Five people slip through the shadows of post-war London, trying to rebuild shattered families amid the debris. Three are Irish: father and son Brendan and Hugh, the older man a farmer still rooted in Irish soil, the son a gentle youth whose knowledge of Ireland is centred on images of his dead mother; Sarah, a single parent who, forced to leave Ireland pregnant and disgraced, has created a respectable space in London for herself and her daughter Deirdre. One is English: Elizabeth, highly-strung, full of life, a factory worker with aspirations to something more. And one is German: Karl, traumatised when everything and everybody he knows is blown to smithereens in the bombing of Hamburg.
The central characters of Philip Casey's new novel The Water Star might have come straight out of his own life, for he was born in London in 1950, his father a farmer from Co Laois, his mother a nurse during the war. They might have; but they didn't. "It's pure fiction," says Casey, "except that Citizen Road, where Elizabeth lives, is on my birth certificate. And I used Wedmore Street, where we also lived, for Sarah's house. Both streets have been demolished now, which is partly why I used them in the novel. The pub on Wedmore Street is still there, though the name has changed - and the Tube station on Holloway Road is almost exactly as it was.
"To the best of my knowledge nothing that happens in The Water Star actually happened. But it's funny how, when you write fiction - when I write fiction, that is - it comes true over time, in lots of ways. When I try to write the truth it's like a pack of lies. I wrote a play some years ago which was based directly on experience, and it came back with a reader's report saying that perhaps I needed a little more experience!
"That was one of the things that prompted me to write pure fiction. And in the 1970s I wrote this incredibly surrealist novel in which all my friends starred; but I discovered you couldn't really write anything very intimate about your friends."
Casey's family returned to Ireland when he was six, and he now lives in a quiet terraced street in Dublin's north inner city, but he still remembers playing on the bomb sites in London as a child. "I used to climb out the window and get on the Tube and go and play on the sites, and I distinctly remember bringing home gas masks and things. And I still have my ration card. So I suppose I absorbed the post-war atmosphere in that way. Like most of their generation my parents never really talked about the war very much - it was only recently that I discovered my father had been a fire warden at the age of 17, and that one night his life was saved by going off to a ceili with the keys to a particular building in his pocket. The building was bombed that night, and the firemen couldn't get in.
"That's one of the main emotions running through the book. It's very much an anti-war novel. I didn't set out to do this, but in writing it, as the characters came to me, I thought a lot about it. And also I'm a little bit angry with a society that allowed children - 17-year-olds - to go from small rural villages and farms in Ireland into the most horrific war in history. Can you imagine? At least nowadays, through communications and so on, young Irish people have an idea what the outside world is like. But if you cast your mind back 50 or 60 years, they hadn't a clue."
This mix of compassion and anger emerges in The Water Star as a quiet humanity, as well as a total absence of sentimentality about the London Irish community in the 1950s and 1960s. But would Casey be pleased, or alarmed, to find his book filed away under "diaspora writing"? He shrugs, unconcerned, pointing out that there's as much of Hamburg as there is of London in The Water Star - just as in his debut novel, The Fabulists, there was as much of Berlin and Barcelona as there was of Dublin. "The thing is, that when people live in another country they meet and marry people from other cultures; so it's a gross simplification to say we're a pure tribe, or nation, or whatever."
London, was, besides, a liberating place for many Irish people, he says - an idea which is echoed in the novel, as Brendan and Hugh gradually unclench and make a kind of peace with their situation and with each other. The striking of political attitudes is also strikingly absent from the book - deliberately so? "Yes, well, it's a very delicate thing; they purported to hate England, but they were living and working there, and I met many Irish who said they never had a day's freedom until they stepped on to English soil. "I really do believe that the reason for that haemorrhage of young people wasn't just economic - it was social. It was a need to escape the kind of social control which squeezed any joy out of their youth, or any exuberance. For women, but for men, too. "Women were oppressed on several fronts in Ireland - sexually and economically - but there were subtle ways of oppressing men, too, keeping them in line. When you think of some of the desperate bachelor lives - and I say that as a bachelor myself - men used to lead, and still do, in some cases . . . People laugh at Kavanagh's The Great Hunger, but that was how it was."
Given that Casey began his writing career as a poet - "I was a poet once every two years, for about five minutes," he says, with a rueful smile, "and you'd be lucky to be that, I think" - there is little that is self-consciously "poetic" about The Water Star. The language is simple and direct, to the point of austerity, but the book's cyclical structure - which gives a chapter, in turn, to each of the main characters, retelling the same events from their various points of view, sometimes with sentences repeated word for word - ensures a heightened atmosphere irresistibly reminiscent of Eliot's "still point of the turning world".
Why did he decide to tell the story in that way? "I'm not a conscious architect," he says. "I write through the characters; they form, and then they bring me through the story. It's a long, difficult process, but it's the only way I can do it. In this case it was a big risk, because if you don't read very attentively you won't see why the same phrase is used in different episodes. I did that out of respect for the characters' point of view - in the early stages of the novel, during the me- nage a trois, for example, it was crucial. There was an emotional territory there that wasn't true if you looked at it from a different point of view. The reason why the same sentence is used is to place that exact moment - but the following sentence will be very different."
As to whether his next novel will return to similar territory, or will itself be very different, Casey is keeping his cards close to his chest. "The last thing I was working on was the guest list for the launch of The Water Star," he says firmly. "It was wonderful. People went to great trouble and expense; it was very touching. Aunts and uncles came from the south and west and all quarters; friends came from London; neighbours, too. I had the feeling the book was well and truly set on its way."
The Water Star is published by Picador at £14.99 in UK
