“This one was a very, very, very long time in the making and was a very hard book to write,” author Timothy O’Grady said to The Irish World about his post-Troubles novel Monaghan which he launches this week at The Irish Cultural Centre.
The story, with themes of art and war, goes from West Belfast to San Francisco via the Monaghan of the title.
Timothy O’Grady, 74, was born in Chicago and has lived in Ireland, London and Spain. He now resides in Poland.
He is the award-winning author of four non-fiction books and three novels.
His novel Motherland won the David Higham award for ‘best first novel’ in 1989.
I Could Read the Sky, (with photos by Steve Pyke), won the Encore Award for ‘best second novel’ of 1997.
It was adapted into a feature film and stage show.
He is co-writing the memoir of acclaimed Belfast actor, Stephen Rea, 78.
Timothy told The Irish World: “I’ve only written four novels and each of them have come from some place I wasn’t looking.
“They arrive, a face or a voice, and demand to be told.
“That was also the case with Monaghan.
“My first book, Curious Journey, was interviews with old IRA people who had been involved in the Easter Rising, through the Black and Tan war and the Civil War.
“One of them was a very interesting character called Martin Walton, he was in the Easter Rising.
“He was in the IRA in Dublin and went on an arms raid when he was 18 or 19 and the man whose house they were getting the weapons from attacked them and they killed this man.
“He was an old man when I heard the story in Dublin.
“When he told the story he lived it in front of my eyes, his hand shook, he had a kind of convulsion.
“There was a film crew there because these were to be recorded and he agreed to tell the story to camera and when he did, he was completely different.
“He was asked, ‘Did that event haunt you, sir?’ and he said, ‘Not at all’ when, of course, he had just shown how much it haunted him.
“I told this at a house in West Belfast and heard somebody behind me, who I didn’t know, laughing in a very quiet, isolated, accepting-of-fate way – ironical, melancholic.
“I turned around, saw this guy.
“A young Republican asked me if I knew who that was, I didn’t, and he told me his name was Frank Quigley, ‘probably our most important sniper’.
“I was in Belfast with some frequency in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, and met this guy from time to time.
“He grew up in Ballymurphy and had always wanted to be an artist.
“He came from a very poor family, left school young.
“He was on a path of art as best he could be in the conditions of poverty in which he lived.
“This was the early ‘70s and all around him was this war going on and troops all over the place and police, and burnings of houses, and pogroms and somebody asked him what he thought about it, and he said, ‘I think it’s very bad’.
“This guy said, ‘Some think, some do’ and took him through back alleys into a back yard coal hole where there were some old WW1 weapons and said, ‘That’s what I mean’.
“At 17 he joined the IRA and stepped out of his own life into this conflict.
“He was on big operations, not only sniping, mortar attacks on military bases and heavy machine gun fire – still drawing when he could.
“He got caught south of the border, went to Portlaoise for 8 years and drew in jail, met an artist there, came out, did a degree in Art and became a professional artist.
“This connection between art and revolution was embodied by this one man.
“What is the weight of killing on your psyche? Does it make it impossible to have the self-confidence to make art?
“I thought there was a book in that.
“This central character, ‘Ryan’, is like Frank Quigley but in many ways is not like him.
“He shoots a high-ranking British Intelligence officer in Mayfair and is whisked out of Ireland, eventually to San Francisco where he becomes a house painter and tries to get back to art.
“It’s the story of three men – the narrator, an American mathematical wizard who becomes an investment banker, and the central character, Ryan.
“Each of them faces a crisis of identity, of whether they have sold out.”
Q: For revolutionaries, and artists, the worst thing you can be accused of is selling out…
“You’ve identified it, that’s very true.
“I had some experience in the academic world saw people calling themselves artists attaching themselves to universities, safety-first orientated people more concerned with their healthcare plans than what it means to create art.
“That was evident to me when writing the book.
“People who have something and don’t look after it and they’re not serious about it then regret it because they’re haunted by it.
“That’s the crisis of the narrator he wanted to make beautiful buildings and instead became a theorist and is suddenly in a crisis brought about by his encounter with Ryan because he can see whatever violence Ryan has done, he’s stayed true to what he believed about revolution and about art.”
Q: All three characters are trying to escape their past…
“Yes, Ryan has the legacy of killing.
“The narrator finds out things about his family – that his brother was in the IRA and put a bomb in London that killed a child and this haunted him, that his father kept weapons buried on the land.
“He didn’t know because he was protected from this as a child.
“He asks Ryan what it’s like to kill someone, so he tells him about the first person he killed which was a sniping operation.
“It had all been carefully planned and set up.
“He had a clear shot on the target and his finger would not pull the trigger, he could not make his finger eliminate this person and then, finally, he shot him in the neck, and he died.
“The narrator asks, ‘Do you wish you hadn’t done it?’ and he said, ‘No, I don’t.’
“I had a lot of help from Frank Quigley.
“I didn’t know him very well, but he agreed to come to Poland and stayed with us for three days and told me about many of his operations, how they were planned from beginning to end.
“This was extremely privileged information and that he was taking some risk in telling me because these were things that he was never caught for.
“To the extent that the book is convincing about that, it’s all down to Frank.”
Q: Did you get the sense that what Frank carried from what he did was still raw after all these years?
“He knew I would ask him about how it felt, and what he carried.
“He talked about how they were planned and the detail – angles, metres, hiding, getting in and getting out.
“It was quite clinical the way he described how it was done because that’s how he had to see it and that’s how he remembered it.
“I said, ‘Does it haunt you? and he said, ‘I understand why you ask me and have to say it doesn’t. I am fully aware of the heaviness of my responsibility ending other people’s lives and that they suffered, we in a war and I believed what I was doing.”
“I grew up in Chicago and my cousin went to the Viet Nam War. He was in some of the worst of it.
“He was in a landing zone in the middle of the jungle. He was in the invasion of Cambodia.
“He was a very charismatic, athletic, charming, witty, glorious individual before he went. (After he returned) he drank himself to death over 40 years in different parts of the far west, remote places. It was difficult for him to be around people.
“But he was in another person’s country, Frank Quigley was in his own country. That’s different psychologically.”
Q: You were shocked by what you saw in Northern Ireland when you first went there…
“I went through Strabane on the bus and soldiers got on and they had fingers on their triggers. It was very shocking.
“Then the town was in flames. buildings were burning, it was apocalyptic.
“When my book Curious Journey (1998) came out, I met what was then the Republican leadership, Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison and all these people
“I landed in Belfast and this guy picked me up and said, ‘Here’s City Hall, here’s the Linen Hall Library’ and we turned west onto the Falls Road, and he says, ‘Here’s where the assault on the senses begins’.
“It was just watchtowers, barbed wire, Saracens, foot patrols, hovering helicopters.
“The security state was just sitting on that community, smothering that community. That was very, very vivid and shocking, extremely intense.
“That state was conceived in violence by the threat of war by Lloyd George when the Treaty negotiations were going on, it was born in violence though pogroms, it was maintained in violence by the B Specials and the RUC and eventually the military and the political establishment.
“Those people there were abandoned and forgotten.
“The state’s attitude to them was, ‘You don’t count. You’re nothing. We want you to leave. We want you to not exist, to feel degraded while you’re ceasing to exist’.
“People said, ‘We’re not taking it anymore’.
“Nationalist people in the north were alone, living in an apartheid, fascist state and everybody forgot about them, they had to do it themselves.
“What they have done is incredible. The way they made the transport system, remade housing, created the only expanding Gaeltacht in Ireland in West Belfast.
“They almost seceded from the state – an extraordinary achievement.
“What I’ve written is not political, I’m just following a story that started with a laugh and trying to be as true to it as I can.”
- Timothy O’Gray launches Monaghan (Unbound) at The Irish Cultural Centre on Thursday 12 June, at 7.30pm. See irishculturalcentre.co.uk.
