Interview:Catherine O'Flynn, who grew up in a 'weird Irish bubble in B irmingham', is a contender for the Costa Book of the Year Award with her first novel, published by aindependent publisher. She talks to Louise East
When the shortlist for the Costa Book of the Year (formerly the Whitbread) was announced earlier this month, media attention focused primarily on just one author. Not AL Kennedy, the well-respected winner of the novel category, nor ebullient historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who took the biography award for Young Stalin. Nor, despite a certain renaissance of interest in both children's writing and poetry, was it the victors in those sections, Ann Kelley and Jean Sprackland respectively. Instead, everyone picked up on Catherine O'Flynn, whose novel, What Was Lost, won in the first novel category. All these category winners now compete for the overall prize, which will be awarded on Tuesday.
O'Flynn's was a story to cheer even the most gloomy of January miserabilists. The writer, the Birmingham-born daughter of Irish sweet-shop owners, cheerfully confessed to receiving 19 rejection letters from agents and publishers before finding a place for her book with a small, independent press.
Moreover, unlike most other first-time novelists, O'Flynn was not the carefully-groomed product of a creative-writing MA course but a 37-year-old late starter whose pre-writing CV included such gems as postwoman and mystery shopper, and who embarked on her novel without having written so much as a haiku. "Dogged Postie Wins First Novel Prize" trumpeted one broadsheet.
Sipping tea at home in Birmingham 10 days before the announcement of the overall winner, O'Flynn rolls her eyes in amusement and dismay. "I was only a postwoman for four months," she exclaims. "And a mystery shopper for two days . . . It drives my brother mad. He says, How did you get known in the press as dogged? You're the biggest quitter in the world."
Previously longlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Broadband prizes and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, a real feeling of excitement and momentum has gathered behind What Was Lost. At its heart is a shopping centre, densely filled with lost lives and mislaid opportunities.
There's little Kate Meaney, a 10-year-old amateur detective who disappeared in 1984 but continues to appear on the CCTV screens 20 years on; Lisa, a record shop manager whose "to do" list includes "Number 14: Think about Something", and security guard Kurt, guardian of the centre's empty corridors.
Although O'Flynn's writing is both funny ("Kate was frightened of dogs, though as she'd been bitten eleven times, she couldn't see that it was an irrational fear") and lyrical ("Like an illuminated cave network, narrow passages would abruptly bloom into cavernous loading bays"), if What Was Lost does get the overall gong, it will probably be because it speaks so movingly and acutely to how we live now.
O'FLYNN'S WORLD is that of the windowless shopping centre and the multi-storey car park, a place of CCTV cameras, dead-end jobs and urban wastelands.
"When I write about industrial land, I have a real sense of melancholy and nostalgia," she muses. "The area I grew up in used to be very industrial and now there's an enormous casino at the end of our road. In between uses, me and my friends would roam the building sites and the empty factories like a marvellous playground. I miss it terribly. It never really occurred to me when I was writing, but now I can see that that's not a common thing for people to be lyrical about."
Born to a father from Hillstreet, Co Leitrim and a mother from Oylegate, Co Wexford, Catherine grew up in a "weird Irish bubble in Birmingham". The family's parish priest and his congregation were Irish and O'Flynn's Catholic primary school was made up of the sons and daughters of Irish immigrants. When the nearby Protestant school in Cromwell Street wanted to wage war, one of the pupils simply stood on a wall and shouted "I'm Ian Paisley".
O'Flynn's mother was a teacher while her father took care of the family sweet shop, its stock constantly under siege from Catherine and her five siblings who would creep down in the middle of the night to steal Hazelnut Whirls and pilfer comics. "Poor man, I'm sure the source of his heart problems was having to come up and find out who'd got the copy of Jackie."
Despite losing her father at the age of 15, O'Flynn thrived, moving to Manchester to study anthropology and sociology before returning to Birmingham to start working in music journalism. The death of her mother, two years after she left university, put an end to all that.
"My dad died before he got to retire and my mum died shortly after she retired and it just really made me think, I don't want to pursue a career that doesn't make me happy. You work all your life and then you die before you get a chance to have any space for yourself. That's when I started doing what some would consider low-prestige jobs, which didn't really take up my head, because what interested me was my quality of life outside work."
THE YEARS THAT followed were like a pendulum. O'Flynn worked at something mindless until the boredom got to her, when she would do something more fulfilling such as teaching or web editing. Her short-lived career as a mystery customer for a chain of pubs was prompted by an ad in her local job centre: "Market research position. Must be willing to drink alcohol. It was a great job but I had to give it up because you had to eat three enormous three-course meals a day and fill in endless forms about whether the vinegar was in the correct position."
Only when she started working for record chain HMV in the vast Merry Hill shopping centre in the Black Country did O'Flynn begin writing. "I found I was making these notes about the place, and its strange atmosphere. There was no big focus for me. I was just doing it as a little past-time."
When a security guard told her the (probably apocryphal) tale of seeing a child on a security monitor in the middle of the night, her note-taking took on a sharper focus.
"It seemed to bring together a lot of things I was thinking about the centre, how it had this slightly malevolent air and people seemed to be slightly lost there . . . There was such a contrast between daytime, when it was absolutely heaving, and the night when it was empty and eerie, yet the cameras kept running."
In 2002, a chance discussion about winning the lottery resulted in O'Flynn and her partner Pete selling their house and moving to Barcelona. O'Flynn started writing in earnest and by the time she returned to Birmingham in 2004, a draft of What Was Lost was completed.
"I was so surprised to have finished it that I thought it would be equally unlikely for it to be published."
O'Flynn sent her manuscript out to some 14 agents, and received nothing but rejection letters in reply. "You can see from this interview that I've quit every job I've ever had but I had read all the things everyone reads about how impossible it is to get published so I was expecting to send it to 200 agents and get three rejection letters."
As it happened, the 15th agent she sent it to was the fortuitously-named Lucy Luck, who took it on, helped her work out her manuscript's pacing and structure, and packed the book off to five of the largest publishing houses.
It was at this point that O'Flynn's natural pessimism seemed warranted as each of them rejected the book while praising it to the hilt. "One woman said the nicest things I'd ever heard about the book but said 'Ultimately, we don't understand where we could market this book. Is it this genre or that genre?' I remember thinking, well if someone who likes the book that much isn't going to publish it, there's no hope."
Instead of giving up entirely, O'Flynn's thoughts turned to Tindal Street Press, a small local press who had sprung to national attention in 2003 when Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour, a book the press had taken after multiple rejections, made the Man Booker shortlist.
"I knew virtually nothing about publishing, but I knew about music and I knew that independent record labels were often a bit more adventurous and would take more risks."
For Alan Mahar, founder and publishing director of Tindal Street Press, the faintly armorphous quality of What Was Lost was an advantage rather than a drawback. "When we read it, we thought, okay, this is an interesting mixture. It's a beautifully written literary novel, yet it's also got a young adult feel, it's a mystery and it could even get a chick-lit audience, although it's not a chick-lit book. It wasn't a problem for us. We wanted to make a virtue of it being a square peg in a round hole."
As to why his colleagues in the more commercial houses turned it down, Mahar says tactfully: "It would be dangerous for me to suggest they weren't doing their jobs properly, but you do wonder. Maybe they thought, it was too edgy or too parochial. People tend to get jittery about things that don't fit the usual tramlines."
OF COURSE, THE last laugh is with Tindal Street, particularly as O'Flynn's What Was Lost is now on its third print run and, in the year since its publication, has had an almost constant drip-feed of nominations and enthusiastic reviews. "I keep thinking, 'Surely that must be the end of the good times now'," O'Flynn says, shaking her head. "I feel a slight fraud at this point."
A great believer in having a "proper job", O'Flynn only recently ceased working part-time work in the box office of a local arts centre, explaining rather apologetically it was closing anyway. In truth, with more publicity at home and abroad ahead of her, she now needs time to start working on her next novel.
All of which means that for Catherine O'Flynn, it may be time to change her job description one last time. "To be honest, I have a real problem saying to people that I'm a writer. It's just embarrassing because there are just so many levels on which people can interpret that as me being totally deluded."
What Was Lost is published by Tindal Street Press, £8.99