Sebastian Barry: Not when I started, but, as I say, as I went on, and felt the men were allowing me in near them, and I could see what was happening and hear what they were saying, I began to feel a strange responsibility. The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled from the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. Even if you were in Dublin, you had to pretend you were silent in Paris. Sebastian Barry: 'By the accident of being born in Ireland, everywhere I looked I found people mired in history' Interview by Nicholas Wroe Fri 10 … Unfortunately, though, he makes the problem even worse by also, when Flattery is actually speaking, talking over her; with interjections and elaborations, most of which are uncalled for and unhelpful and counterproductive in terms of the purpose of the interview, of any interview. It could be argued, in fact, that Barry hints with the way he employs this idea of magic that Flattery surely cannot really claim full agency in relation to some of the brilliance in the book (“well beyond your capability”)! But sometimes a book takes you by the nose and leads you elsewhere. I'm concerned these silences leave a gap in yourself which then leaves a gap in your children and can ultimately lead to a hole in the country's sense of itself. Most of anything I have written begins life as a short poem, sometimes years and years before. “It may have snuck on.”.

And when it arrived, it was the most mysterious and exciting thing. ], I’m inclined instead to sympathise, as Roseanne Clear does there with her doctor, William Greene: “Poor humans!”. His family lost to the famine and his homeland ravaged, Thomas makes for the US, whereupon he finds himself enlisted in the American army, and falls in love with another soldier, John Cole. I started with an intention somehow to honour Peter Matthiessen, engendered by my admiration for him, and ended up with something other. Those ideas that are only made more murderous by insisting on the differences between us.”, Winona and Thomas are, he argues, correlatives of one another; their experiences of violence and dispossession relate to one another. I think of the moment in Dante where he meets himself in the wood, riding towards him. I saw the old Oliver Twist as a little boy and also Beauty and the Beast [directed by Jean Cocteau in 1945]. But then not only was there this real document, somehow all the difficulties of our relationship also fell away to leave just this elemental sense of mother and son, which took me back to that asylum ward full of those women who were of course unknown mothers and unknown children themselves. And the most frustrating and terrifying thing is that it seems there is nothing you can do except stand and watch these things unfold. Do writers have a social/historical responsibility? Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. The protagonist of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), another servant of the British state, is forced into exile; Annie Dunne (2002) features Barry's great-aunt; A Long Long Way (2005) focuses on Annie's brother, Willie, and Ireland's entry into the first world war. The Great War has been a theme hinted at in your work before, for example in The Steward of Christendom [Barry’s award winning play The Steward of Christendom has as its main character Thomas Dunne,a Dublin policeman serving the Crown, but also a mention of Wille Dunne, his son and the central protagonist of A Long Long Way] . It’s really difficult to find someone when you think you know so much about them. Sebastian Barry: I think we might. And she lived the rest of her life in an institution, and he married again. From 26 October - watch the shortlist livestreams at 5pm GMT every Tuesday & Thursday on Facebook & YouTube Fri 10 Oct 2008 19.01 EDT About this relationship, and those with his parents, he is clear and adamant: “Some people may be more practical than me about this.

His previous novel, A Long Long Way, was shortlisted in 2005 and his agent explained to him how rare it was for lightning to strike consecutive books. Only in recent years has Ireland come to accept its participation and suffering in the war between the European great powers. So there’s no making of sentences, they’re just the result, the aftermath, of that.”, I ask him if he thinks his grandfather Jack, who lived to see himself featured in some of Barry’s short stories and was upset by them, would approve of the new book. I wrote this little opening section in about 2003 and it sat alone in my computer, forlornly representing the entire novel, for about two years, until I managed to write some of the rest of the chapter. This grand project can, in hindsight, be traced back to Barry's earliest poetry and fiction, but it began in earnest with his 1989 play Prayers of Sherkin. But I didn’t.”, The title of Barry’s best-known novel, The Secret Scripture (2008), would be equally apt for this book; like many of his works it takes the form of a private manuscript in which someone tries to make sense of their life. • On Blueberry Hill runs at Trafalgar Studios from 5 March until 2 May. Sebastian Barry interview In this Man Booker Prize 2017 longlisted author interview Sebastian Barry tells us the prize has the power to knock years off your age and how the experience of writing Days Without End was a great surprise to him. “They were going to be thrown on a skip when my grandfather died. Is that an aspect that you feel has faded from public consciousness, or indeed one which was hidden from Irish people? I was driving along on the back road to Gorey in County Wexford (just to be precise) when my editor at Faber, Angus Cargill, rang me. His new novel, The Temporary Gentleman, is an evocation of his maternal grandfather, Jack O’Hara, who fired his grandson's love of storytelling with bedtime tales of his adventures in Africa: “As soon as he started talking, that bed was just a magic carpet and I was in the Gold Coast.” The title refers to Jack’s temporary commission in the British Army during the Second World War, when he worked in bomb disposal. When the novel was published, Barry spoke movingly about how it was inspired by and dedicated to his younger son, Toby, who – after a period of what his parents feared was depression but transpired to have more to do with the pressure of secrecy – had told them that he was gay.

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