Redemption Falls is the second installment in Joseph O’Connor’s planned trilogy of the Irish immigrant experience in 19th-century America. It’s the follow-up to the hugely successful and critically acclaimed Star of the Sea. At times heartbreaking, bawdy, cruel and exciting, and told in lush prose with authentic, unforgettable voices, it is no Far and Away cliché but a rich and deeply rewarding reading experience. In conjunction with its US paperback release this month, the author generously participated in the following email exchange.

First off, welcome to Readerville, and thank you for taking the time. Before we get to Redemption Falls, I’d like to talk about your youthful Sandinista experience, if you don’t mind. I find this part of your background fascinating — not only because as a nineteen-year-old, I lived in the Mexican hills outside of Cholula among a colorful community of international students and Vietnam Vets, but also because of its topicality. Could you talk a little bit about that experience, and whether it has informed your perception of today’s current affairs?

On a Sunday morning in February 1985 my mother was killed in a car accident. I was twenty-one that year, a student at university.  Her departure, so sudden, so violent in its nature, meant all kinds of things could never happen now. Our family had not been happy; my parents’ marriage had ended some years previously. Her death left unanswered questions. 

My student friends and I were interested in politics, especially in the situation in Latin America. We would congregate in the university bar on a Friday night and talk about Nicaragua, where the Sandinista Revolution had occurred in 1979. It was said to be a new kind of third-world society. Democracy had been introduced, some form of it anyway. There had been no executions; torture had been banned. The revolutionaries were teaching people to read and write. They didn’t get hung up on ideology.

My friends and I would drink and talk about these things. We were lefty radicals, but in a rather undergraduate way. “Free Nelson Mandela” was written on our t-shirts, but “Fight for the Right to Party” was written on our hearts. Late in the evening, with a few beers on board, and The Clash and The Specials blasting from the jukebox, we would tell each other we would visit Nicaragua one day. We knew, at least I felt so, that we had no intention of doing such a thing. It was only something you said in the pub.

And then my mother died. And everything changed. Grief comes to us in many forms, some of them strange. The way it affected me was that I wanted to go away. There was help on offer from family and friends. I was lucky to be offered it, and I was deeply grateful. But for some reason I wanted to be by myself, a haven where I could be totally alone.

That was how I ended up, in the summer of 1985, flying to Nicaragua by myself. I spoke no Spanish, was totally unprepared, knew nobody at all in the whole troubled country, which was at that time in the grip of a terrible civil war in which many thousands would be injured or killed. I had not even had the required inoculations. (Wuss that I was, I was afraid of injections.) These were administered to me on the plane by the Swedish doctor I happened to be sitting beside, and who warned me, if I entered Nicaragua without having had them, I would find myself in intensive care “or the morgue” within a week.

When I think about it these days, I am absolutely astounded that I went. I wouldn’t do it now without a personal physician, a bodyguard, an interpreter and a wallet full of credit cards. But you do foolish things when you’re twenty-one. It’s amazing that any of us survives youth.

I found a room with a family in the capital, Managua, a city that been wrecked by an earthquake in 1972 and never rebuilt by the dictatorship. Only the Cathedral and the Bank of America had survived: proof, some said, of whose side God is on.  But the people were extraordinarily welcoming and warm. They were curious, intelligent and tough. I would often go into a supermarket and see no food at all — the United States Government was blockading the country — but somehow they contended with appalling circumstances, rarely losing compassion or humour. “Aero Nica” was the name of their inefficient national airline. Its nickname was ‘Aero Nunca’: Air Never.

I travelled all over the country, wrote a couple of long articles. These were published back home, which encouraged me greatly. I was realizing I wanted to be a novelist one day. My first proper attempts at fiction were written in Nicaragua. The beauty of the landscape was stunning and heartbreaking. You’d see volcanoes, banana plantations, enormous lakes. Once-glorious haciendas, now burnt to their skeletons; tiny cardboard hovels adorned with portraits of Che Guevara. Everywhere there was music: the joyous strut of salsa. Ragged children playing baseball by the headlights of Jeeps. Death was all around: the newspapers were full of it. But somehow the people refused to let it win. 

I came home a changed person. It was the summer I grew up. I learned all sorts of things, some little, some big. Rum gives you the worst hangover you are ever going to get. Spanish, not English, is the most expressive language for poetry, and also, bizarrely enough, for cursing. Nicaraguan girls are the loveliest in all the world. Politics is not about spouting slogans, nor even a matter of right and left, but ultimately a question of right and wrong. And I learnt that the only things really worth achieving are accomplished when people combine their efforts, to make things better for one another. It was half my life ago, and I’m sure I was naïve. But the main thing I learned, I try to remember once a day. If you have enough to eat, and a safe place to sleep, and nobody wants to kill you or take you from your family, you are among the most fortunate people on the face of the earth, and you should never forget your sheer luck. 

The Readerville community is comprised of a bunch of savvy writers and readers. While most are probably familiar with Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, I don’t think your earlier works are as well known. If I’m not mistaken, Desperadoes was a direct result of your Nicaraguan experience. Would you describe that book for our readers?

Sure. It’s the story of two estranged middle-aged Irish parents who visit Nicaragua in 1985 to collect the body of their teenage son who has been reported accidentally killed in the Civil War. But when they get to Managua and to the mortuary, they find the body is not him. So then the real journey begins. The book hasn’t ever been published in the United States, but maybe it will be some time.

I’ve read that you cite J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as an early favorite and that John McGahern’s “Gold Watch” inspired you to choose writing as a career. If you had to create a timeline of your development as a writer, what other early familial, educational and cultural events would you have to include?

Well, at kindergarten (in Dublin) I was taught by a fairly tough old nun. But she loved reading and encouraged us to see it as important. And my father was a huge influence. He was a draughtsman, and later a structural engineer. Churches, schools, office-blocks, libraries — they formed themselves on the drawing board he kept in a spare bedroom at the house. Often, when I went to bed, he would be working at that board, in shirtsleeves, his tie flung over his shoulder. (“You can always tell an engineer,” he used to joke with us, “from the soup-stains on the end of his tie.”) And often in the mornings, as I got ready for school, he would be there again — his eyes raw with tiredness — so that it seemed to me, as it may have seemed to him, as though he had stood there working all night. He sang as he shaved; little nonsenses or bits of arias. And at night he would read to me before I slept. He loved the Victorian writers, the old poets like Lord Tennyson, to whom he had been introduced by a teacher, Thomas Devane, in Francis Street School in Dublin’s inner city. And I can never read any poem without hearing my father’s beautiful Dublin voice. Calming as a hearth on a rainy night, it was a voice that revealed whole worlds. It was how I had learned to read, or certainly why I wanted to; his finger tracing capitals on the yellowed old pages of books that seemed to breathe wonder into life. That I wanted to be a writer one day, I owe to my father — to his stories, but more to his voice. He is present in every book I have ever written, a part of their DNA. 

You mentioned in a past interview that your grandfather was quite the storyteller, and he would tell you what Ireland was like in the 1920s after the revolution. Any chance you’d share one of those stories with us?

He used to tell us a wonderful story that wasn’t about the 1920s but I always absolutely loved it. It was about a boy who bought a goldfish. And one day, to see what would happen, he took it out of its bowl, just for the briefest second. And it didn’t die. So the next day he took it out for two seconds. And it still didn’t die. And every day he would take it out, for a little longer each time, until soon he could take the goldfish out of the water for thirty seconds and it wouldn’t die. And he continued like that — one second longer every day — and the goldfish got slowly accustomed to these longer periods out of the water. And soon, he could take that goldfish out of the water for almost a minute, and still it was healthy and well. And then one day, he was taking the goldfish in its bowl to school one morning, because he wanted to show the teacher this remarkable thing — a goldfish that can remain out of water for, like, two minutes!! But he stumbled while walking alongside the canal in Dublin. And the goldfish fell out of its bowl and into the canal. Where it drowned. “And that’s a true story,” my grandfather would smile. (I think he should have been a novelist.)

I met the great Jewish comedian Jackie Mason once in New York. He asked me to tell him an Irish joke. I told him I couldn’t think of a joke but I told him the above story. He said “You know, everything about that story is Jewish. The way it’s structured, the delivery. Your grandfather was clearly Jewish.” (He wasn’t.) I was fascinated and proud. It’s a good story, isn’t it? 

What were some of the things you wrote about as a journalist for The Sunday Tribune and GQ?

Politics, culture, sport, rock and roll, celebrity interviews, investigative journalism, a bit of everything really. I once attended a night class in New York on “How to Flirt” as part of my work. (It’s probably why I’m now married.) The scariest thing I ever did as a journalist was to dress up as Santa Claus in a Dublin department store at Christmas. I had been to a party the night before and was very badly hung-over. The toddlers must have wondered why Santa Claus smelled of beer. It was many years ago, of course. These days he’d smell of Chardonnay.

There’s a never-ending discussion in this country about the value of creative writing programs and MFA degrees. Identity Theory once asked you whether such programs existed in Ireland, and they quote you as saying:

It’s interesting that we have one small island that has consistently, and for hundreds of years, produced immeasurable contributions to Western Literature, yet writing programs are virtually non-existent. To what do you attribute this?

Well, since making those remarks I’ve noticed that we have more writing programs in Ireland than we used to have. And I’m certainly not against them. Not by any means. I think many aspects of writing can indeed be taught. Structure, and so on. And things about tone and subtlety, and how to discover what story you really want to tell. A character in my book Star of the Sea says “the hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write” and I think a writing course can help you discover that. And having a serious and disciplined approach to writing can be helped by participation in such courses. I’m going to teach at Baruch College in Manhattan for Fall Term 2009 and greatly looking forward to it. A course isn’t a substitute for sitting down at the blank screen or page and seeing what you can do to fill it. But writing is like music or many other art forms in that sense: certain important things can be taught and discussed.

Regarding the second part of your question — why have there been so many Irish writers? The honest answer is: I don’t know. I think it’s something to do with the fact that when I was a kid, the only Irish people who had ever been successful at anything were writers. When you grow up in the city that was home to Yeats, Joyce, Wilde and Beckett, you don’t see writing as anything unusual or exotic. It’s something worth aspiring to.

I was impressed with your ten favorite books list that you submitted to Barnes & Noble, not just because of the brilliant selections, but because authors are notorious for evading questions about favorites. The one choice that I’m not familiar with is The Mercy Seat by Rilla Askew. Why did you pick it?

It’s simply one of the best novels I’ve read in many years. I was awe-struck by it. She’s a wonderful, wonderful writer.

You were responsible for the collaboration that culminated with the publication of Yeats Is Dead. How did that experience work for you?

Well, Yeats Is Dead was a fundraising project for the Irish section of Amnesty International, an organisation I’ve belonged to since I was 17. I edited the book. There were very many challenges: to keep the narrative going, to make something amusing and entertaining, to ensure continuity of plot and no internal contradictions. That is difficult enough for any novelist to do, but obviously the difficulties are multiplied severely in a book written by fifteen people.

The book is essentially the literary version of a relay race. Chapter One (written by Roddy Doyle) was given to the author of Chapter Two (the Tony-award-winning playwright Conor McPherson). Then those two chapters were given to the author of Chapter Three, and so on. The most difficult task was to ensure that there would be no internal contradictions in the story. I drew up the list of contributors in such a way that I hoped the book would be a sort of anthology of some of the best of contemporary Irish writing in all its forms. We have literary novelists like Roddy Doyle and Frank McCourt but also stand-up comedians (Owen O’Neill and Gina Moxley) as well as a biographer and poet (Anthony Cronin) and the best of the younger Irish playwrights (McPherson). We also have the best sports journalist in the country (Tom Humphries) and an excellent screenwriter and movie director (Gerard Stembridge). And in Marian Keyes we have the finest popular or “mass market” novelist in Ireland today. My approach was to think of the writers I, personally, thought really outstanding across all the different genres and to invite them to participate.

But to be honest, it’s mainly a bit of fun. It’s a literary thriller that makes jokes at the expense of the great figures of Irish literature. But since Joyce was a wonderful comedian, among all the other wonderful things he was, I hope he would have understood and forgiven us the liberties we have taken. Essentially the book is a crime story about the theft of a priceless manuscript that is apparently Joyce’s last (unpublished) novel. The story is obviously fairly slapstick but I suppose it also contains a certain satire of the way in which whole industries have grown up around Yeats and Joyce. The book was conceived and written as an amusement and very little more. I don’t think any of the fifteen authors would claim it’s going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The book, by its nature, varies widely in tone and approach, but I think I can honestly say that most readers will find something to like in it. I think it’s part of the Irish literary tradition to mix serious and comedic themes. You see this constantly in Joyce’s Ulysses but also in the work of many others. Most of the truly great writers in the Irish tradition — Swift, Beckett, Joyce, Wilde, Shaw, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Roddy Doyle — have been comedians. The great exception is Yeats. But then, he is the exception to everything. Obviously writers usually work alone so I suppose these projects are an attempt for writers to work together in a spirit of experimentation and fun. Also, the book is for a good cause — all the authors’ fees go to Amnesty International. (So far it has raised more than half a million dollars.)

Musicians often have the chance to collaborate on projects, so I guess this book was a way of allowing a collaboration in literary form. 

You’re quoted as saying that you are always very conscious of writing for your audience as you work. I read exactly the opposite from a lot of authors today who claim they only write for themselves. How does this awareness affect the decisions you make as a writer?

Oh I couldn’t imagine anything as totally and shamefully worthless as writing for myself. I mean, I’m one of the people I write for — but far from the only one. Every moment I’m writing, I’m thinking about the reader. I need to know where the reader is in the story, what they’re feeling now, what they’d like me to do next, where they want the characters to go. Of course that doesn’t mean you always give the reader exactly what he or she wants. You can play with their expectations, subvert them, prolong them — but what I’m doing is trying to establish a connection with the reader and anything else is just vainglorious time-wasting. I simply don’t believe in art for art’s sake. A novel must be beautiful — of course it must — that is the very first (and probably the only) duty of any work of art. But it needs to be beautiful for the reader, not to express the writer’s ego.

We have some very dedicated Irish Lit fans here at Readerville, and we’re constantly updating each other on new finds.  Philip O Ceallaigh, Keith Ridgway, and Kevin Barry are some of the newer authors that we’ve been reading. Do you have any good, new Irish author recommendations for us?

Well, you’ve found three of the very best ones there. I’d strongly recommend the Irish short-story writer Claire Keegan, whose book Walk the Blue Fields is an absolute triumph. And Gerard Donovan is a wonderful novelist and short-story writer. His novel Julius Winsome is a masterpiece, and his new collection of stories Country of the Grand is exceptionally good.

Getting back to Redemption Falls, I read that you wrote this while on a New York Public Library fellowship. Could you talk about your research (which must have been vast); the first person accounts, the correspondences, and the places you traveled?

Yes, I had a sort of writer-in-residence fellowship at the New York Public Library and I did a lot of the research and reading there. I also visited Montana, which is in some ways the template for the (fictional) Mountain Territory in the novel. I read every first-person account I could find of Irish participation in the American Civil War. And there are a lot of them! But to me, at its heart, Redemption Falls is a love story, a story about being married. I hope it has an intimacy as well as an epic feel. In some ways, I don’t think research is very important to a novelist. It has to feel right, rather than be right.

The book’s structure is like an historic smorgasbord. There are several main narrative voices, but interwoven throughout are ballads, poems and letters peculiar to the time period and your character’s stories. Critics have referred to it as a literary collage. There’s nothing gimmicky or contrived about the way you use this material, though. All of it is holistic to the novel. How did you arrive at such a structure? Did the story evolve first, or did all those rich accessories inspire the story?

“Smorgasbord” puts it very well. (And straight away, we have another example of the extraordinary capacity of American-English to be open to the world, to borrow from other languages.) To answer your question: a bit of both, really. I had an image of the novel of being a sort of scrapbook — which, the further you read it, the more you see it actually is. It’s really the story of the man who’s putting all those disparate elements together. And you don’t find out who he is until the very last page, in fact not until the very last line. I had the ambition of writing a novel whose last line would make you realize you’d been reading a completely different book from the one you’d thought you’d been reading. And hopefully you’d start reading it again.

How would you describe the first two books of your trilogy? Am I correct in referring to this as a trilogy?

Yes, Star is part one, Redemption Falls was part two, and I’m working on the third part now. But each book is designed to have its own independent life. They’re more like distant cousins than parents-and-children. I like all kinds of music, from Italian opera to punk rock, from Irish folk balladry to American blues and gospel, and in a way I think of the three books as three movements in a piece of music. You know?

I’m a big fan of Star of the Sea, which sold so well and won so many awards. However, I think the writing in Redemption Falls is even better. The sentences are so fluid and melodic; the metaphors and similes rival the best poetry. There’s a certain essence to your writing that reminded me of the early, Appalachian books of Cormac McCarthy, specifically his prose in Suttree (one of my ten favorite books). I fell in love with the languages of the book. Did you set out to pay special attention to the prose? Do you write poetry?

Well you’re very kind and encouraging. Thank you. The previous book, Star of the Sea, was really the first book of mine where I tried to regard the writing itself almost as a character. And then, in Redemption Falls, since so much of the book is about language — its music, its beauty, its ugliness, how it conceals, how it’s a very powerful metaphor for cultural mixing — I worked harder on the actual sentences than I ever had before. There’s a drop of my blood in Redemption Falls. And the older I get, the more I’ve come to feel that a novel really should be the very best you can do at the time. If it isn’t, you’re in the wrong job.

I do write a little poetry but it’s been a private activity really. I just do it for myself, I’ve never published any. I admire poets enormously. That’s the hardest kind of writing. And it’s totally unforgiving. As you know, Lucia in Redemption Falls is a poet, and so I had to learn the poetic modes of the 19th century. And I enjoyed that very much. And also I had to learn how to write an American blues, a gospel, an Irish ballad — and to me those are as valid as interesting as anything any poet ever wrote. Give me the Blind Boys of Alabama over Keats any day! And Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee — they’re all poets. Dylan said Smokey Robinson was the greatest American poet and I always loved that idea. I love Dylan. I always think of popular song as being America’s greatest poetry, and it comes from the more beautiful side of the American democratic tradition: the notion that ordinary lives are absolutely worthy of remembrance. That’s in Steinbeck, Hemingway, the John Henry ballads, bluegrass, Cole Porter, Raymond Carver, Springsteen, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Elvis, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Yates, Eminem, Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, Rick Moody. I don’t see separations between them. They’re all storytellers. And only America could have produced them. And those of us who don’t like your current president — there are a lot of us, I’m afraid (there are also a lot of you, I know, I know) — always need to remember that only in America could these giants of storytelling have emerged. I think Yeats would have willingly chewed off his own arm to have written a line as perfect and as immediately recognizable as “How strange, the change from major to minor, every time we say goodbye.’

The voices in Redemption Falls are remarkable. How did an Irishman pull that off? It must have seemed like translating into a foreign language, at times.

Yes, it was a lot of hard work to get the dialects and accents right. I listened to many tapes and read phonetic transcriptions of regional American accents during my residency at the New York Public Library. But more than that, I’m always genuinely interested in how people speak, and whenever I’m somewhere new I listen very carefully to that. And since it’s a genuine curiosity rather than a mode of research, remembering it becomes a labor of love. And it’s an extraordinary thing about America — the diversity of its English. Take a Bostonian, a Texan, a Chicagoan, someone from Wisconsin, a Latino from Los Angeles, a Korean living in Little Italy — put everyone in the same room and you’re going to hear remarkable diversities of accent.

Have you seen HBO’s Deadwood? I think that series did a world of good for the legends and myths of the American West.

I’ve never seen it but many people have mentioned it to me, so I must get around to it. Sounds very interesting.

Is James O’Keeffe based on a real person? And speaking of HBO series, I think Redemption Falls would make a fabulous one. Who would you love to see play O’Keefe in an adaptation of your book, and who would you pick to play Lucia? Who might you choose for the soundtrack?

There was a real person called Thomas Meagher who was a little like James O’Keeffe, but in most ways they were very different. There’s some Hollywood interest in Redemption Falls, but I’ve learned that it’s best not to think about that too much. There are two actors I could easily imagine as James O’Keeffe and each of them would do it remarkably differently: Russell Crowe and Daniel Day Lewis. I don’t know who could be Lucia. Penelope Cruz? But if I were a single fellow (which I’m not) that’s an actress I’d like to meet!

Are you working on the final installment to the trilogy now? Can you give us a few clues as to where the story is headed?

Yes, it’s a novel based on the secret love affair between the great Irish playwright, John Synge, and a much younger woman, an actress, Molly Allgood, who lived in America in the years after Synge’s death. But really it’s a book about the character writing that book, a 40-year old divorced civil servant, writing in 1995, in Dublin. So it brings the story of Irish-America pretty much up to date. Or as up-to-date as I’d want to go. The novel I’m planning after that one will either be based in the first century AD, or in contemporary Ireland.