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I'm not giving up.
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I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear.
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The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either gonna be okay. No, Stop. Or not.
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We are outgunned and we are outmanned.
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But we have each other. FX's the bear, the final Season, all episodes now streaming on Disney.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You you'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter earnedbybooks. Let's start the show. One of the stranger developments in contemporary culture is that television has become the place where seriousness now resides. Not long ago, the novel was still the form we turn to for psychological depth, moral ambiguity and social diagnosis. Today, it's just as likely that we'll look to a streaming series, 10 hours long, densely serialized, impeccably cast, to provide the kind of narrative experience that used to belong, almost by default, to literature. That shift has produced more than a new hierarchy of cultural prestige. It has also changed the stories that we tell about ourselves and our histories. Seamus O'Reilly's debut novel, Prestige Drama, enters this landscape with a particular question. Who gets to tell the stories of loss and mourning that mark the period in Ireland known as the Troubles? Prestige Drama is a multi voiced novel driven in part by the friction between oral histories and a media culture increasingly interested in claiming the power to represent those histories. The novel opens with the city of Derry abuzz with the arrival of a Hollywood production company preparing to film a prestige TV series called Dead City. One problem the lead American actress, Monica Loge, has gone missing. A series of Derry narrators will take turns grappling with the memories stirred by this outside interest in their history. And what begins as an opportunity for potential work and fame, maybe even prestige, becomes something altogether more complicated and tinged with mourning, both for specific individuals and for a time lost to fear, violence and sorrow. Seamus O'Reilly is a writer and author who has worked as a columnist for the observer, the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner. He is features editor of the London satirical magazine the Fence, and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times. His memoir, did you'd Hear Mammy Died? Topped the Irish Times bestseller list for seven weeks and won Best Biography at the 2021 Irish Book Awards. Seamus currently Lives in Walthamstow, London, with his family. Welcome to Burned by Books.
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Seamus O'Reilly, thank you so much for having me.
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It's a pleasure to have you. I really so enjoyed this novel and found it just gripping and loved all the different voices and the ways of sort of batting around this question about histories. And I think the best place for us to start is to get a little bit of it in our ear. And I was wondering if you would read one of the sections, one of the Diarmuid sections for us and maybe give us a little context about who he is. Sure.
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So Diarmaid is a. He is a script writer, possibly a failed playwright, who has somehow managed to be at the head of this prestige drama of the title, which is going to be about the Troubles, filmed in the modern day, obviously, but set possibly closer to that time, in the sort of 80s 90s. And he finds himself struggling to put it all together at the same time as having to deal with all the interactions he's having back in Derry for the first time. Perhaps the sort of you can't go home again feel. So he relates this every other chapter with a sort of a short sort of meditation on where he is and basically where he finds himself. So here's a sort of a supplementary extract. Daddy always said whoever called it the Trouble should have been shot. Maybe they were. I told him plenty of it going around. He never likes me talking about it because what would I know about any of it except nothing worth knowing. I think some part of him wishes he died. Feels bad that he never got so much as a scratch. A wee disfigurement he could take to the pub as a shield. Some proof of time served in the bad old, good old days. I came back from London because I wanted to have the taste of my mouth again. But all I do is walk about the place all day, spending my time in cafes or dithering toward bookshops and hiding nowhere. Sometimes I keep going until I'm too tired to keep going and then call a taxi, leaving the car in town. The problem is that once I decide driving is going to be off the table, it'd be madness not to have a drink. And then the night unfurls and I get jarred to the boots. Nothing written, nothing learned and me left Feeling more of a fraud for day tripping than I ever did in London. I've been home six weeks and have nothing done. The pilot script has been divvied up to casting agents and there's production meetings every day of the week and still I've got nowhere on the pages to come. I don't write, I don't type, I don't think. I just walk around the town over and over, dodging people who want to talk to me. How the fuck were we all so worried about touts all this time when every one of us is at it? I was better off where I was better in London, away from the constant questions and the squinting windows and half the town thinking I might have something to do with Monica going missing, but too frigid to say so because every wee girl and their mammy is asking me if they can be in the fucking thing. Everyone telling me it's going great, the story's being told, and I'm the one to tell it. Fair play to me, man. Good to see you back. Is there a job in it for me?
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Hahaha.
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I don't even know if there's a job in it for me. I say, hahaha. Good to see you anyway. All right, dead on. The more I stay here, the more I know this isn't my story to tell. It never was.
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Thank you so much. It was great to hear you read that. I am interested why Dermid ends up being, you know, as you said, he's. He's. Every other voice is his. And we return to him as somewhat of the protagonist, but also maybe the antagonist. And he is a storehouse of an enormous amount of pain and consternation as to this project that he's undergoing. And so I wanted to hear a little bit about how he came to be central to the novel.
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Well, I think the first thing was basically he is, in a lot of ways, some of my worst qualities as an actual person. And it's quite. It's quite fun to excoriate yourself in a way. And I think having that sort of bitterness as a writer or someone who's in over their head or someone who thinks they're above a certain type of writing or a certain type of life. There are definitely parallels there. And I think it was fun for me to have a sort of a dip into that. That maybe felt. That felt less like a sort of an author surrogate that was, you know, wise and wonderful and great and trustworthy and reliable as a narrator and more to have one who maybe begins as someone that I could. I could identify with personally. I'm a writer in London. You know, I go back to Derry and sometimes I don't always feel, you know, like it's home anymore.
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So you are from. From Derry then?
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Yeah. So I'm from Derry and to me, I suppose the sort of the germ of the idea for this was, you know, whenever I go back there and I feel, you know, how much has changed, how much has not changed. And I think everyone has that if they've moved away from the place where they were grown up. But I think after that it just became, you know, mechanically quite a useful vehicle for, you know, conveying bits of the plot back and forth to the reader. Because I always wanted the book to be, you know, a sort of collage of all these first person perspectives. So there are, for example, I think 13 different characters who speak at much greater length. And I discovered that rhythmically there was something really, really appealing for me anyway as I was writing it to kind of go back to this sort of this other figure, this sort of ghost at the banquet who is, you know, present in a lot of the other people's chapters, but who doesn't necessarily fully appear and to tease out and sort of trace what are the connections between all these different Cartas and each other and this sort of recurring narrator whose narration itself starts to become sort of less and less reliable and more and more intrinsic to other parts of the plot and other parts, other seeds of. Of intrigue that I've hopefully deployed elsewhere.
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Yeah. So Derry has. It's a city that's become recently famous from a number of things including the. The amazing Derry Girls sitcom. But it's important to understand Derry's centrality to that period of internecine violence, the Troubles. Could you tell us a bit about Derry's history and that moment and maybe think through with us why it was important for the. You to set the novel there.
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I mean, well, first and foremost it's. It is what I know. So I think maybe my next book will be set on, you know, a sort of basalt colony on Venus, but
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for the time being, which will assuredly be a stand in for Dan. Yeah, I've.
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I'm actually seeing. My agent has texted me, just heard that she's. She's going to get that over the line. No, I think, I think, yeah. So a lot of it is write what you know. But also I'm endlessly fascinated by the place and especially because, I mean, to sort of give context. So Derry is the second biggest city in Northern Ireland, Belfast being the number one biggest. And Derry and Belfast and all of Northern Ireland has since 1921 been separated out from the rest of Ireland. So it's under British rule. This obviously has led to quite a lot of Violence in the period between 1968 and roughly 1997, which is sort of ubiquitously referred to as the Troubles, which, you know, really was. It's what I grew up in. So about, let's see, my. Basically my primary school years were all during the Troubles, and then my secondary school and adulthood were in what might be termed peacetime. So I'm of that generation that straddled those two things. So it's always been something that I've found obviously extraordinarily impactful just on my life. But also I've noticed how infrequently this was treated in drama. So how infrequently it was referred to in major works or even minor works of fiction. There would be nods to it, there would be toes dipped, there would be sort of background color relating to it here and there in a film or in a TV show. But there was a broad sense that maybe people just didn't want to talk about it or that, oh, people heard enough about it. And, you know, that's something that kind of comes up in the book. The book is obviously an example of this. And it's also something which comments on this because clearly it talks about the fact that there is a, you know, these people who are making the decisions for what goes on tv, what gets made into a film, even what books are published. There has been a sea change, I think, in the last 10 years and a very welcome one, I think. You know, I would probably put it back to Anna Burns as Milkman winning the Booker Prize. I'd say Patrick Radden Keefe, though he of course is, you know, from Massachusetts, but his work, say nothing, had a huge impact, I think. And I think what you see from
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those two guys and then got a prestige drama to go along with it. Absolutely.
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And I actually met Patrick when he was in London for filming that series. And he told me and I had to literally take him aside while I was buying him a pint and tell him that I previously was already writing this story. I am having just stolen your experience. So he was very sweet about it, but I was able to show him receipts. It was all good. But yeah, I think his book as well and with Anna Burns to kind of maybe put it into that sort of thing in the last eight, nine years. I think that was evidence that you can have on the one hand this 700 page, immaculately researched long form investigative journalism about the troubles. And people bought it in their droves, thought it was fantastic. Or you can have something like Anna Burns Milkman, which is you know, deeply experimental, doesn't even use proper nouns for a lot of its characters, you know, and it was a sensation. And I think people were like, well, you know, if people are willing to, even in these slightly obscurantist and slightly daunting scale and size of projects do that, then you look at something like Dairy Girls, which you mentioned earlier, which you know, I absolutely adore. And Lisa McGee made something that I never thought would ever happen, which is a show about dairy that everyone in dairy loves. Because if there is a stereotype.
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Oh, that's good. Good to know, actually.
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I mean, I think there's a, if there's a stereotype with dairy people that is sometimes true. And I think most dairy people will cop to it is we can, we can be sniffy about people who come poking their noses in and trying to depict us or trying to talk about us. Sometimes a bit of a tall poppy syndrome. It's like, you know, if a poppy gets too big, you know, you cut it out at the roots. It's like you're too big for your boots. And I, I feared the worst whenever I heard it, but I was like, oh God, maybe it's going to be this, you know, clap trap, whatever sort of stage Irish stuff. And then obviously you see it and it's. You shouldn't have, you shouldn't have worried because Lisa is such a master at what she does.
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But I think it's just so alive,
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I think, and I think as well, it's so, so packed with the comedy and humor that was my entire life. I mean, sometimes the other thing about these stories not being told in any way is that you, you lose so many of the different flavors and the recipes of these stories because I did not grow up, you know, with a sandbag under my head, you know, you know, having to mount barbed wire every time I, you know, went to my kitchen. There was obviously an awful lot of weird bad stuff that happened, but most of my childhood was exactly the same stuff that would happen in any childhood, really, within reason. And I think Dairy Girls captured that very well. And it was something I wanted to capture as well, is that a lot of people's experiences of these things are colored by past. Sometimes people have a rose tinted view of the past, sometimes they make it seem worse than it was. You know, I'm trying to unpack that, trying to untangle that, even for a person, even just for someone talking in the pub with their mates, versus trying to depict it in a play or in a book or in a film. You Know, to what extent is it, to what extent is a, for example, some sort of bad, schlocky, Hollywoodized version of something that happened in Northern Ireland? To what extent is that really any worse or any different from me down the pub exaggerating something that I went through? You know, whose stories are these and who is the right to tell them? So that was the sort of hooky stuff. That was the, the, that was the, the grist for the mill, as I was.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And, and do you. I mean, you did really nice work there, explaining how different forms and genres can kind of get at this same idea in a way that's, that's appealing. What were you thinking about as you sort of crafted the form here, the, the multivocal, multi narrative novel and how you thought that form would be best acclimated, would have the most affordances to do what you wanted with this history, which is now, for lots of different reasons, a real, you know, global touchstone?
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Yeah, well, I tried it in other different ways. I mean, I, I loved the characters that I had, you know, at the beginning. Some of them have not survived, sadly, sort of kill your darling style. But I, I find that a lot of the time when I was writing, you know, the events that take place in the book, many of which were the same, I just didn't feel like I was getting as close to a propulsive or, to be honest, interesting way that was like, that was specific to how I experienced those cartridges in my head. And I was like, well, I could just literally do it almost like monologues. And obviously this is not a complete. This is not the first time that anyone has ever done this. The sort of polyphonic novel that you get all throughout Russian literature, some great recent examples in Irish literature too. But the second that I realized, oh, I can just have every chapter as a different person and you're speaking in their voice, well, that was extremely, extremely attractive to me. And also it just flowed. It flowed so much better. I'll also say that there was, once I started doing it, it was. The other real big benefit was I love writing dialogue. So I'm effectively writing 13 monologues. I mean, 20 odd if you include Diarmuid's bits as well. And that was extraordinarily enjoyable as a writer because I never get to do that. So in the breadth of my memoir writing and my columns and everything else, I think I would say with a little bit of self deprecatory distance that the thing that I most known for and celebrated for, admittedly, but which can maybe sometimes be slightly constricting, is I'm doing funny descriptions of things. I will describe things in a funny way. It's very much from a third person perspective, kind of. This is like that and then that. And in novelistic storytelling, of course, you get the opportunity to do that all the time. And maybe that's what I was leaning in on, but I really, really wanted to write dialogue. And I didn't realize that until I was writing a book that was quickly becoming all dialogue. And I was like, oh, okay, well, this is what I'm going to do. And sometimes it would be, you know, it was almost the cliche of all cliches. And it pains me to say it, but it really did feel like I was just inhabiting the character a bit more. And it's just.
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It's good, though. I mean, it's a cliche, but enough writers have the experience, I think we can say there's, you know, there's something real happening there completely.
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And I mean, I also. It's. Some cliches are just a. Are just a timesaver, you know, they're just true, you know.
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Right. Yeah.
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And I think that once I realized, for example, that if I had a. If I had a funny line that a character would say I was hearing in their voice, this is not a real person with a real voice, obviously. And I would imagine their face, you know, and perhaps, maybe it was. Maybe it was just some sort of unbelievably trite kind of way of getting myself to write. Like, you know, like, like all writers, I hate writing and will do anything else except depending on how heavy the deadline is. And I find that that was not a. Really, wasn't a problem, particularly in the early stages. Obviously later on when you have to really start making things, you know, kind of get to their. Their Sunday best in terms of, you know, hanging together and really, really being perfect, coherent whole. But in those early bits, we are just, who is this character? What's the kind of thing they would like? What's the kind of thing they would say? What's the kind of thing they would notice about someone hearing it in their own voice? Yeah. Accented and inflected, I'm sure, by people that I knew or aunties that I had or a teacher that I, you know, used to. Used to study with or whatever. It was just a really pure way of getting that sort of account. And also because I wanted it to feel like testimony, I wanted it to feel a little bit more like the oral histories that you kind of get for things like, you know, Boston University's sort of troubles projects or there's a fantastic book called On Bloody Sunday by Julianne Campbell which is entirely formed from thousands of interviews done by the Bloody Sunday commission in relation to a massacre that happened in Derryen in 1972. And that sense you get of being completely in that space, in that place and I think it really, really lent itself to being able to psychologically trace those characters in a way that I find really useful. The downside obviously is that you soon realize why so few books are written this way. Because why so actually because getting people in and out of a room is quite tough if everything is in first person. You know, trying to driving away for plot to happen. You know, if I can be so base. So sometimes it was like, well, you know, it's not going to be that plot heavy. And then slowly but surely you realize, no, well this person can talk about that thing and they can also be referring to that. And I hope the reader picks up on this thing, but maybe they won't pick up on that thing. And in the end it was, that was, that was part. One of the parts that I find so, so enjoyable and which I'm really, really glad that people have enjoyed, you know, in talking about it, is that it does. It allows you to kind of have that absolutely immediate sort of, sort of telepathic connection with these characters. Yeah. Athletic Brewing Company crafts award winning non alcoholic beers for those who want to
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be part of every round. With over 185 flavor awards, they're exceptional NA beers that fit your lifestyle and any social occasion. Summer's full of good times and Athletic fits right in. Go to athleticbrewing.com to have brews delivered to your door or find them at a bar, restaurant or or store near
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you near Beer Athletic Brewing Co.
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Fit for all times. They're, you know, their voices are very different, which I love. And I think one of the great things about having a, a multivocal novel is just getting to experience all these different kinds of, of, of voices. But they're, they're interlinked in various ways to one. One death and one absent person. And that's, you know, Jamie who was killed as a young man during the period of the troubles by a British soldier and has been memorialized in, in many different ways in the city, both as oral history, as you were saying before, but also in mural form. And he becomes central in his absence. And I wonder how his absent ghost there speaks a different kind of language of representation of histories than Does a representation like a TV program?
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Yeah, I mean, one of the sort of common sort of touchpoints in the book is a mural that was made for Jamie, you know, where he's depicted. And, you know, a common refrain that people say in, you know, throughout the book is he was. He was a very handsome boy and the mural makes him look not as handsome. And I hit upon that as a, you know, a very obvious kind of point about how things are remembered, you know, how things are memorialized. Because it doesn't matter if the mural doesn't look exactly like him or that it looks ugly even. Is it not important? Is it not just a symbol? Is it not just symbolic? But you can also say that about, you know, so many other things. Does it matter if a really trashy show is made about, say, Bloody Sunday? Is it not good just to people hear about it, you know, does it matter if an unfaithful representation of a poem like the Odyssey is made? Isn't it not good that, you know, a 12 year old is going to go to the cinema and think, maybe I'll go and, you know, read the classics, you know, and I do. I don't know the answer, especially when I'm often asked to review, say, for example, shows or films or books that are written by the Troubles, the few that are, and maybe by Irish papers, you know, in the Republic of Ireland, or papers in Dublin or, sorry, papers in London. And I think they expect me to get my pitchfork out, really, and be like, well, this is not accurate and this is not this. And very often the accuracy is not really the problem. I mean, I'll have a few potshots because it's funny to do sometimes, but mostly it's about, you know, it's about sympathy and empathy and compassion. And I think I could, for example, in this book, I could have had Jamie speaking from beyond the grave. And that was a consideration at one point. But it always seemed to me, you know, to undercut the finality of that death, specifically because that death and its reverberations are a bit more present. And obviously there are, you know, there's bits of the book which may or may not have people who are living or dead kind of speaking in one way or another or being found, you know, their information being passed on. But with Jamie, I think his death was. His death was final. And I think it was one of those things of having that choral voice coalescing around, you know, that event, and not just for the fact that this is a young man who had died, but because of how traumatizing it was for other people. And I think one of the things about the Troubles is, despite its slightly cutesy name and the relatively, you know, in a global sense, low death toll, you hear three and a half thousand people died in 30 years. And you think, well, you know, that's, you know, obviously, you know, it's awful, but it's. You know, we see such death and destruction every single day. But as recently, I think it's about 10 years ago, there were a hundred thousand people still living in Northern Ireland who had lost an immediate family member. So. And that's an immediate family member that's not your best friend, that's not the best man at your wedding, that's not your oldest work colleague. So there's so much undigested trauma.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Never addressed really, in popular culture or I would even say in working life. And also the people who most subjected to that trauma, by dint of the time period, you know, this is between the late 60s and the late 90s, they were not people who were particularly au fait, I think, with sort of emotional or psychological hygiene. And I think there's an awful lot of repressed sadness and grief and anger. And I've. I've been fond of saying this is a funny book. And my memoir was. If my memoir was a funny book about grief, which it was, then this might be a funny book about anger. That's something which to me is really surprised me while I was writing it, because it was one of those things, was like, well, everyone here is so angry. And I was like, yeah, because you're angry because you are talking about things that happened to you basically by two or three or four removes in some cases. But a sense that these are all stories, these are all people, these are beautiful people, these are compassionate people and kind people who've been forced to suffer through things that, you know, are unimaginable, but do so with a smile on their face and never to complain and never even have to that. Never even to have the outlet of, for example, getting to publish a book about it or get someone to hear about it on the TV or, you know, in a movie theater. So all of that was swirling around when I. Yeah. Decided to. To tackle it in the way I did.
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B
Yeah. And it's. It's interesting to have, you know, the contrast between some of these narrators who, you know, are. Are really keen to have the. The stories of their own experiences told, dramatized, even embellished, and others who see it as a. As a violation Both because it's, you know, it's these Americans coming from outside and, and even some Brits working with Americans, but it's also a digging up of things that are, you know, for some, they, they feel as though it would be best left untouched. And that's always a question about how one mourns as a, as a culture, as a nation, as a civilization is how much digging up do you do? And it, and it's pretty clear from your project that you're interested in the digging and the digging up, but it's also clear from what you just said that that involves digging up some anger that maybe you weren't that aware of. And so I wonder if you address that a little bit.
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A
Yeah, no, I think that's a really, really interesting thing to explore. I, I, I wonder, I really wonder if I, you know, where I do fall on it, because I obviously think that it's worthwhile to go through all these things and obviously I've, you know, done it in book form, but I also think that I probably have internalized so many of those things myself where I think if there's a sort of a Northern Irish sensibility that you could kind of, you know, nail down to one nugget, it would probably be something like, just don't cause a fuss. It's, you know, really the idea of creating some sort of palaver or hullabaloo about what you've been through and the specifics of, like, how you've had it harder than anyone else. There's almost nothing more contemptible in, in Northern Irish culture, society, psychology. I, I feel like I have that in me as much as I might, you know, rebel against it or rail against it in print, because that's quite
- [29:03]
B
a lot of cognitive dissonance to have for this novel completely.
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A
Because, I mean, I think, and it needed to be there, I think, because obviously I am the sort of person who would possibly react to the news of this kind of show being made in Derry with, you know, rolled eyes and say, this is just going to be trash. And I am also the exact sort of person who'd be like, oh, it'd be good to work on that. I wonder if I could make it interesting, like, as a challenge and also just, you know, you know, make a few quid. You know, I'm that person as well. I'm venal, I'm vain, I'm scared. You know, I'm psychologically challenged by looking back on things I don't want to. I'm sniffy and snooty and probably quite judgmental about other people coming in and, you know, sticking their noses in. And also I have that other thing where some part of me feels like it's, it's. It feels complimentary that other people are interested. It feels like, oh, wow, like the big American Film company or whoever are coming in to make a show about little old us. It's all there. And I think it was really, it was really easy to inhabit each of those characters for as long as I did in each chapter because I think they all make fairly persuasive cases. I mean, some of them are maybe not people I would take advice from, but I mean. And that comes to another thing as well, which is in writing the characters, I could find myself, you know, really, really kind of accenting them with, you know, the worst aspect of my character or the most bitter aspect of my character or the most loving and compassionate part of my character. That was the only way that I could kind of color in the squares in such a way that I felt. It felt lived in and real. But it does have the ancillary effect that I have friends who've known me since I was, you know, 9 or 10 years old who read certain chapters which I thought were, you know, extraordinarily over the top, very exaggerated forms of nastiness, of bitterness, of, you know, contempt. There's one long screed that a character named Turlock goes onto about how much he hates punk music.
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B
Yeah,
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that was completely written with tongue in cheek. That was his character. That's him. And I've had four or five of my friends come back to me and say, this is basically exactly the stuff you said when you were. When you were 14 years old and we were listening to guitar music and you just wanted to listen to Abstrus Electronica by Autecra and Aphex Twin. This is the stuff you were saying to us how rubbish our terrible taste in music was. And I was like, oh God, you can't get away from it. You, you are everything and you have everything.
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B
I loved the. I loved the screed against punk music particularly, you know, it. It works so well as, you know, a corollary to thinking about work of literature that is going to engage something, you know, that it has earned. And the critique against punk music is that it's unearned, that it's privileged kids who haven't experienced any pain or, you know, cultural oppression and. And yet, you know, are all about how, you know, savage it's been for them. So I liked that as a. As a kind of echo there.
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A
Yeah. And I think it is one of the. It's also a kind of a very packed cliche that's used quite a lot in. Because Northern Ireland did have a relatively cross community punk scene. So it's. It's almost always become one of those. What would you call it, a sort of a. A touchstone perhaps of certain depictions of Northern Ireland. Just like we didn't get on because we're from different sides of the tracks, but through three chords and the truth, we will be friends forever. I'm saying this, there's an excellent, excellent film called Good Vibrations which that sounds like I'm making fun of, but it's not.
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B
Okay.
- [32:45]
A
But it is that kind of thing. So it's a loving takedown, you know, it's, you know, like the makers of Walk Hard, A Dewey Cock's story, you know, they like all the old biopics of musicians, I'm sure.
- [32:58]
B
Yeah, no, I'm sure they do. You can't. You. That is a. That's a loving satire. Oh my.
- [33:04]
A
Yeah. So like I. But you can still spot the tropes, you know, when you love something. I mean, even it's almost a prerequisite for. For spotting the tropes is probably that you love them enough to watch so many things. And so I always find that slightly, slightly asinine perhaps. And I also just don't like punk music, which might. Might not shock anyone who reads that chapter that I don't know.
- [33:23]
B
No, it's not shocking.
- [33:25]
A
I wouldn't have thought I was quite as venomous as Turlock, but at a certain point the pen, like the mask, what was it? The fame is a mask that eats the face. Sometimes writing a sort of excoriating novel performs the same function. And all of a sudden I've turned myself into all my most evil characters.
- [33:49]
B
So Monica is a really interesting foil in some ways to Jamie in that she's absent, she's gone missing and she is the thing in the system that people are talking about. But it's really interesting that it's. That it's her that gets to have this, this kind of foil position to. To Jamie's absence and, and we'll get her voice in the end. But until then, she's more of this, this sort of mystery. And you know, on one hand she seems to be this like naive, totally out of her element actor who, who can't do even anything close to an Irish accent. But then there's also all these other hints that there's something else going on there. And each character starts to think about, well, how is this a curse? Is this, you know, something that is, you know, a reaction of the place to being depicted in the way that it might. And I wonder if you'd say a bit about Monica and why you've decided to have an American sort of run through the bloodline in the way that, that Jamie does or in a quite different way, but as another, another absence.
- [35:07]
A
I always, yeah, I always imagined it was going to be a big American actress. I think in this sort of, this era of sort of peak streaming TV or the sort of hbo, Netflix, kind of combined sort of prestige cable era. I've seen plenty of examples where these big actors will either A, go and do something slightly more regional or local or B, will sort of move from sort of film to tv. And sometimes I've seen perhaps a little note of maybe trying to get some bona fides because as you said in your introduction that really the, the sort of tentpole dramatic sort of treatments, I think of the last 10 or 15 years have been, have really been televisual. I mean, in terms of, you know, as an actor's medium, as a writer's medium, you know, getting 10 hours, as you say, to tell a story, or 60 hours over the course of five or six. I mean, it's, you know, it's, it's you. You're able to use that more novelistic thing. So I always thought that was interesting and I always find thought a way in as a sort of a shortcut or. Yeah, it's a sort of a symptomatic sort of exemplar of Hollywood. Landing in Derry would be some sort of huge movie star, let's say a Julia Roberts style movie star landing in Derry and just warping, you know, the space time continuum around her. Because I think a lot of the things that happen in the book would actually happen. People would just be obviously flocking and trying to get photos and acting, you know, terribly impressed. And then there'd be people saying, oh, what's she doing here? You'd have the people in high dudgeon kind of sneering at this person coming around and sort of making money off their misery or patronizing them. And sure, why didn't that job go to a great actress from Derry? And you know, every one of those conceivable things. And I think it works as a catalyst just for that reason. And also because then you get to examine her character itself. Like, you know, she is herself of Irish extraction, as a lot of Americans are. And everyone in Derry, or anyone in Ireland, you know, has that experience of meeting Irish Americans who have, you know, a very deeply felt, very spiritual connection to Ireland. And they might extemporize on this in a way that catches us off guard because they'll. They'll come into our very ordinary homes and our, you know, perfectly pleasant, you know, locks and cliffs, and, you know, they'll be in tears because obviously they feel that spiritual connection or that ancestral connection which, you know, is so pronounced and so. So emotional. And they're doing this for literally, you know, fields and hills that we walk past every day. Yeah, that's.
- [37:45]
B
I know several of these people, but
- [37:48]
A
it's a beautiful thing. I mean, it's an absolutely beautiful thing, but it isn't necessarily always completely scrutable to us at the time. Perhaps sometimes, you know, certain Irish people can be a bit sniffy about it, but it is a. It's all within that, of course, you've got the opportunity to talk about fame. You've got the opportunity to talk about, you know, ancestry and history. And so much of the. So much of the DNA of the. The plot of this book has to come back to, you know, some of those things, which is people talking about you, people noticing you not being able to have a spare moment. Should we have a spare moment? Should we be able to talk about these things? Should we just leave them all? Should we just. Just. Just stop talking about all this stuff? Yeah, just to, you know, just pull. Pull it all apart, start a new page. And, you know, like, there are certain days, particularly when I'm, you know, engaged with anything related to Northern Irish politics, where I'm like, let's just start over. To a certain extent, the peace process was an extended process of doing that. It was much more about starting fresh, I feel, than it was about reconciliation quite as much.
- [38:58]
B
That's. That's fascinating.
- [38:59]
A
Yeah. And I think that you can see that even. I mean, I was once at an event with a wonderful writer from Derry called Darren Anderson, who's an excellent memoirist. He wrote a great book called Inventory, which I'd highly recommend to anyone. But he. He made the point that, you know, there are places in the former Soviet bloc and, you know, in Eastern Europe where they have these incredible beautiful old Soviet brutalist sculptures and monuments that look so space age and otherworldly, but they're just sitting, you know, now what, you know, 40, 50, 60, 70 years after they were built fully, you know, nearly 40 years after the fall of The Soviet Union and they're there and they were never taken down. So everything in Northern Ireland, like the police checkpoints, the army barracks, there's a lot of them, they've basically been taken down piece by piece by piece. And he said, you know, we were in such a rush to do that. And I think to some extent having a monument to these things, having some sort of reminder of them as of what went before would have been good rather than this sort of speedrun of this completely, I believe, understandable thing that kind of, I think pervaded Northern Irish culture was rewind about the end of the 90s. People were like, let's just get that in the rearview of Murray. Let's never think about that again. And perhaps some of that spilled over into arts and culture. I'd say there was very few people in 99, 2000, 2001 who wanted to write anything about the Troubles because it was like, it was like putting on old, you know, gym clothes just after you'd taken a shower. You know, you were like, no, fresh clothes. Let's go.
- [40:29]
B
Do you, do you think then that this current moment for the Troubles is an attempt to rememorialize in the way that those buildings might have had they, had they, had they stayed?
- [40:41]
A
I think there's something in that definitely. And I think it's no coincidence that a lot of the people who are doing that writing now are my age and younger because certainly, I mean I would put myself kind of in the middle range because obviously there are people now writing books in northern who I presume were children when the peace project Peace process, like very young children. I myself was a child, but I was, you know, in secondary school, I was 12 or 13. But you know, there were the so called ceasefire babies, those who were like, you know, either not yet born or basically infants who've never known Troubles Northern Ireland. And like my older siblings, they've never known Northern Ireland that wasn't the Troubles. You know, they, they left for their jobs or their, you know, their university degrees, what, four or five years before the ceasefire. So my brother Dara, my brother Shane, they've never lived in Derry when it was in peacetime. You know, they've obviously come back for visits and stuff. But the last time they lived there full time, there was, you know, bombs going off every night or whatever, not necessarily where we were, but just on the news every single night. It was, you know, everything was colored by it. And I think the fact that there's now much greater appetite to tell these stories. I Think part of it is a demand. A demand thing where I think publishers are realizing that there is a demand for these kinds of stories. And people do find fascinating, people do find them psychology clearly relevant. But I think it's also supply. Maybe there are people. It's not like they didn't want to do it before. I think maybe, you know, it's a sort of a circular thing where you hear, oh, people are interested in this. Well, maybe I can write about, you know, these things that happened to me in my life in a way that maybe 10 years ago I wouldn't have. I wouldn't. Probably 10 years ago I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have pitched a bit like this, I'll say that much. That's interesting, but I don't know. I don't know if I would have. It's hard to know because you obviously are going to be colored by the things that you pitch or think about or write about are going to be conditioned by the possibilities of them being fulfilled. And if you extend that to its slightly more terrifying conclusion is. Does that stop us even from thinking about these things? You know, if you remove the. The apparatus, the sort of permission structures for people to think about these things in a deep and proper way, then does it just wither on the vine? Do you just start to have this. This paucity of imagination about what the past was and how we can learn from it?
- [43:12]
B
That's really nicely said. We've already layered in some. Some great recommendations. But I wonder if I could get you to leave us today with a couple of books you might recommend that maybe you've been reading and loving recently.
- [43:26]
A
Oh, yes, I can do that. I have. Really, really. Well, I mean, I should say, because I've mentioned his other book, London Falling by Patrick Raden Keefe. He does. I know he doesn't need people bigging it up. It's done very well. But it really, really is good. And he is. He is a good guy. I'm going to dip into my book pile here. This is like. This is great. I've really, really loved into the Wreck by Susanna Dicke. I am not finished it yet, so I don't.
- [43:54]
B
I don't know it.
- [43:55]
A
Okay, so into the Wreck is by Susanna Dickie. Susanna Dicke is one of my favorite writers. She is also from Derry, but she is. How do you describe it? Okay, I'll tell you what the best thing is to describe Isdal, which is her. Her previous book, which is a novella sort of poetry collection in one. It's isdal one of my favorite reads. I've probably read it three or four times now. It just goes down like chocolate. So it is basically about. It's about the Isdal woman who was a woman in Scandinavia that was murdered. It's an actual famous real life case, sort of mysterious, like, oh, who killed her? What was this all about? Sort of one of those unsolved, sort of creepy true crime mystery things. So you cut between that being done in this beautiful verse style that the Susanna has, and then you cut to also in inverse, these podcasters who are doing a podcast about it. And so from.
- [44:49]
B
Fascinating.
- [44:50]
A
Yeah. And from that you get all these extraordinarily layered satirical barbs at the sort of, you know, podcast True Crime Trauma. You know, they're due for some.
- [45:02]
B
For some barbs, for sure.
- [45:04]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, I even, even when I. Whenever I tell people that that premise that I. Ooh. And then I give it to them and I have to buy another copy. So. So that's the one I would recommend first to give you a taste. And then into the rec is the new one about which I can't really say much because I've not finished it. Other than that I have been really, really enjoying Jonathan Wilson's history of the World cup because I. Oh, Fabian, fabulous. He's an amazing writer and every single page is during the World Cup, I managed to get my son into football for the first time and it has been one of those real. I feel like the J. Robert Oppenheimer of making my son into a little football nerd. Basically every day I wonder what hath I wrote?
- [45:46]
B
Because, yeah, you've opened the Pandora box there, Chris.
- [45:51]
A
It's 4,000 questions a day. He is telling me every fact that he is. And I'm like, bruv, like, I swear to God, 40 days ago you did not know what football was. Like, you didn't knew who Messi Ronaldo were. So Jonathan Wilson's his the Power and the Glory History of the World Cup. It's really, really brilliant. Even if you're not into football, I think you'll really get something out of it because it's written beautifully. And also if you sit on the train reading it, people will think that you are a dumb guy who's trying. I mean, it's not my football, but
- [46:23]
B
that's what I've always longed for.
- [46:25]
A
I noticed that I was reading on the tube here in London and I was like, like everyone's just going to think, wow. Well, he's. Well, he's trying to read and you know, men aren't reading very much these days. They'll have to do.
- [46:35]
B
It's the best you can do.
- [46:37]
A
It's best you can hope for. It's either that or it's like LeBron's autobiography, right?
- [46:41]
B
Yeah, that. I mean, what a, what a perfect book. For the moment. I was so, so obsessed and, and kind of need more ways to extend it. I can't believe it's done already. And, and Susanna Dickey's work sounds like something that's a real lacuna for me that I need to, to fill immediately. But I want to most of all ask my listeners to run out and get Prestige drama by Seamus O'Reilly, a novel of the troubles, but also just of how many people thinking about how to understand and deal with loss and mourning and trauma can come to very different conclusions. And I just loved it. And it's been a real pleasure to get to talk to you, Seamus.
- [47:32]
A
Same to you, Chris.
- [47:38]
B
Well, that's all for me for now. My thanks to Seamus O'Reilly for coming on to talk about his debut novel, Prestige Drama. You can find links to purchase Prestige Drama and all of Seamus's recommended books at the website burnedbybooks.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books. Sam.