Booker Prize winner Paul Lynch: Feminine power is the social glue that holds us all together

Grace is a historical novel about survival, discussing the hard times that Grace suffered during the Great Famine of Ireland. During her travels, she met both kind and violent people. Did including diverse characters help you write a more comprehensive text?

Grace is a novel about silence, about the transmission of silence that remains to this day in Ireland regarding our painful national trauma during the Irish famine in the late 1840s.

From one generation to the next, silence was handed down, and the Irish adopted an attitude of avoidance, indeed, a failure of admission: starvation didn't happen to us; it happened to other families, or it happened in another townland.

We are a nation of survivors, and yet no stories exist other than what was collected by the folklore commission in the 1920s, many of those stories taking on the shape of myth.

What is the source of this silence? What did people do to survive? Hiding within that silence, of course, is the trauma or guilt of those who had the means to survive. But to truly understand the problem, I needed to get to the root of the issue. The novel needed to push into territory that the Irish famine novel had not explored before.

At the same time, the book is also a coming-of-age novel and a picaresque — a form which invites many characters into its grasp. And so, as Grace is sent out onto the road to survive, it is her good fortune to meet many rich and strange characters.

While I do think the novel is pushing into modern terrain, at the same time, it is in many ways an homage to the great 19th-century novels.  

Grace is not the only historical novel you've written. You also wrote Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow. What kind of work goes into writing such novels?

I don't truly consider these novels historical novels in the way that such fiction is generally considered. Of course, research is required, and you must give your universe physics and a dependable sense of reality to bring the reader along with you.

But my novels are informed by my sense of personal mythology, which is unique to me as a writer. I am not one for stitching unnecessary or pedantic detail into the plot as many historical novels do. I like Kundera's description of the novel as an existential vacuum in which one gets to go to work on your characters, asking questions such as, what is human existence?

When you write in a period that is not your own, you can strip the contemporary noise from the novel and focus on essential human problems.

It seems like you are tracing life through your five novels. What inspires you?

My fiction takes a cosmic eye. My hunting ground is the unknown, the unforeseen, and how the unwanted likes to knock upon our door. How we crave love and security, but that suffering is our lot. How we live in hope and seek an essential human dignity as life's challenges beset us.

What shall we discover about ourselves in our overcoming? I am interested in how the enormity of invisible forces beyond our understanding shapes our lives. And yet, we must make choices. We must live, but live blindly, acting in certitude, but continually reaping the unforeseen.

Do you think your interest in cinema has helped you write narratives characterised by spectacle?

I remember thinking many years ago, when I first saw the films of Robert Bresson, that I would like to capture something of the expression of his filmmaking in fiction. I was not writing then, though I sensed I would in the future.

When I read Cormac McCarthy soon after, I could sense a similar aesthetic. Human behaviour is intensely revealing, and I am less interested in fiction that is all telling.

I like to demonstrate my stories and their ideas through characters who behave before our eyes and make decisions. My imagination is intensely visual, and I see what I write as though it were cinema.

But of course, my novels are literature, and literature trumps cinema every time because it has a broader range to explore the hidden aspects of inner and outer life. 

In your novels Grace and Prophet Song, the main characters are women. Through them, you capture the transition to femininity, motherhood and the power of protection. Tell us more about this.

I wonder if the two characters are related. In Grace, I take her up to motherhood, and in Prophet Song, I take Eilish from motherhood towards something else.

It's my personal belief that the feminine power that permeates our world is a unifying power and the social glue that holds us all together. The masculine — starved of the ability to grow a human being — finds within itself an energy that sets out to make the world but so often unmakes it as it does so. 

Your latest novel Prophet Song, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and many of your readers think you will win the prize. What do you think about this, and how did you feel when you received the announcement?

The Booker Prize changes everything if you are a writer. To shortlist is an honour and a small miracle in itself, and I am grateful for that. And, of course, if you are shortlisted for a prize, you do wonder if you might win, but the truth is that any of the six writers on that shortlist could win it.

When you are shortlisted, you are full of the energy of a race, but your book is already written, so there is nothing you can do and nowhere to run. 

Your novels have been nominated for several prestigious awards, and you earned your first literary award in 2006. Would you please share your feelings with us then?

Unlike the musician or actress who enjoys applause after a performance, the writer works alone for months and years at a time, staring out the window onto a garden. Nobody has asked you to write the book, and there is always enormous risk involved because you are building a cantilever bridge out over nothingness in the hope that it will hold and carry readers across to your fantasy island.

And so when you are nominated for an award, it really is a round of applause, a pat on the back from the universe and an acknowledgement that this bridge you have built will hold.   

As you are a full-time writer, do you have a writing routine?

When I am not in promotion mode, as I am now, I work Monday to Friday, and I am at the writing desk at 10 am, after breakfast, and drop the kids off at school. I tend to work for three to four hours, in deep concentration.

My phone and email are off, and I avoid the newspapers online. I write a little each day and tend to edit as I write, and there are many days when I'm utterly exhausted after I've finished work. This is a sign, perhaps, that the writing was good.

I envy the writers who can blast out a work in three months. For me, writing is the rolling of a boulder up the hill for years at a time in the hope that you don't falter and the damn thing doesn't roll backwards and crush your feet.