Colin Lacey interviews Bernard MacLaverty (photo right) the Belfast writer who penned Cal and Lamb and who has just published a book of short stories.
“Some journalists in the North of Ireland are fond of asking me what I’ll write about after the Troubles are over. But although peace is absolutely necessary — and I wish them all success — pain and suffering and human concerns go on, and that’s what writers deal in.”
Belfast-born author Bernard MacLaverty is characteristically reluctant to identify himself solely as a chronicler of Northern Ireland’s twenty-five years of Troubles. Although his brilliant new collection of short stories, Walking the Dog (W.W. Norton, $20,00), like his previous critically-acclaimed stories and novels, focuses largely upon contemporary Northern Irish situations, characters, and experience, the author says the themes in his writing have a wider, more universal application.
“A writer must write about what he knows,” he explains, his Belfast accent diluted only slightly after almost twenty years as a resident of Scotland. “I was born and grew up in Belfast, so I do have concerns about Ireland. But they’re human concerns; the same concerns someone in Poland would have about Poland. I write about Ireland, but the more parochial a story is, the more universal it becomes.”
Perhaps this universality, coupled with an uncommon willingness to directly confront the North’s turmoil through fiction, is partly what makes MacLaverty one of Ireland’s most respected writers. His first novel, Lamb, published in 1980, told the story of the troubled relationship between a Christian Brother at a desolate Northern Ireland orphanage and a young, epileptic boy from the slums of Dublin. It’s a tender, compassionate drama that, without denying its specifically Irish background, transcends its localized texture to become a tale of loyalty and redemption that found a significant readership both in Ireland and beyond.
Lamb was followed in 1983 by Cal, MacLaverty’s second — and, to date, his most recent — novel. The tale of a reluctant IRA operative who falls in love with the widow of a man he helped kill, Cal boiled the intensely political down to the deeply personal and examined the contradictions and passions storming beneath the surface of Northern Ireland’s troubled political and social landscape. The novel’s cheerless scenario and tragically doomed lovers seemed drawn from an even more specifically Irish well than MacLaverty’s debut effort, but like Lamb, went on to become a favorite with reviewers and readers, even outside of Ireland.
MacLaverty adapted both novels into screenplays, and the two were filmed soon after their initial publications; Lamb featured a pre-Hollywood Liam Neeson as the anguished Christian Brother, and Cal was an early hit for Irish director Pat O’Connor. Despite the bleak, despairing tone of the novels, the films achieved minor success on both sides of the Atlantic, adding further weight to the author’s claim that a strong, well wrought story will extend automatically beyond the confinements of its own locale.
“Writers who know their territory and write about it well, likeFlannery O’Connor did, for example,” MacLaverty adds, “will always be seen asuniversal.”
MacLaverty is certainly a writer who knows his territory intimately. His family has long ties to Belfast and surrounding areas, and MacLaverty was born there in 1942. He was educated at a local Catholic school, Saint Malachy’s College (he proudly notes that Irish writer Brian Moore is a fellow Saint Malachy’s graduate), and after a decade-long stint as a medical laboratory assistant in Belfast, he attended the city’s Queen’s University from 1970 to 1975 on a mature student program. It was at Queen’s that his name first appeared in print — MacLaverty laughs wryly, recalling that his literary career began with an article in a student medical magazine called Snakes Alive — but the young writer had long had literary aspirations.
“The first book I ever read was The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky,” he remembers, and then hastens to point out he is in no way comparing himself to the 19th-century Russian master. “It lifted the top off my head. I was eighteen, and I had no thought of writing before, but I thought, ‘if only I could do that…’
“In Belfast in the mid-1960s, there was a kind of excitement about writing too,” he continues. “A group had started that was made up mainly of poets like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and eventually Paul Muldoon. I was part of that, but I was one of only three or four prose writers around.”
MacLaverty began writing and publishing short stories and soon became identified, along with Heaney and his circle, as a writer with a keen understanding of the social and political dynamics of Northern Ireland. However, despite a background that automatically afforded an insider’s eye view, MacLaverty says he never set out to write specifically about the Troubles. And although he eventually did approach the subject, writing fiction about it was no easy route for him to take.
“One of the things you have to be aware of is that although I grew up in Belfast, I was already twenty-eight or twenty-nine when the Troubles started,” he says. “I was already grown, and as I moved into serious adulthood, I realized I had deferred writing about the North for nearly ten years. It was too personal, perhaps, and there was too much suffering. I began to write Cal in the late 1970s — I actually wrote it before Lamb — when there had been for the first time the hope of peace, but suddenly, the hope was gone again. Ten years on, I might have written something different, but because of what was happening back then the book is very bleak and despairing.”
By the time he began writing Cal, MacLaverty had moved away from his native Belfast, and settled on the island of Islay, in the Scottish Hebrides, near where George Orwell wrote 1984. Teaching by day and writing by night, MacLaverty completed work on the short stories that would comprise his debut collection, Secrets, and began work on Lamb. Secrets was published in 1977, and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and powered by a strong,well-reviewed collection and a growing reputation, MacLaverty quickly found a publisher for his novels. Lamb appeared in 1980, and was immediately praised as the work of an important new writer.
The novel continued themes MacLaverty had already established and developed in his short fiction; among them the influence of religion, and especially religious education, upon the freedom and mindset of the individual. Although it’s never made precisely clear whether Lamb, the novel’s Christian Brother protagonist, is a victim or transgressor, MacLaverty leaves little doubt about his views concerning the other members of other religious orders in his novel.
“It must be something to do with my school background,” he says, after some deliberation. “At Saint Malachy’s College, about one third of the teachers were priests, and they fell neatly into groups of good and bad. Imay have a jaundiced view, but although the church does concern itself with the big questions — a very important thing early in life — institutionalized religion is hurtful. Brother Benedict in Lamb does everything through fear and force, not through love.”
The success of Lamb prompted MacLaverty to quit his teaching post, and in 1985, he moved with his wife and family to Scotland’s mainland, settling in Glasgow, where he has lived since. Cal appeared as MacLaverty’s second novel in 1983, and in 1987, he published a third collection of short stories, The Great Profundo. After that, all was quiet on the writing front, and, apart from back copies of his earlier works, MacLaverty’s name was absent from bookshelves.
But that doesn’t mean his typewriter remained quiet. His stories continued appearing — albeit slowly — in prestigious magazines like Story, GQ, and the New Statesman, and last month, MacLaverty’s latest collection, the long-awaited Walking the Dog, appeared. “I’m always in a state of writing — however constipatedly!” he laughs. “I don’t feel it’s important to rush at writing, and Walking the Dog includes the stories I’ve written over the last seven years. The writing is leaner now, with more muscle, and it’s less ornamented. I’m trying to leave room for the reader to make up his own mind. It’s moved on since the last book.”
MacLaverty’s prose has certainly sharpened in Walking the Dog — not that his previous work wasn’t already honed to a fine edge. His latest stories are balanced, Hemingway-like, around clipped, almost abbreviated conversations that shun an excess of narrative description without sacrificing the eloquence or passion of his most successful writing. Walking the Dog continues to consider themes of religion, violence and individual freedom with honesty and insight, and MacLaverty deftly injects a lighter air into the book by interspersing the nine stories with a series of droll vignettes featuring a character referred to only as “your man.”
It’s a multi-layered, near irresistible collection that’s filled with subtle wisdom and a graveyard humor that will undoubtedly please longtime MacLaverty admirers. Boosted by the author’s first major reading tour in the U.S., Walking the Dog may also be the work that hoists MacLaverty back into the public eye as one of the most acute observers of the energies that guide and shape not just the lives of Northern Ireland’s people, but of people everywhere.
MacLaverty, though, is typically modest about his own hopes for the book. “I really do enjoy writing short stories,” he says. “And all I hope isthat people buy them and read them. And that they’re moved and intrigued bythem, too.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the May/June 1995 issue of Irish America. ♦
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