You know a graduate of a creative writing course when you meet one: his conversation is punctuated with expressions like "there's too much metafictional games being played out in contemporary literature", "fiction is a rhetorical art" and "you learn to internalise the voices of the workshop".
The speaker is first-time Dublin novelist Robert Cremins, who, to be fair, is merely responding to sarky questions about the need and function (if any) of a sit-down, listen-to-the-teacher course in how to write. Cremins, alongside Glen Patterson and Anne Enright, is one of the few Irish graduates of the prestigious, one-year, full-time creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. With past students including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Mick Jackson, the course is seen as a literary hot house, propelling its students along a fast track to lucrative publishing deals. And with tutors who have included Malcolm Bradbury, Angus Wilson and Angela Carter, it's safe to assume that you emerge from the course with more than 60 words a minute typing skills and a few names to drop at literary soirees.
"I know there's a lot of debate about the merits of these type of `how to write' courses," says Cremins, "with some people thinking that a course in creative writing is an oxymoron in itself, but while there I learnt, amongst other things, to believe in myself as a writer and to have the confidence to go on and produce this," he says, holding up a copy of his debut novel, A Sort Of Homecoming - a Generation X-type tome about contemporary twentysomething life in Dublin in which an amoral anti-hero returns to his native city for Christmas for a brisk round of cocaine-snorting, beer-quaffing, debutante-seducing antics.
American Psycho meets A Christmas Carol for a pub crawl around Baggot Street, basically. U2-fixated buskers on Grafton Street, newspaper social columnists, frequent-flyer media brats and techno-ridden nightclubs all collide in a pump-action-style narrative as you're whisked around Dublin streets by a very drunk, if eloquent, driver at the wheel. With its constant allusions to fashionable imported beer, cappuccino bars, Aer Lingus timetables and Temple Bar renewal schemes (but all written about with a sardonic detachment), and with a protagonist who knows the streets of Greenwich Village and Montmarte better than he does the northside of his own city, Cremins slyly plays around with received wisdoms about over-educated, over-trust-fund-endowed southside Gavins and Samanthas. Cremins (30) has classic southside credentials: educated at Gonzaga and Trinity College, Dublin where he studied English and Philosophy; he lived in Paris for a year after graduating from his masters course in creative writing. A classic case of the overly autobiographical first novel, perhaps?
"In a sense, yes but although the scenery of my life is all there, the psychology is different," says Cremins. "A lot of the characters in the book would be partly composites of people I know but there is also a lot of comic exaggeration of the whole Trinity, southside lifestyle. It's funny now with friends reading it and asking me which character is supposed to be them, but it wouldn't be as clear cut as that. "Some strange things have happened with the local references also: in the book there's this fictional newspaper called Ireland On Sunday and while waiting for the book to be published, as you know, a paper of that name was set up in real life."
SHOT through with all manner of knowing references to the ins and outs of Dublin life (referring to the currency in the southside slang of "bunnies, joyces and dannies" - the £5, £10 and £20 notes, for example) wasn't there a fear of alienating overseas readers? "Not at all, mainly because the things I've enjoyed most about, say, American literature, is not knowing exactly what the author is on about all the time, it leaves more room for you to create your own impressions. Having said that, if the book does get published in the US, I'm thinking of putting in some sort of glossary or map to help people along."
There's some pretty impressive knowledge about drug types and drug use - the result of rigorous research or creative fiction? "The latter, I'm afraid," he says, "but away from the whole Dublin environment, what I really tried to do with the book was create a style of writing. To use an allegory from the music world, the short stories I have had published before this I regard as singles, this book I regard as my first album".
Before writing the book, Cremins re-read J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye - "that book is a standard of excellence" - and mildly surprised himself when he realised that his main character, Tom Iremonger, was having the same sort of breakdown as Holden Caulfield. Apart from Salinger, the only other influence he mentions is Jay McInerney, particularly Less Than Zero.
"I wanted to get that contemporary feel but I also wanted to explore other ideas - like the relationships in a suburban family and the maturing, or lack of maturing of a character after he leaves an institution like Trinity and takes to the world outside," he says. "In that sense, the book is very much a `voice' novel in that it is told from the point of view of a returned emigrant, an amoral character who is offered glimmers of redemption." He says it's a novel he's been waiting to write ever since his first day as a student in Trinity: "I can remember lolling around on the grass in the college with my new classmates on that day and we were all asking each other what we hoped to go on and become and I actually said `I want to be a writer' and everyone laughed because it's such a cliche." Now with a two-book deal with an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton, he's already started on the follow-up, although he is reluctant to leave behind his Tom Iremonger character. "I hope he can make a cameo appearance in the new book which is going to be more of a `tale of two cities' story, but still an `emigrant' novel," he says. Now living and working in Houston, Texas with his American writer wife, he marvels about how Dublin has changed even in the time it took him to write the book.
"The book is set in 1992, before things like email and before Temple Bar was really refurbished. So much change, but I suppose so much more reason for the diaspora to strike back."
A Sort Of Homecoming by Robert Cremins is published by Sceptre. Price: £9.99.
