The Cathach 2011 - Volume II (PDF) - Sligo Libraries

Instead of venereal disease passing from one character to the next, it would be the
knowledge that dissident Republicans were making a bomb. I would do this, however,
without specifying the Omagh bomb, as that would snarl me up in matters of documentary
veracity with which I had no wish to become entangled.
Then I read Schnitzler’s play, and saw that my idea could work. I saw further that,
though I would need to change the characters from nineteenth to early-twenty-firstcentury
archetypes, I could retain Schnitzler’s overarching structure with its ten scenes and
ten couplings. All that needed to be new was the dialogue: in the final draft of my
version, called 10 Rounds, I retained only one line from Schnitzler’s original. The rest was
new. The first performance of 10 Rounds was given at the Tricycle Theatre on 23
September 2002 and the play was subsequently short-listed for the Ewart Biggs Award.
After the production of 10 Rounds, and with the publication of The Siege of Derry
and My Father’s Watch some years away because they had yet to be finished, and with
A Good Day For a Dog, which I was still writing in my free time, incomplete, yet
knowing I must publish, I went to Miriam Hodgson with a new idea. This was for a
novel based on the body of Jewish myth about Rabbi Loew, a rabbi at the Prague
synagogue during the seventeenth century. According to legend he had made a Golem
from river mud to defend the ghetto against Christian mobs inflamed by stories that
Jews used the blood of gentile children to make the unleavened bread eaten at Passover.
This vile calumny was better known as ‘the blood libel’. The book was commissioned.
The novel opens in a cave in the South of France, where (in 1944) a group of Jews
are hiding. In order to pass the time, and also to engage the attention of a feral
adolescent boy, they mount an oral retelling of the Golem cycle. This material forms
the core of the novel (with, again, as in Caught on a Train, someone telling a story
while others listen) but an omniscient third-person account of the everyday life of the
refugees as they wait for liberation envelopes it. As it happens, the Allied troops don’t
arrive in time and they’re all killed, with the exception of the feral youth. It was an
unusually bleak conclusion to a children’s novel but I thought the right one. August
’44 was published in 2004 and short-listed for the Bisto Prize.
The moment I finished August ’44 I went back to Miriam Hodgson with a new idea:
a retelling of the Irish epic the Táin Bó Cuailnge or The Cattle Raid of Cooley, the
story of the invasion of Ulster by Maeve, Queen of Connaught, and the single-handed
fight against her army mounted by the semi-immortal warrior Cuchulainn. The book
was commissioned.
I had two things clear in my mind before I started. The first was I didn’t want to
write another book that was largely or completely constructed out of reported speech.
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