don't Knowand Say Nothing Saw Wood. "Which is probably my favourite piece of writing," he says. "It's about a murder that happened in my home town in 1971, and it's told through the eyes of the murderer. Now that was a really controversial thing that I did. Down to the Dirt was one thing. But dragging up that old wound was another thing altogether."
As far as his personal life goes, he's moving on from the chaotic character he remoulded into Keith Kavanagh. "I have a nine-year-old son myself," he says. "He's a big, important part of my life and my childhood is healing through him, I think. His name is Percy and I think that if I give him what he deserves, and the kind of life he deserves to have, and an open loving relationship, as time goes by I tend to heal up a lot more myself. You also tend to leave a lot of the old s**t behind. It's just not relevant any more.
"Plus I've been in recovery - fairly actively in recovery - for drugs and alcohol. Which is beside the point of what recovery is: the drugs and alcohol over the years are symptomatic of the old s**t and garbage you got in your head. So recovery for me is constantly wanting to live better in the world, and acceptance of the self, and of the past, and of people." It sounds as if it's a road he has already travelled quite a way along.
Down to the Dirtby Joel Hynes is published by Brandon, €11.69
