Interview: In spite of being acclaimed on publication in the US, Irish writer Barry McCrea's first novel, The First Verse, with its portrait of gay Dublin, has yet to find an Irish or British publisher.He talks to Belinda McKeon
It's a novel about the city in which he was born. A novel about being young and gay and obsessed with words and with literature in that same place. A novel which gives an absorbing portrait of this city, of a particular - and very recent - moment in its existence. It's a novel of Dublin. But Barry McCrea knows he won't see any copies of his first novel on the shelves of bookshops or libraries in Dublin and its vicinity any time soon. Despite being published by Carroll & Graf in the United States, to acclaim from writers including Edmund White and Colm Tóibín, despite having been chosen by US bookshop chain Barnes & Noble for its Discover Great New Writers programme, and despite having garnered positive reviews in publications including the London Review of Books, The First Verse has yet to find a publisher in Ireland or the UK - a situation which the LRB reviewer described as an even bigger mystery than the one at the centre of the novel itself.
Over lunch in a café looking on to the campus of Yale, where he now teaches Comparative Literature, McCrea admits to feeling "sadness and frustration" at the situation. It was at home, more than anywhere else, he says, that he hoped that the book would find readers (it will, interestingly, be published, in translation, in Germany and Spain, with a particularly large print run in the latter country). Though he left to pursue an academic career in the US in 1997, taking his PhD at Princeton before moving to Yale, he seems fascinated by Dublin, by what it has become in that pivotal decade; in conversation, his focus veers back to it, again and again, to Dublin as a changing city, as a city of connections and contradictions, as a place where social limitations and social largesse co-exist as decidedly uneasy bedfellows. It's a city from which he himself feels more and more "estranged", he says, every time he visits.
"I'm kind of a flaneur when I'm there," he says. "I wander and I see what's happening. And I eavesdrop. Because Dublin is so insular . . . so merciless if you're not absolutely up to date on everything, especially if you've been away. And so I'm so afraid of losing the frame of reference, and forgetting how to speak the language, in a way, that I'm always eavesdropping to make sure that I'm up to speed."
Standing on the threshold of other conversations, snatching at phrases and intimations, staying on the outside but somehow delving into the core of what's happening; none of this comes as a surprise, because it's the same manner of existing that McCrea has given to Niall, his protagonist in The First Verse, and to the strange band of people with whom he falls in during his first year as a student in Trinity College. Their eavesdropping, however, is of a literary rather than a literal nature, as they dip and dive into the pages of books seeking the answers to the questions that propel them around the city and around their lives. Niall comes to Trinity, and to the world of books that it represents, in search of many answers, not least about his sexuality and about the loneliness he has felt so acutely in his teenage years, and at first the activity to which these accidental new acquaintances introduce him seems a harmless, inoffensive, even charming one; ask a question, choose and open a random book, and read the first line on which your gaze happens to fall.
But this is no game, Niall soon discovers, no party trick. It's the tradition of the sortes, stretching back to Virgil and to the Bible; a practice with which McCrea himself became acquainted during his undergraduate days at Trinity.
"Some people there used to do it . . . ask a question, pick a line," he says. "And it sort of spread out a bit, and I was just so struck, honestly, by how well it worked. I mean, we actually learned a lot about ourselves."
The thrill the practice gives, the shiver of recognition and realisation, are the descendants of those experienced by St Augustine, in the epiphany which told him to tolle, lege, to take and read, and, in McCrea's fictional revisiting of the sortes, the realm to which it grants access when done seriously - and endlessly - is as eerie and dangerous as it is impossible to resist. Given the supernatural nature of Niall's experience in this realm - a dazed communion with voices from the history of art and thought - comparisons to a certain blockbuster by Dan Brown have been finding their way to McCrea, but he's adamant that his inspirations come from elsewhere.
"I haven't read The Da Vinci Code, actually." he says. "What would influence me would be a strain of popular gothic, like Anne Rice and Donna Tartt. I don't want to write a book in the same genre as either of them, but I think that they hit on a seam of interest that hadn't really been mined before. So that would be a thread."
Another genre which has wielded an influence since McCrea's time as an undergraduate at Trinity (he read Spanish and French, but confesses to "a bit of wish fulfilment" in making his protagonist a student of English Literature) is that of magic realism; the fantastical worlds of Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American authors were "the first big find" for McCrea, he says. "I think that the twin bases of the novel, for me, are that it has to be embedded in social reality and also have a mythological vision. I was always struggling, in my early attempts at fiction, with the problem of how to make reality meaningful. And García Márquez, when I first read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, it was like unlocking a key in my head. It was like this box had opened up."
WHERE DUBLIN WAS concerned, it was the changes brought by the economic boom of the late 1990s that most compelled McCrea; so much so that he actually rewrote the novel to situate its characters in the aftermath of that boom.
"I actually started the book in Spain in 1996, where I spent the summer, and I worked on it then during the summers that I was taking off, first from Trinity and then from Princeton, and I was always spending those summers in Europe," he says. "But then while I was writing, the Celtic Tiger happened, and all of the pubs where the action was taking place closed down. And suddenly everyone had mobile phones. And I thought about leaving it there, and making it a kind of monument to its time, this pre-Tiger shabby kind of Dublin, but then, the recent past is not such an interesting place to set something. And then Dublin, I mean it was a great coincidence, but Dublin had become a place of reinvention, a place where people came from abroad, immigrants, to reinvent themselves. Instead of being a place you had to escape, where reality was just sort of there to be encountered, it was a place where people came to reinvent themselves and to create new identities for their lives. And it really fit with the themes of my book. So I went back to the beginning, and I updated it all. Gave them mobile phones, changed the pubs . . ."
That the book so heavily references contemporary Irish society, and the language in which its characters speak is firmly rooted in colloquial Dublinese, caused McCrea's American publishers a degree of discomfort ("they basically nailed 91 theses to the door of my book, I felt like Martin Luther," he laughs), but with the support of his editor, he stood firm. Fascinated as he remains by Dublin, McCrea's ear is still attuned to the idioms of the city, to the differences between those idioms, and to what those differences mean.
"You know, it's really strange, but Irish people won't talk about class at all. It's this weird unspoken thing in Dublin, that there are two completely separate accents. And everybody knows it," he says.
In The First Verse, McCrea's characters come from a number of different Dublin backgrounds, and the language of the book consciously attempts to sound this diversity. McCrea is certainly not the first to render Dublin accents - whether working-class or "Dart-lite", as he describes his own - phonetically, but there is something about the juxtaposition of different worlds which works.
"I do have a fear," he admits, however, "that people will misread it. But there's no snobbery about it."
The portrait of gay Dublin, meanwhile, is both fresh and frank. Niall's emotional turmoil about his sexuality was no mere accessory for McCrea in the writing of the novel; it shapes the very vulnerability which leaves Niall so helpless in the face of the sortes, and paves the way for the crisis into which he is plunged.
"Being gay is another, a more intense, version of being an outsider," he says. "And Ireland is a very insider society, and Dublin too. And I think for most gay people, there's the same moment, the coming of age, when you cross the threshold of a gay bar for the first time, I mean it's part of the gay formation, in a way. You know, there are secondary school crushes, and there's angst, and there's the first time . . . this, I think, is why it's a metaphor I wanted to use for the book. It's like the sortes, or any system of signs. It needs to be learned."
SPEAKING OF THE sortes, the process of unearthing all those meaningful, loaded passages upon which Niall happens to chance as he questions his way through the story must have been a gruelling one for McCrea. Did he have to read and reread an enormous number of books to find the right phrase for each situation?
"I'll tell you something you won't believe," he grins. "Which is that I just pulled them off the shelf and found the right passages. I swear to God, yeah. Sometimes I would go two or three times before I got one that worked, so I cheated a bit, but yeah. I knew with some writers, like Joyce, that it was more likely to work than others, and some I did deliberately put in. But mostly I just picked them, randomly, and some of the best ones just came like that."
Does he still find himself dipping in to random pages from time to time?
"Yeah," he admits. "But it doesn't seem to work any more since I wrote the book, for some reason. I don't get very far."
Curiouser and curiouser. Try the sortes with the novel itself. You might be surprised.