THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.230 - COLM TÓIBÍN

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Adam talks with Irish novelist Colm Tóibín about New York, Don Trump, whether the motivations of terrorists are worth considering, whether anything valuable came from having cancer, writing his novel Long Island (the sequel to Brooklyn), why keeping a journal is 'offensive', and the magic of Bob Dylan.This conversation was recorded via Zoom on April 17th, 2024CONTAINS VERY STRONG LANGUAGEThanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and conversation editing Podcast illustration by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSLONG ISLAND by Colm Tóibín (Audiobook narrated by Jessie Buckley) - 2024 (AUDIBLE)AMONG THE FLUTTERERS: THE POPE WEARS PRADA by Colm Tóibín - 2010 (LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS)IN RESPONSE TO 9/11 - 4th October 2001 (LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS)COLM TÓIBÍN ON DESERT ISLAND DISCS - 2016 (BBC SOUNDS)COLM TÓIBÍN ON THE VERB - 2023 (BBC SOUNDS)THE NEW YORKER FICTION PODCAST - COLM TÓIBÍN READS MARY LAVIN - 2017 (APPLE PODCASTS)40 MINUTES - HEART OF THE ANGEL - 1989 (BBC I-PLAYER)40 MINUTES - MIXED BLESSINGS - 1988 (BBC I-PLAYER)GERI Directed by Molly Dineen - 1999 (YOUTUBE) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey, Adam here with a shout out for a new podcast series that I'm acting in. It's called Up in Smoke. It's a dark, supernatural drama told in the style of a factual, true crime investigative podcast written and directed by Guy Larson and Cambria Bailey-Jones. Up in Smoke, the first two episodes are available now from your favorite podcast bin. I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man, I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, Podcats? It's Adam Buxton here. I'm talking to you on a beautiful cold evening as the sun goes down out here in Norfolk County in the last week of October 2024. My dog friend Rosie is back at home. She's curled up on the sofa, not interested in a walk this evening, but I wanted to come out. I've been cooped up all day. I'm just catching the last of the sunset. Probably by the time I finish my outro it'll be dark and then the clocks are going to go back aren't

they and then we're going to be plunged into eternal darkness. Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself. How are you doing podcats? I hope you're well. Thank you very much for downloading this episode of the podcast which features, well it's not really a rambling conversation this one, my guest is not someone who typically dwells in my comfort zone, i.e. the world of silly superficial chit-chat. He is in fact considered, not that these two are mutually exclusive, but he has been called one of Ireland's greatest novelists. He is Colm Tobin. Tobin facts. Colm was born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, on the southeastern coast of Ireland.

He was just 12 when his father died. He'd been so anxious during his father's illness that he'd developed a stutter. And it was soon afterwards that he began writing poetry and stories. After graduating from University College Dublin, Column moved to Barcelona and taught English for three years, before returning to Ireland where he worked as a journalist, columnist and editor for several Irish papers and magazines from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, going on to become the editor of Ireland's leading current affairs magazine, McGill. In the second half of the 1980s, Colm lived for a while in Argentina, writing about the trial of President Galtieri and other South American authorities accused of human rights violations. During this time, Collum was also working on his first novel,

The South, eventually published in 1990. It told the story of an Irish woman who flees to post-Civil War Spain in search of freedom from her past. I'm now quoting from the blurb on the website of his publishers, Pam Macmillan. Over a 30-year career, Colum has proved remarkably consistent. Eleven novels, no duds, each a deeply wrought, deeply felt work, his writing filled with characters who yearn for better understanding and acceptance and sometimes escape and even reinvention. This is one of the times I did quite a bit of prep before talking to a guest. I don't always but I was unfamiliar with Colum's work when I heard that we had the opportunity to talk to him. Seamus is a fan and he said that he thought it would definitely be worth it.

So I read one of his most celebrated novels, The Blackwater Lightship, published in 1999, which is about a woman, Helen, a headmistress who discovers her brother Declan is dying of AIDS and has to deal not only with losing her brother but with the painful divisions within her family brought to the fore by his condition. I also read Colum's essay collection A Guest at the Feast which begins with an account of his battle with a particularly severe form of

testicular cancer. It's a frequently funny piece. It made me think of Richard Herring talking about his own testicular cancer in his's a frequently funny piece, it made me think of Richard Herring talking about his own testicular cancer in his book Can I Have My Ball Back? But Colum's main job is not to make people laugh, like Rich, so his piece which is called Cancer, My Part in Its Downfall, becomes like the Black Water Light Ship, quite harrowing. Other essays and articles in the collection deal with personal and cultural memory, religion, politics and literature. When I spoke with Colum in April of this year, 2024, I was also halfway through reading his novel Long Island. It's the sequel to Brooklyn which was published in 2006. That was made into

a film starring Saoirse Ronan in 2015. And Long Island, which has now been published, has been a huge hit. At the very beginning of the novel, the protagonist, Ailish, discovers Tony, her husband of 20 years, has made another woman pregnant, and the revelation encourages her to take some time to reassess her life, and to return to Ireland in order to reconnect with her roots. I don't think there are plot spoilers in my conversation with Column. We do talk about a scene halfway through the book, but we do so in terms of the technical aspects of Story construction and writing which column always talks about in a fascinating way

But I don't think that we give away any key details of the story. I Also listened to several interviews with column that he's given over the years I'll put links to some of them in the description and They're all fascinating. He's a really good talker that he's given over the years. I'll put links to some of them in the description. And they're all fascinating. He's a really good talker. It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to speak with him. Slightly annoyingly though, we were originally going to record face to face, but then there were scheduling problems and we ended up having to do it via zoom with me in Norfolk and Column in his

office out in New York's Columbia University where he teaches the part of every year. But once again I had some technical problems. We spent half an hour or so fiddling around. On this occasion we didn't reschedule, we just went ahead but it was quite an annoying process of fiddling with the mic which may have had an impact on the mood of the chat a little bit and from a practical point of view the sound quality is not what I would prefer but it's perfectly audible and it hardly matters when my guest is as interesting and articulate as Colm Tobin. We recorded on April the 17th of this year. That was back when Donald Trump had just begun a trial

that the following month saw him convicted on all counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign. Despite that trial it seemed back then likely that he would win a second term. As I speak the election is just over a week away. Trump's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast will be out by the time you hear this. He was very keen to come on this podcast to have a ramble chat about whether Keir Starmer's been interfering in the election and why it's annoying when people put your favourite chopping knife in the dishwasher instead of just cleaning it up so you can use it when you want it. But we couldn't get the mic to work. Anyway, back in April, Colm shared his thoughts about, among other things, what a second Donald Trump term would look like,

why he disagreed with Mary Beard in the wake of 9-11, that the motivations of terrorists should be at least considered, whether cancer was a valuable experience, why he feels keeping a journal is offensive, and he speaks about the magic of bobbles. Dylan that is. Back at the end for a couple of brief recommendations but right now with Colm Tobin here we go. Focus first on this, then concentrate on that Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat Yes, yes, yes I was interested to know how things were in New York. I haven't been there for a long time. I wanted to ask what your life was like out there.

I find New York very quiet. I live on the Upper West Side at 116th, which is very close to Columbia University. And one of the things is it's very like living in a village. And all the stuff about the city that doesn't sleep has really got worse with the pandemic where restaurants tend to close about nine. Often they're closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. So it's a

funny city with this great reputation for energy, it's great reputation for sort of culture, but at the moment most of Broadway is dark, most of off-Broadway is simply not there. So it's a pretty quiet place in New York and it's a very good place for work, it's a very good place for reading, and it's a pretty quiet place in New York, and it's a very good place for work, it's a very good place for reading, and it's a long winter, and so you stay indoors a lot, and all the myths about it are probably untrue. Is everyone obsessed with the Trump trial at the moment? No.

People in general who live here don't ever mention his name. You see it if you have a television, but I don't have a television. So you can go through weeks here with friends without his name ever being mentioned. You see it on the newspapers. It dominates in all sorts of other ways. But there's such fear, I think, here, such a sense that if he took over the next time, it would be much more brutal, that there would be a sort of violence included in it, that he would mean business the next time, he would know much more about government, he would know what people to bring in, and he would know where his enemies were.

And his enemies effectively are in the big universities and in the big cities. And therefore, you know, being in Colombia and being in New York, there's certainly a feeling that an extraordinary enemy would arrive with extraordinary power as the President of the United States does. So that's the reason why there's almost no one mentioning his name. I mean, he probably will get in though. It's really unclear because I'm the last person who should be consulted because I got it so I mean he probably will get in though. It's really unclear because I'm the last person who should be consulted because I got it so wrong the last time.

Like a lot of people I just didn't think there was any chance of being elected. So on the night of the election when he won I realised I must never comment on an American election again because it was so wrong. Meanwhile back in Ireland things looked more positive. Yes. I thought it was very elegant the way that Leo Radker, who was a Taoiseach, the way he resigned. He took us as far as St Patrick's Day and he handed over, I think he would, to a younger person who's been a colleague of his who is able as much as Leo was able.

And so they're all facing in now to the big beast which is how do you keep Sinn Fein out of government in Ireland? And it may be that we've got to give up the project, giving up that feeling that democracy itself would be damaged by the arrival of certain people who are around the Sinn Féin party.

This is the way that terrorist groups come into democracy. They come in slowly, they come in gradually, they come in one step and then another later. This has been the history of Ireland to a large extent. In other words, that after the Civil War in 1922, 23, the Fianna Fáil Party came into the Parliament in 1926 and went into government in 1932 and remained a very stable government and a very stable political party once they were in government. And so perhaps we just, people like me who would have to hold their noses as the party that seems to me to have been closely allied to the IRA will

eventually take power in Ireland and certainly I would have viewed this with horror a few years ago, I still do, but as it's more likely to occur then I'm just more likely to learn to hold my nose. I was interviewing Mary Beard the other day and in the course of prepping for that I was reading the letter that she wrote to the LRB after 9-11 and then I read your response beneath I didn't realize that you had written a response but I was scrolling down and reading everything and it happened to be a coincidence that I was going to talk to you a couple of days later. And do you remember that exchange? Or do you

remember your letter to the LRB in response to hers? What happened was that the LRB asked a good number of their contributors to comment on 9-11. One of them was Mary Beard. So it wasn't actually a letter she wrote as much as a piece she had in the paper. A short piece, which was, I mean, I think a lot of the general, regular contributors had those short pieces. And when I saw all those short pieces, I realized that perhaps there was a need for a response.

In other words, that there was an idea that somehow or other, because these people had flown these planes and had killed all these people, that they had somehow a right to be heard. And I just needed to point out that perhaps they didn't. Yes, although I suppose, well your point in your letter that you made was that you had spoken to people that you knew in Ireland who knew members of the IRA or the INLA or the UDA or the UVF and you asked them what they were like at the age of 10 and all those people told you that each child displayed a nasty early sign of terrorism. One of them spoke, I'm quoting now,

one of them spoke for many others when he described his schoolmate, the embryonic terrorist as a resentful little cunt. And it sort of resonates with the way that I feel as well. But also, Mary Beard's not totally insane when she's saying that, you know, these people are motivated by principle on some level, or do you think that that's not even worth getting into? Especially as these are educated, you know, middle-class people, they have been radicalized, but they have been radicalized on a kind of intellectual level in some way, or do you think not at all? I think if they wanted to run for election, it'd be very interesting to hear them

but and the idea that they're going to take planes up in the air and Burn people alive. I have to say that after first thing you have to say about 9-eleven was that it was a crime and Then you have you know, in other words that anyone connected to it And then you have, in other words, that anyone connected to it is a criminal, or at least there's a prima facie case against them. But if you start saying that because they did that, it gives them a special right to speak and we must listen to them, and that they were somehow impelled to behave as they did by circumstances, in other words, this whole idea that the empire, the American empire, you know, bore down on them so brutally.

What else could they do except learn to fly planes into buildings? And the reply to that is, well, you know, there are, there may be places in which there are no other options. For example, Yemen could be one example. But Saudi Arabia is not one such place. In other words, that the problems with Saudi Arabia are actually with the monarchy in Saudi Arabia before it's with any other one. So the idea that somehow, I suppose it really arises from Ireland, that because you go out

with a gun and you blow up some people with a car bomb, that then you have a right to speak. And my reply to that is you do not, as a result of doing these things, have a right to be heard that doesn't give you a right to speak and my reply to that is you do not as a result of doing these things have a right to be heard that doesn't give you a right to be heard it gives others a duty to arrest you. I don't think Mary Beard was saying that they had a special right to be heard like she wasn't I don't think she was suggesting they were somehow admirable or courageous. Oh no, no, no, you're absolutely right. But she said that maybe we should listen. And when I saw maybe we should listen, I saw red. I thought maybe we should not listen.

But then where does that get you? It gets you down to negotiations which took place in Northern Ireland leading up to the Good Friday Agreement, where you will say simply to the IRA is if you lay down your, you can do what you always could do, you could run for election. You could run for election, you could run for election. We've been saying it to you for so long now that maybe this time, someone will actually pay attention. You can run for election. I read your essay collection, Guest at the Feast, very much enjoyed it.

I wanted to ask you how your balls were, or your ball. Yeah, I mean, I'm like Hitler, I just have one big ball. But no, I had testicular cancer, which is an unusual idea for someone in their 60s, but seemingly you can have one last surge, which I love the idea of, and this one window in which there's a two or three year period in your early 60s where you can still get testicular cancer.

And I was one of those people. And it involved, yeah, it involved, there are funny euphemisms that come up in this business where the doctor said to me, are you fasting? Have you had breakfast? And I knew immediately what he meant, that if I hadn't had breakfast,

he could do the operation soon, like this afternoon, in an hour, in our two hours, meaning that he would remove one of my testicles. Ha ha ha. So I said, no, I had no breakfast, so it was fine. I was fasting, so I went over across to the hospital, met a nice anesthetistist. Anesthetist. And the anaesthetist put me to sleep and when I woke up I had only one ball.

This was 2018, is that right? That's correct, yes. That's six years ago now. And I do a scan twice a year and I'm clear. I mean, I don't have any sign of any cancer, and I haven't had really any sign of cancer for the last five years. So I only now have to do a scan every year. So things are improving.

Yeah. Good. I'm glad to hear it. But was it a particularly aggressive form of testicular cancer that you had then? Because I know other people who've had a testicle removed and the chemo that they had and the experience that they had getting through it was nothing like as severe as the one that you described. Yes, I think that it had to be also people who have testicular cancer are normally in their 20s. Mine was particularly severe. Whatever way the cancer had spread,

it had gone into, it hadn't gone into lymph nodes, which is the dangerous one, but it had gone, there was some sort of tumor on the liver. There was something on the lungs. And so yeah, it had to be very aggressive and very quick. And so it was, and it created enormous anguish, and it was very unexpected. It's hard to put words sometimes on the levels of anguish, on the idea of how can you get

through the next five minutes. As a result of the chemo, the physical effects of the chemo? Yes, the effects, the chemo caused me immense, depression is not the word, it's something much, much deeper than that. Active. Yeah, I was going to ask because the superficial similarities are, you know, with depression, the things that you were describing,

just not having no thoughts and loss of taste. And although, you know, that's not necessarily anything to do with depression, but yeah, anguish you talk about and Loss of taste and an advanced smell that you, that you smell became extraordinary. If you went onto the street, as anyone approached, you could, you could smell any sort of aftershave, perfume, any smell. Whereas the taste disappeared,

the smell seemed to become more intense. You couldn't listen to music, and no one could understand that. Some would say, well, why don't you just put something on and try? And it was very hard to explain. It sounded like jumbled confusion, any sort of music, including music I love.

Like, that idea that music changed its form as it came towards you into confusion, not only confusion, but nasty jumbled thing that you had to turn off and you couldn't read. I mean you couldn't read and you couldn't sleep. You can't read, you can't sleep. See, you have no taste, which means that if you come to drink water, water could be sulfuric acid. And so you look at the water and you think,

how am I gonna know what this is? And so you don't tend to want to drink. And you don't want to eat, you've absolutely no appetite. The only great thing they've done in cancer treatment now is they seem to have dealt with nausea that I didn't vomit at any point. And see, there was a time when you would that they have a new pill,

and that new pill manages to stop all that question of spending the night in the bathroom. The other thing is there's a new funny injection that if you're not producing enough, I don't know whether they're red cells or white cells or some sort of thing that you're not producing enough of, there's an injection. And it costs a thousand bucks,

it costs a thousand euro or a thousand pounds per injection. And what it does is it increases the, whatever the marrow, you know, whatever the bones make, it increases. The problem is that a week later, it just says on the box that you could get severe pain. And I woke at about four in the morning, on a Saturday morning when the Pope was in Dublin, Pope Francis, meaning the city is sort of cut in two

and the hospital is on the other side of the city. And I phoned the hospital and say, I have this, and they know immediately what it is. And they say, have you got liquid morphine, which I did have, just they'd given me this little bottle of liquid morphine. I hadn't used it. And they told me exactly how much to take.

But the pain in the meantime was as though your pelvic bones were cracking, as though the actual whatever was going on inside them was going to make them burst. So it was a level of pain going all around, you know, the whole sort of middle of you that was really active pain, something moving towards further pain, and then the further pain coming. And they just said, if this pain is still there in about an hour, call us back. But actually I didn't because the liquid morphine just got rid of it.

But it was a big shock. And what was worse was that I was stoned for the whole weekend because whatever the liquid morphine did, it just put me as one stoned fellow was watching the Pope on television. What stopped you going mad then? Was it that you weren't even sufficiently mentally engaged to go nuts? I mean, I think what's strange is how much resilience you do end up having.

And that even though, I mean I did speak to the Lord, I said the Lord, Lord I don't believe in you and I won't be getting involved in you after this. So don't think this is the beginning of some relationship. But I would like to get through the next five minutes. And there were days when I did that, I did five minutes, five minutes, five minutes, five minutes, five minutes, on the basis that

if I contemplate the next hour, it will be impossible to do that because the level of error. I'm using the word anguish, but it isn't as though there is a word. You just simply find that the following day, you have got through the previous day. There was no question of, I didn't for a moment contemplate suicide, not for a second. And that's interesting because you think, well that's surely what I'm talking about.

No it's not. Whatever it is, it's just that it's very difficult to carry on. But then you find strategies and ways to do that. And also just time goes by. The strange part of this is that time goes by. It's much easier to be in hospital, by the way, because hospital is a place where there are great distractions of nurses coming in, all sorts of blood pressure and blood tests

and all sorts of checking your tongue to see if it's right. And the people from the kitchen want to know if you want any sausages or something. So there's a constant sense in a hospital of life going on. But once you're home, it becomes very, very dark. And were you able to have any productive thoughts or make notes of any kind? Oh, none. I mean, really, really none. It just wasn't like that, the idea of it. It just sounds so horrific. It was really, really, really idea of it. Ugh. It just sounds so horrific. Yeah, yeah.

It's really cheating. But the thing is, then it's over. And it's hard to explain. And the reason why, in a way, the doctors and nurses were so good at it, and generally seemed sometimes, slightly, you know, they didn't seem over concerned about, you know, when you complained about not feeling good, because they would end up seeing you three months later, sailing in one day, just to say, oh look, I'm off to Spain, I'm just stopping by to do the scan, and

they would think you are the scarecrow who was here six months ago, looking like death, and here you are with your eyebrows growing again and you're smiling so that they tend to see people and I mean I mean I mean unless it's a terminal you know that's a terminal cancer but that with chemo they often find people are three months later I've forgotten about the chemo. Mm-hmm and so how long was it before you were sort of more or less normal? I started treatment probably in June, July 2018, and I wasn't teaching in the second half of the year. So I went back to Columbia University in January, mid-January, the following year,

without telling anyone I'd been sick at all. I thought that would be good because it would just get it out of me. No one would be stopping me to know how I was. I mean, I know I looked like a scarecrow, but I went back to work. And I simply managed my day very carefully. But so basically I lost six months. I mean, I see it like that, and I wonder if a lot

of other cancer people who have gone through chemo and come out the other side to see it as a last time. Hmm but I guess nothing is a total waste I mean it's an experience a powerful experience is it useful do you think as far as your writing goes? No I mean I think if you need cancer to cheer you you know to get your writing going then that really is something wrong with your writing. I think if you need cancer to let you know how valuable life is, then there's been something wrong with your perception of life before you had cancer. So yeah, no, I don't see it as, you know, I can't see it as a gift.

And I can't see it as something that did me any good. It was just irritating, isn't the word for it, but it was a complete waste of my time and energy. ["Spring Day"] I'm going to go to the bathroom. I was reading the Blackwater Lightship and I was wondering about how you manage a reader when they know that they're in for a rough ride. They know what the book is about, broadly speaking. And they know it's not going to be easy. It's going to be intense. Like in the first reading the first few scenes with Helen at home, domestic scenes, normal life, but you know there's this terrible thing just over the hill, this discovery that she will make.

And so is there a special way that you handle the reader in those pages? I wonder if it isn't the opposite where if the book isn't like that then I have no idea how to do it. So that maybe you think that not very many readers will follow you in this but that if you tried anything else it would look like a set of tricks and it would look like a set of evasions and it would not be interesting for me and I don't think it would be something I would like to foist on a reader. In Australia I was signing a book for a woman she seemed very nice and then she turned and said to me, how many people die in this one? And I smiled and said I

think quite a few actually and she smiled back meaning yeah this is what this is what these books are for Not that their self-help books, but that it's not that's not as though they spare the reader in the dramas. They present any Set of realities You know in other words and that is that there are no evasions and it's not as though they're there really to entertain you Well, there's a there's I, I mean it depends how you define entertainment. It's some form of entertainment, isn't it? I suppose it is in that you enter into another world, but nonetheless what you're trying to do I suppose is intensify the experience, so that the experience of being alive is distilled and intensified and given a sort of rhythm.

But it doesn't mean that you find easy consolation in that. That it may be that you actually intensify a sense of darkness, a sense of doom. But yeah, but you are right, in which case you're turning the pages following the story and that there is a sense of being engaged by something like a story, which is in some way or other a form of entertainment, yeah. And is it important to try and find meaning in it, or is that nothing that you're... I suppose I would worry about the word meaning, you know, that if you're trying to say, is there a way you could sum it up or does it add somehow to knowledge? Does it intensify things enough that you can put into a phrase what life now means? It means more. I don't think you should try and do that as a novelist. I think that sounds heavy handed and I think

you would fail. I think you've got to leave as much open as possible, to create as many images as possible and just see where they will go. You're finding pattern, but then you're destroying pattern, you're disentangling as much as you're connecting. And so it may be what you're offering the reader is a sort of strange confusion, a sort of patterned rhythmic confusion. But

again, confusion is probably too strong a word. And there's a lot of moments in the books. I'm halfway through reading Long Island now. There's a moment there where Ailish is being driven to the airport by Tony she's found out about his infidelity and she is taking a break going to visit Ireland and she is in her mind considering warning Tony that if he takes this baby in that she will leave him and she's aware that he is aware they're kind of connected and she feels almost resentful that he has an aura of vulnerability or innocence even that he is cultivating she feels in this moment in the car. Anyway, just I can't think of too many other people who are able to capture those moments

the way that you can and they often pop up in your books and I'm interested to know how you go about recreating them. Are you simply imagining them sitting there imagining similar moments in your life or do you experience them and then go home and make a note of them? The first thing you do, I mean it's really important this journey to the airport where it would be so easy to have a screaming match between them, her accusing him and him trying to defend himself. It would be so easy for them to be silent the whole journey. So what I'm trying to do now is the first of all look at the worst-case scenarios and then say they won't work.

The reader will know that these are possible. I've got to find some other way to deal with these two people on the way to the end. So it's not about remembering my own experience as much as imagining now what has to happen. And what's important is that they've been married for a very long time, for more than 20 years. They know one another. They live a very isolated life, in a way, in a suburban house, and therefore, she knows that he's beginning a thing where he can stop her saying something

that she needs to say without having to speak. Somehow or other, in the way, even he's driving, in the way he just goes quiet and just seems soft, she isn't able to say to him, if you take that child in, I will leave you. But she also knows, if she says this, it will then come to pass. But if she doesn't say it,

things will be open still between them. So saying it will be a final thing. It will mean the children will come with her. It will mean we'll be divorced. It will mean the end of something. And in the car as they go, we have this extraordinary tension, not between them, but between things they both might say that they don't say and ways he's controlling her, even though she doesn't speak.

And what you have to do with this is do it very, very slowly. Have it in your head exactly how it works for each moment. Write it, I work in longhand, and then later on type it so you can see it and start cutting and start adding and what you're doing really here is you're holding and wielding time. How much time are they silent? How much time must have last before she said something? When she's thinking of saying something, how well is it formulated?

Are you sure that her motive, if I say I will leave you, this she knows will mean more, that her feeling in other words will solidify having spoken? I would have to worry about is this a theory from some philosopher about what speech, what language does to experience and is therefore too heavy-handed in this conversation between these two people. And then I realize, no, no, no, no, it's important. She knows very well. She doesn't want to say it, but she does also want to say it.

So if she says it, whatever it will do to her, it will make her feel more. It will add to her feeling, her speech. And she's also realizing, slightly bitterly, that he's just doing something, something. And she knows him enough to know what it is, to stop her speaking. And so the journey goes, and the journey goes. But I have to be really careful not to add one more thing to that that will make the reader feel he's working from some theory of communication, some theory of what language does. He's working out of some set of, I suppose, preordained images that are already determined about these two people. What I want to do is leave it open that she might say

something. In one second, if the car were to, you know, if the car were to stop for a moment, she might just say it then. So the car were to you know if the car were to stop for a moment she might just say it then so the reader has to not know because the characters themselves don't know and you have to keep that going for as long as you think it will work now you have to make a lot of judgments here and so you so basically what you're doing is you're writing first and then you're reading and you're reading what you've been writing with making sure that you're not pushing your luck, or you're not being heavy-handed, or you're not offering the characters a theory that is preordained.

So you're simply in that sort of journey, they don't know how this is going to end. These two people don't know how to handle this. This is new for them. And therefore, you have to keep working on their softness, on their fact that they haven't determined anything. Therefore, you don't determine for them. And so, it's slow work, and it requires a lot of judgment.

And it might be the whole scene will have to go. You know, do that sort of thing, just say, out. And it's a lovely feeling, it often happens in the morning where you just say, out, out. Take two pages and just, you know, if they're typed, just delete them. And if they're written in longhand, just cross them out and just move on.

In other words, that you don't need them to go to the airport at all. That simply she packs her bags and you can very, very easily go in. On her first morning in Ireland and you've moved the time and the reader would accept that, you don't need that scene in the car. But I felt I did because I felt I needed to get them alone where they weren't having an argument and where you were watching a connection between them that was almost tender but was certainly very close and

that was being wielded or played with by certainly by Tony but also by Eilish that they were actually operating as a couple, attempting to protect themselves from the outside world so they could in some way or other in the future consider a life together again. So I felt the scene was needed. That's what novel writing is, you know, that you're constantly trying to make those scenes. I mean, I hesitate to say subtle, but you're trying to make them as unpredictable as possible,

that you haven't preordained it, and you're trying to leave as much Available to possibility something could be said something could happen. They could even say something tender But they don't but it could you've got to leave that open and so you go on like that every day It's a funny way to live when you're aware of the dynamics of relationships in that minute way and you're able to analyze them the way you do, is that intimidating for the people that you have relationships with in your personal life?

Not really. In other words, this is a sort of work. But certainly there are moments where someone says to you, someone but you're with says to you, you know, and Did did you when you wrote that were you thinking about us? And you always say no, no But you are sometimes and people I mean members of your family I think you need to concentrate fiercely on the characters themselves I think if you say this is just exactly like the time we were going to the beach, and you

said this and I didn't reply, but I was going to say the following, I think you could really lose your novel in trying to, in a way, compensate for your own failures in your own emotional life by giving to the characters. I think you have to give the characters enough autonomy as you're working that requires self-suppression on your part, that you're not actually putting in what happened yesterday, that you're giving them everything. Yeah, that's difficult. I mean, yeah, I can't imagine how you would do that.

The temptation just to refer to real moments must be, I would think that that would be overwhelming. Not if you have a very dull life. I mean if you have a pretty stable emotional life, then there's really no temptation to put what happened yesterday because what happened yesterday is really no interest. It's not as though you're suppressing what's really important in your own life. It's just that what's happened in your own life is just, you know, it's just usually pretty dull and pretty calm. Although you have advised writers to write anything

regardless of how others might be affected, i.e. that if they do have something juicy to draw on, then go for it and don't worry too much about people getting bent out of shape is that fair? Yeah I mean you find with people saying oh my my granny will really mind after after wait till my granny dies and then I'll write the great short story and the answer is you know I've never known I've never known any writer really to hold back if there was some story that needs to be told or they were working on that was going to offend someone.

I've never really known anyone to hold back. I've known people to claim they might or would or will. But in general, writers tend to write whatever is on their mind. I mean, part of the reason is that something comes into your mind in a very peculiar and mysterious way. It isn't merely something happened yesterday, I need to write it down today.

It is that something enters your spirit, mysteriously and suddenly, and it is a story with a shape. It is a rhythm. It is a, I suppose an image or a plot, a plot being an action that has consequences, and it comes as rhythm. Now the rhythm part means that you're sort of

impelled to do something with it, as a singer might be with a song and so you write it down. And if you start saying oh I can't write the next bit because of something that will offend somebody that that seems a minor impediment really to progress the larger impediment is just getting the sentences right. The conversation nowadays is about whose stories you have the right to tell. Yes, I think this is a really interesting debate. I've just written a book about James Baldwin, which is coming out later this year. And there was an interesting moment in the 1960s when William Styron, the American novelist, wrote a book called The Confessions of Nat Turner.

And Nat Turner was a slave, and he had left a short document, so he had something to go on. William Staran was, he was not only white, but he was a sort of white privileged man, and he wrote the novel in the first person voice of a runaway slave. And this caused immense trouble,

because there was a book produced in retaliation by 10 black African-American intellectuals to say you know he's got it wrong in every way but not merely that he has no right to do this this is not his story to tell. James Baldwin intervened in his intervention was just he has told a story ours. In In other words, that story of a runaway slave belongs to white and black people in the same way, Baldwin was claiming. I worry about that now.

I worry that if I were to suddenly get a rhythm of an African American of the 19th century, a rhythm of speech, a tone, a sense, I would get it wrong in some way. That somehow or other, it's a novel I couldn't write, and maybe it's even a novel I shouldn't write. Now I think part of the reason is that I would just get the words wrong. In other words, even in the 20th century in America,

I'm unsure as to when people start using Icebox, and when they use Fridge. Like just the basic words words like automobile, car. There are so many things I think that are distant between our societies. And so the problem then is you read say the two best descriptions of gay sex between men are by my view, they're by Pat Barker and Annie Prue.

And so I don't know where that leaves us, but it is a complicated story men are by my view, they're by Pat Barker and Annie Prue. And so I don't know where that leaves us, but it is a complicated story, and I think at the moment, if anyone asks me, if I got a brilliant idea and some wonderful opening paragraphs for a novel set among, say, Native Americans, among African Americans, I would have to add, I don't think I could even write it if it was about white Americans on the base,

that's just not my story to tell. And it says the details, the rich business, a novel is a thousand details. What if you started, no matter what you were doing, getting the details so wrong, or having to strain to find the details, details in dialogue, details, but more than that the experience of being African-American

say in the 20th century is so distant from mine that trying to imagine it is not something I'm sure that I could do. Now and if you can't do it then attempting to do it as some way or other to say, oh, it doesn't matter, the fact that I'm white and you're black, well, I think it bloody does, actually. You haven't a clue what it's like to A, walk down the street, B, you know, B, like, watch the television, C, watch Trump in his coded racism. You know, so you'll be

constantly, I think, wrong as a white guy, a white Irish guy, trying to write maybe African-American but also maybe even Southern American. Also, I think I might have trouble writing Northern Irish, even though it's only a few miles away from where I was born. Just the sense of what happened there seems to have been so special and so particular that to try and enter into it and to try and describe what it was like to be, say, a Catholic in Derry, I'm not sure I could get that funny mixture of cockiness and pride and ways of moving around.

It's so articulate and brilliant. And the other hand, a sort of sense of oppression and fear. I just honestly don't think I know all that. The other one, the big one though, for me, is the Holocaust. Could I set a novel in a place that was close to Auschwitz? And the answer is no. No, I couldn't, because I work with irony, I work with a sort of whispering distance,

I work with aftermath, I work with sort of shadow, and these things, these skills, you might call them, these methods won't work when you're dealing with the brutality. I suppose as extensive and as unending and as brutal as that, just my particular method as a novelist will crumble against that. Does that prevent you from being able to read other people's attempts at writing about those things?

Yes, it makes me very uneasy. Speaking of things that make you uneasy to read, I was interested to see you writing about your mother's journals, finding, was it that she had torn out a few pages and left those pages behind? There were a few sad, terrible pages about coming back from a beautiful holiday in Spain. And those holidays mattered to her so much when she was in her 50s and 60s. And she would describe the beaches and the days they spent and the journeys and the little hotels and all that.

And then she would come back and just describing what it was like on a Monday morning to go back into her job where she worked as a bookkeeper. And just the sheer drudgery of it. Hard to read. Do you keep a journal yourself? Oh no I don't. I mean I really don't. The idea of writing for me is that you write for a reader and the idea of sitting down at night to write for nobody that you close the diary afterwards. Honestly the idea of it isn't merely a waste of time, it's

a sort of parody of writing. And also with novels, if you can't remember something, then it's absolutely no use to you. Writing it down is a way of keeping it away from you so that in the building of images for a novel, in the getting of ideas, in the sort of slow accretion, it has to happen in your mind. If it doesn't happen in your mind, it's no use to you. So it's a process. Writing it down would just foul it in some way,

and it would snarl the process. But do you think maybe that's just the way your mind works? I mean, for most people, things move through your mind fairly quickly, and it's hard to hold on to them a lot of the time but do you think that that's always an indication that something is not worth holding on to? I mean I love when I think is it Gwendolyn or Cecily in the importance of being earnest keeps her diary as if she's

a teenager, a teenage girl, because she wants something sensational to read on the train her own diary. But some writers, I think, need a diary. Henry James' diaries are interesting because he just only writes down ideas that might come in the future. So it's interesting. You can trace the beginning of something, but I don't really see that it made that much difference to him.

And there may be writers who depend on diaries, but for me, the very idea of it is anathema. It's not merely I'm too lazy or that I don't have time or something. I think that the form of diary itself is offensive in some way. is Offensively in some way Offensive it's good therapy they say oh Yeah Yeah

Journaling is supposed to be good down all about yourself and and I'm feeling satisfied and closing it. I think that's the truth Yeah, I know it seems to me the opposite of therapy and it seems to me that writing a diary would be more likely to fool yourself. Also, I think that if you write your diary at night, you're likely to feel sorry for yourself and you're likely also to find some of the friends you've been meeting during the day just less than helpful generally in your life. You're likely to get all grievance-led, all resentful, and those I think in general were better to keep those sort of emotions to ourselves. Did you hesitate to read the pages of your mother's journal that you found?

No, I was, there were somebody else's journals, she was dead, and there they were, and I read them. And you were glad that you did so. I'm asking because I have lots of journals that my father left behind and I'm not sure about the wisdom of reading them. Yes, I wonder if there have been big loads of journals and if I would have been happy to have gone through them all page by page. Yeah, I probably wouldn't actually. Oh what have I done with my keys? I had them literally one minute ago. I put them down to take a call. I thought I left them in the hall. Oh what have I done with my keys. You're a Bob Dylan fan, are you still? Yeah, I went to see him in Barcelona last summer

and I had a good seat in the opera house and it was amazing because we were all so old. He actually didn't look that old because we couldn't really see him. The way he lit was very clever. People think women are vain, but Jesus, you should see the way he took care of how he managed the fact that we couldn't really get a sense of how his legs were doing or how his hair or how his face.

But what we could do is we could see each other in the audience. Some people had brought their kids, but it struck me that more people had brought their grandkids. People were on all sorts of ingenious walkers and different type of machines that were allowed them to move from one place to another. I felt young among the old, meaning we were all old. And looking around you think, geez, how do we get so old? And it wasn't that we were all ancient hippies.

We all just looked like old accountants and old fellows who'd been working in offices. This was the one thing that we shared, that there was one moment somewhere in our lives where he fell and sang, it's all over now, baby blue, or strike another matchless start anew. And obviously wanting him to sing his old songs was nonsense because he couldn't go around the world as a troubadour just singing

blowing in the wind all so he was singing these new songs with a new sort of rhythm it struck me that he was saving his breath and that he was finding therefore a new rhythm to do that so he was tending to go la da da la da da da da and the rhythms tended to go like that rather than you know, how many times must a man walk out before you call. So he was doing something entirely new with his voice. He was very charming at the end because he came to the front, still carefully lit, and he thanked all the members of his band. And it was when

they said ladies and gentlemen Mr. Bob Dill and he came out onto this opera stage, it was the Opera House in Barcelona, I just felt God this is that he has really had an extraordinary effect on the world, this man, with these beautiful songs, he's uncompromising, also his irony, his wit, his mischief, and also the yearning, the love songs. Just how much love. And Bob Dylan, when the children were babies, we were all on the beach. And Sarah, Sarah. And I love when he goes into, I suppose, what's called language poetry, rhymes and

songs where the meaning doesn't seem to add up, like Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowland, you know, with your mercury lips in the missionary time, with your mercury lips. It's just so beautiful. He's a big hero, he's a big great guy, and he just made me laugh. And then some of the songs are so sad And yeah, I just think he's great. Does your affection for him extend to an enthusiasm for the traveling Wilburys? I am the traveling Wilburys about to go on a book tour I was looking at the schedule as I am I am going to model myself on the traveling Wilburys

But I wasn't quite sure even who they were because I don't really know much about all that. I just like those, some of those Bob Dylan albums. George Harrison was in it, wasn't he? Yeah, yeah, yeah, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lin of ELO. Oh my Lord. And they, when they were together,

they were still in their forties. I think Roy Orbison was in his early 50s and I didn't realize he was so young when he died. He was only like 52 or something. Of course, he had a great voice, didn't he? Yeah, amazing. He was so sad, Christ softly lonely one. You know, he was always doing that sort of stuff,

Roy Orbison. You could go through, it was like Sylvia Plath, you could go through a time, a year, you're having your life blighted by him. And then you went on to Larry Cohen or something. And I was, yeah, God in dream, a candy-coloured clown they call a sailman, tiptoes through my room every night. Just as God is, go to sleep, everything is alright. Do you remember that? Yeah, of course, I love that. Well, that was used so well by David Lynch in...

Yeah. Blue Velvet. ["Blue Velvet"] Wait. Continue. Woo-hoo. ["Blue Velvet"] Hey, welcome back. That was Colm Tobin talking to me there and me laying some deep level David Lynch info over the only bit of the interview where Colm was laughing in a relaxed

way after his Roy Orbison rendition. I trampled all over the chuckles there. Apologies. But I was very grateful to him for his time and for persevering with the interview, especially after a really frustrating, maybe the most frustrating technical setup that I've had while I've been doing this podcast. Every now and again someone from Columbia University would pop their head through the door and try and help out and see if they could configure the microphone correctly so that we could get it to work and all the while Colin was getting more frustrated. Understandably his time is valuable. He didn't see why

we couldn't just make do with the sound that in the end we did make do with. Which is fair isn't it? But I just felt like well but we could we could make it work. Let's just try and make it work, shall we? But then minutes turned into 30 minutes. And in the end, it got a little bit stressful, but I'm really grateful that we went through with it and it all worked out, even though he thought keeping a journal was an offensive waste of time.

When he said that about journals, I slightly took it personally, which was pathetic really. In the description of today's podcast, as well as a few Tobin related nuggets, you have links to a couple of brilliant 40 minutes documentaries that I saw the other day BBC four were having a 40 minutes night

40 minutes was a documentary strand that ran on the BBC in the 80s and early 90s. I Didn't watch too much Serious telly in those days, but I suppose towards the end of the 80s I started becoming aware of it and I do remember one of the first ones I ever saw was one they repeated the other night and it was called Heart of the Angel by Molly Deneen. She did a very enjoyable profile of Jerry Halliwell in the wake of Jerry's departure from the Spice Girls. That came out in 1999. It was called Jerry and I've put a link to that in the description as well. But all her stuff is very good. This is one

that she did in 1989 about the people that work at Angel Tube Station in Islington, North London. tube station in Islington, North London, and it was three years before the Angel got a big renovation. So it is a glimpse of the tail end of another age. It just looks so... you know it's 1989 but it looks like the 60s down in Angel tube and some of the characters working there as well seem like throwbacks to a completely different age in a way that's very charming and nostalgic. The program provides a humorous account of 48 hours in the life of the Tube station, from the daily round of fraught commuters, overburdened lifts and cancelled trains to the nightly activities when the fluffers, women who clean human hair and rubbish off the tracks to avoid a fire hazard, and the

gangs of men who work with pickaxes in almost pitch black conditions to renovate parts of the track, spring into action to prepare the line for the following day. That stuff with the people who work down in the tunnels at night time really does look Dickensian. I mean I suppose there are still people who work down there in the tunnels at night. That is a hard job. Holy shit. Anyway there's a link to that documentary on the BBC iPlayer and there's also the other one that I watched the other week another 40 minutes documentary called mixed blessings which I hadn't seen and that was also was that 1988 maybe

there's around then late 80s two women Margaret Wheeler and Blanche Rylat go into a maternity unit to have their baby girls the mothers strike up a friendship gossiping late into the night, but the next morning things start to go wrong. Margaret is convinced she has been given Blanche's baby. So begins an extraordinary story of heartache and humour, of friendship and maternal love. Had they got the wrong babies? The Rilots refused even to consider the possibility of a mistake.

Besides, they had grown to love their changeling child. There's certainly some very poignant moments and a lot of big mad questions that hang in the air about how these people have adjusted to the situation they find themselves in, both the children and the parents. But it's got loads of amazing details, not least the fact that Margaret Wheeler, one of the mothers, wrote to George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright, in the late 1940s when she was feeling tortured by this sense that she had the wrong daughter and wanted to get his perspective on it. She was a fan. She just wrote to him and he was impressed by her letter and wrote back. He was 91 at the time and they struck up a correspondence that lasted for the last seven years of Bernard Shaw's life. There's a book of their letters called Letters from Margaret

which was published in 1992. Margaret is talking about her love of literature and Bernard Shaw teasing her says you cannot afford to buy books neither can I nobody can nowadays when a serious book costs from 18 to 25 shillings if you spend the money they cost on drink you will be better company at home and elsewhere. Mick's Blessings is the name of that doc. Anyway there's a link again to the iPlayer for that one too. Alright, that's it for this week. Thanks to Seamus Murphy-Mitchell for his production support.

Conversation, editing, recommendation, guidance, etc. Much appreciated Seamus. Thanks to Helen Green, she does the illustration for this podcast. Thanks to all at Acast. Thanks most especially to you. I hope you enjoyed this one. And you know, I'm very grateful for the fact that you keep coming back, even when the episodes are quite different. Sometimes I think it's a good thing to try and keep it varied now and then. Other times I think, well, it'd be better if you just did silly chats every time. That's what people would prefer.

I don't know. It's good to be out of your depth, right? Yeah, of course it is. Doesn't mean to say you can't have a sonic hug at the end, Does it? Who doesn't want a sonic hug? Don't answer that. Come over here. Hey, good to see you. Till next time, we share the same outer space. Go carefully. I love you. Bye! Like and subscribe.

Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, please like and subscribe. Give me like a smile and a thumbs up, nice like a fun, whammy bums up. I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die

I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die

I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm gonna die I'm going to be a good boy. Thanks for watching!