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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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Much of "The Barrytown Trilogy" is written in dialogue. Do you feel that helped pave the way into the first-person voice of your last few books?

I don't know, to be honest with you. I think what happened with "The Commitments" is that what I tried to do was make it narrator-free. Just to let the characters do their own roaring, and I kept the descriptions as bare as possible. And then gradually, the next book, "The Snapper," but particularly, "The Van," were more introspective. The narrator was getting closer to an individual character.

I think probably "The Van," more than anything else, got me closer than the other books. It's written in the third person but if such a thing is possible, it's written in the second-and-a-half person, if that makes sense. It's hard to be neat and tidy about things that are terribly messy when you're working on them.

What you're describing seems to be a way of getting at the interior language of the characters.

Yeah.

"A Star Called Henry" is your first historical novel. How difficult was it to feel your way into that?

Extremely. It's historical because the narrator happens to be extremely old. And because he's born in Dublin, he grew up in tumultuous times, far more tumultuous than they would be at the moment. For the first time ever, even with "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors," which in many ways was describing something I wasn't over familiar with, I couldn't really start this book at all. I've always been able to start a couple of pages and then kind of stall till I give it more thought. This time around I really couldn't start because I didn't know enough and I had to research. In the past I'd read for verification, to make sure I was right. This time 'round I was filling in holes in my knowledge.

I take it Henry's story will continue?

I'm working on the second volume. When I started writing I didn't realize I was going to be dividing the story into pieces. I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop. So it could be three books, ideally; it might be just two if things are beginning to lose steam and it could be four.

This is the first time reading one of your books that I haven't felt complete empathy with the protagonist. The possibility of violence is all through this book. We really don't know what Henry might be capable of. A man like Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. might take a misstep but we know he's essentially a good person. This is much more ambivalent.

Well deliberately so, because I think essentially quite a lot of good people killed quite a lot of essentially good people. My grandparents, for example, were killed during that war. And indeed two essentially good people in different circumstances have been killed during any war.

Next page | Did my grandfather use that gun?