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Bum rap
A new book accusing Pius XII of being "Hitler's Pope" overestimates the pontiff's influence and underestimates his character.
By Lawrence Osborne
[10/27/99]

Ivory Tower
Student bodies
When you donate your corpse to a university science department, where will you end up?
By Jon Bowen
[10/27/99]

"From Hell"
Alan Moore, the Orson Welles of comics, delivers his darkest masterpiece yet.
By Curt Holman
[10/26/99]

Reviews
"Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings" by Jonathan Raban
A stunning account of a sea voyage, and a rare book set in the outdoors that isn't about a disaster.
By Scott Sutherland
[10/26/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Could I have been any more inept?
First I fell for my wife's friend. Then I put it in writing. Now my life is sheer hell.
By Garrison Keillor
[10/26/99]

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My father saw my grandfather hold an IRA gun which he had buried in 1922 and dug up again in 1939, but it was corroded and useless. But what none of us know and never will know is, did he use it? It's unlikely that he didn't and yet apparently he was a very gentle, nice man. I never knew him, he died when I was an infant.

But that's the type of thing I was trying to capture. I think if Henry had been born in a more sedentary, more solidly working-class environment, rather than that underclass environment, he'd have had a perfectly normal life like the rest of us. Or if he'd been born 20 years later.

There seems to be an expectation that Irish writers are going to take on the 20th century history of their country. Do you feel that Irish history can be a trap for Irish writers?

Oh, I think any history can be, yeah. I was going to play with it. Not necessarily in the sense of fun, but I was going to mix fact and fiction just to see how far I could go. I didn't feel that, "Now it's my turn." And I don't think many Irish writers do anymore. I just felt, it was an ambition I'd had for quite a while.

Really, the history came after the character. What I was keen on doing was a bit like, I wanted to see if I could copy Dickens basically. To see if I could write a story a bit like "David Copperfield," starting at the beginning. And it just got bigger, not necessarily better, but bigger as I went along. The history was dragged behind the character really. Because he was born in Dublin in 1901, the questions are always then, "Well was he in the 1916 uprising?" and I really couldn't say no.

It was different traditions. I love Peter Carey's book "Illywhacker" and Günter Grass' "The Tin Drum." These are books that left a very lasting impression on me. And indeed "Midnight's Children" and "Shame," the Salman Rushdie novels, made a very lasting impression on me. And they may have been at the back of my mind when I was starting this book. But I didn't feel really self-consciously Irish when I started it. Although possibly now that it's finished and looking at all six [of my books], it probably is the most Irish.

Well one thing it shares with Dickens is the sense of poverty all the way through. And it's much starker in that you seem to be very determined not to accept the usual sentimental excuses for what poverty breeds, but to show poverty at the root of something tougher.

I wanted to put in context, without making a political statement, to explain why the independence movement took off, or why Henry would have gotten involved. That it wasn't just a whim. Despite the proximity of Ireland to Britain and despite the official status of Dublin as the second city of the empire, in fact it's a third world city and Ireland was a colony. And I wanted to just show the starkness of the poverty and try to get across that most working-class people were not politically motivated at that stage at all.

At the same time, as you're acknowledging the research you did, this book has, I think, the most amazing use of language in any of your books yet. Especially the descriptions of the post office siege -- like the image of the woman using the dead horse as an armchair -- and the descriptions of the poverty that Henry and his mother descend into.

I got a mix of books, memoirs, journalistic descriptions of what went on, and I made more of what I got. But when I was reading the descriptions of 1916 it did have a surreal quality to it. And a nightmare quality to it. You know, the [post office] building began to, not only was it being bombarded, but it began to burn from the inside out. The physicality of it was very, very apparent as it never had been before. It was just an extraordinary thing, the fires, you know, and the glass melting.

I was aware that the likes of the woman outside with the boa feathers, all those people in many ways when they turned off O'Connell walked straight on to the set of "The Plow and the Stars," you know, O'Casey's play. They're the exact same people. I haven't seen the play in a long time, but I do recall that they were looters. I remember in one production I saw, a boa. It seems to be a great symbol of opulence or something. So I was aware of a continuity there.

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