Entertainment

Bolger takes the pulse of Celtic Tiger-era Dublin

Prolific Dublin writer Dermot Bolger has recently written a new poetry collection, a Gothic thriller aimed at teenage readers and a book set during the south's property boom and bust that's been labelled a `state of the nation novel'. He talks to Brian Campbell

Dermot Bolger published his novel Tanglewood after shelving it for seven years
Dermot Bolger published his novel Tanglewood after shelving it for seven years Dermot Bolger published his novel Tanglewood after shelving it for seven years

DERMOT Bolger is a novelist, journalist, playwright and poet. His love of writing was clear for all to see when he set up The Raven Arts Press publishing house in Dublin when he was just 18. And he showed how creative he still is, nearly 40 years on, when - at short notice - he wrote a novel (New Town Soul) aimed at teenager readers.

He had been writing a book set in Dublin in 2007 during the Celtic Tiger property boom, but then ran into a problem. "I was starting to write the novel and then the whole market crashed, so I couldn't finish it. I ended up writing New Town Soul because I needed to deliver a book."

He has now published that initial novel Tanglewood after shelving it for seven years.

As for New Town Soul, he said he was inspired by the Gothic Irish writers Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker

"I wanted to tap into that world but also wanted to set it in a very factual world and then you realise one of the central characters is 500 years old and the devil is wandering around. It was great fun," he says.

"When Leonard Cohen recorded the album that had Hallelujah on it [Various Positions], they wouldn't release it in America. The head of CBS Records said to him, `The problem with you, Lenny, is that we know you're great - we just don't know if you're any good.'

"For seven years, every publisher in Ireland and the UK said that they thought New Town Soul was great but thought that no child in their right mind would ever read it. Now it's on the Leaving Cert [English syllabus] down here and it was acclaimed in Le Monde. So these things can take a while."

And despite Bolger setting up Raven Arts Press while still in his teens, he says he didn't grow up surrounded by books.

"I grew up in Finglas, a working-class part of Dublin. There were no artistic activities there and a sense of isolation, so Raven Arts grew from that vacuum. It was a loose movement for change and it was never a business. Paul Durcan said it was `a group of writers with nothing in common except originality and dissidence'."

Raven Arts published books by names including Colm Toibin, Eoin McNamee, Patrick McCabe and Fintan O'Toole. Bolger closed down the publishing house in 1992 and then helped set up New Island.

Tanglewood, out now on New Island, is set in the wealthy Dublin suburb of Blackrock between 2007 and 2009. The book centres on two couples, Alice and Chris and Ronan and Kim, who unwisely decide to join forces to build an investment property that straddles both their gardens.

"When I began to write it I didn't realise the bust was coming. But as somebody who was trying to buy a house at the time, I thought to myself, `This can't possibly last'. There was this notion that the whole of the south partied [during the Celtic Tiger boom years], but it was more about people who just wanted to move to a slightly bigger house.

"New houses were appearing in gardens and neighbours would come together and sell all their gardens as one plot to developers. Ronan has a Filipino wife who's half his age and beautiful but he's still dissatisfied. [The book] was about trying to take the psychic pulse of Dublin at that time."

Yet Bolger stresses that he never wanted to write a blow-by-blow account of the property boom and bust in the Republic.

"It's like if you're writing a novel set in 1914, you wouldn't need to tell the story of the First World War; the readers will fill in that greater narrative themselves. The reader knows far more about what's going to happen than the characters do. In the same way, when you set a book in Dublin in 2007 the reader knows the bigger picture and knows the fate of these characters. So I began writing a contemporary novel and then discovered that I was writing a historical novel."

Bolger's key aim was to examine 'the condition of marriage'. "The title comes from the Thomas Kinsella poem Wormwood, about two trees in a forest growing too closely together," he says. "The book is an examination of two marriages and the catalyst to crisis in both is the building of this shared townhouse.

"It's about the intimacies of the human relationships and from that, I think, you get a picture of a society in crisis and in flux. Hopefully it's also a portrait of marriage in Belfast or Budapest or anywhere else."

Bolger, who wrote a poem in tribute to George Best after the former footballing great died 10 years ago, comes to Belfast next week. He says he's a big fan of northern writers David Park ("an extraordinarily underrated writer") and Glenn Patterson.

Since publishing his first novel Night Shift in 1985, Bolger has been held up as one of Ireland's finest writers. Other novels include The Journey Home, Emily's Shoes, The Family on Paradise Pier and Temptation. In 1994 he adapted Ulysses for the stage under the title A Dublin Bloom. It was reproduced in 2012 and came to the Belfast Festival at Queen's and has recently toured in China.

"BBC Four have made a documentary on it. From the rushes I've seen, a key theme seems to be the Irish cast's quest to find Barry's Tea in China," he laughs.

"But it's amazing to see something you wrote 20 years ago being done again. The Journey Home took 18 years to get published in America and got the lead review in the New York Times, which in music is like getting on the cover of Rolling Stone."

As well as reading from Tanglewood at his Belfast event, Bolger will read a few of his poems too. He says he can't just sit down to methodically write a poem and says "poems have to mug you".

In 2012 he published his ninth poetry collection, The Venice Suite commemorating his wife Bernie, who died in 2010.

"I didn't consciously write poems about it. Eighteen months after it happened, I was going through drawers and I found scraps of paper that I'd written things down on," he recalls.

"I still get emails every week from people who have lost somebody and for whom that book means something and that is very touching. It's a book that I wish I never had any need to write. In some ways I published the book because, by doing so, I knew that I'd never write a poem about it again. I wanted to mark that period of my life and to give an honest account of my feelings at that time."

:: Tanglewood is out now, published by New Island.