Paraic O'Donnell

New from Tin House, a book filled with supernatural landscapes, shadowy séances, young innocent love and cold-hearted murder. What's not to love about this ethereal and haunting new book by the phenomenal Irish author, Paraic O'Donnell?

 

It is the winter of 1893, and in London, the snow is falling. Gideon Bliss seeks shelter in a Soho church, where he finds Angie Tatton lying before the altar. His one-time love is at death’s door, murmuring about brightness and black air, and about those she calls the Spiriters. In the morning she has disappeared.

The snow is falling as a seamstress climbs onto a ledge above Mayfair, a mysterious message stitched into her own skin. It continues to fall as she steadies herself and closes her eyes.

It is falling, too, as her employer, Lord Strythe, vanishes into the night, watched by Octavia Hillingdon, a young, society columnist who longs to uncover a story of real importance.

She and Gideon will soon be drawn into the same mystery, each desperate to save Angie and find out the truth about Lord Strythe. Their paths will cross as the darkness gathers, and lead them at last to what lies hidden at the house on Vesper Sands.

Paraic O’Donnell's first novel, Maker of Swans, was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards in the Newcomer of the Year category. 

His latest is a Guardian and Observer book of the year. 

It was also selected by Time, Newsweek, Library Reads and Indie Next for “best of” lists, January 2021, and one of Oprah Magazine‘s most anticipated titles of 2021.

There were so many memorable lines, here is just a small sampling:

"Upon presenting ourselves at no. 23, it was found that no one could be brought to the door, though Inspector Cutter knocked with considerable energy for two minutes or more.

   A woman emerged from a neighbouring dwelling in a state of some agitation, and demanded to know the cause of the racket. When the officers present identified themselves, said woman's demeanour became coarse and unwelcoming and the officers were invited after a brief exchange to 'fuck off out of it' [sic].

  Insp. Cutter directed the woman to disclose her name, which she gave as Mrs. Kiss-My-Arse [sic]"

***********

Gideon watched Miss Tatton when he could, guardedly and at careful intervals. There were habits of hers, small gestures that he came to recognize. Her way, when she was bored, of swinging her arms in loose arcs, or of raising her wrist-inflected just so-when something moved her to laughter. In all of this there was a strange charge of giddiness. It occurred to him that even this faint intimacy was unfamiliar, that in all his life he had never paid such close attention to another living soul.

***********

"Lightning. In the stutter of brightness he saw her, crouched and hawk-still, then she was gone. He felt it as she vaulted clear, her fierce cold quickness. He heard the slicing air, the snap of cotton. He hung there then, stretched above the vacant darkness. For a moment he could not be sure if he had closed his eyes, and in the devouring silence when she was gone, he could not tell at first that he had screamed."

**********

And from Paraic's Afterword: 

"Passenger carriages with side corridors had been in use since the 1880s, and in March 1892, the Great Western Railway introduced the first complete 'corridor train' (as the Times described it) on its Paddington-to-Birkenhead service. However, trains of this design were not yet in service between London and Kent by February 1893. This minor historical liberty is the only one I have knowingly taken, and by confessing to it openly I hope to escape censure."

Doing my research on Paraic I came upon this, must read, article that he recently wrote for the Irish Times about his experience living with MS. Reading it made me admire him and his writing even more, and better understand what his life is like.

Tell me about where you live and why you love it so much.

I live in Wicklow, Ireland. I love it because I need to be surrounded by natural beauty, and that’s pretty much all this place has. Ancient broadleaf forests, stretches of sleepy farmland, and in the mountains the most incredible Arthurian dreamscapes.

I used to post a lot of landscape shots online, when I went hiking, and someone once asked me what part of Narnia I lived in. That about sums it up.

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

Right here, more or less. I’ve travelled a lot, but this isn’t the kind of place you burn to get away from.

And yes, they’re fond memories. My childhood was pretty idyllic, I’m afraid, so I didn’t have a reservoir of formative misery to draw on in my writing. The last couple of decades haven’t been quite so cloudless, which may have helped, but I think I’d have got by anyway. My life has been fine, as lives go, but I’ve never been much attracted to it as material. When I’m writing, just like when I’m reading, I want to be elsewhere and otherwise.

Did you have a favorite teacher and are you still in touch with him or her?

I did, but no I’m not. I was her favourite, too, in what became a scandalous sense. We don’t look favourably on such things now, and rightly so, but I wasn’t harmed in the minutest way. Plus, my French improved considerably.

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?

Every book does, to a greater or lesser degree. To read is to occupy an altered perspective, almost by definition, but I’m not sure I even like the idea of some singular and epiphanic encounter that changes you irrevocably. The process, at least in my experience, is cumulative and endlessly iterative. What it leaves you with, I think, is a kaleidoscopic availability of perspectives. That seems much more desirable to me than just swapping one lens for another.

Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?

His Dark Materials, almost without hesitation. 

                                      

Superficially, it’s this fabulously inventive adventure story, so it certainly functions as a more traditional children’s book. But it’s also wildly exigent in what it requires of that notional audience, though maybe it’s fairer to say that simply credits children with possessing the faculties necessary to contemplate questions of immense moral seriousness. 

It shows them an adult world dominated by this baroque machinery of deception and enslavement, and children who are brave and capable enough to resist all that and persevere towards the truth. But that truth turns out to be that loss is inescapable, that the extinction of innocence is inescapable.

That’s pretty uncompromising, in a children’s book, but it’s also respectful of children and in my view morally dutiful.

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?

I’m not sure they’re funny stories, exactly, more stories that marvel at what I was allowed to get away with. Like the time I persuaded my parents, when I was fourteen, that it was fine for me to wander around Paris on my own. I didn’t come to any harm, but I did what any fourteen-year-old would do in those circumstances, which was mainly lounging outside cafés smoking Gitanes and conducting a hilariously adolescent performance of louche adulthood. They still kind of berate themselves for all that, but I think on balance they made the right mistakes.

How did you meet beloved? How did your first date go?

We were working at the same bar when I was nineteen and she was seventeen. I was utterly stricken from the start, but apparently I seemed terribly reserved. The truth was that she seemed far too beautiful to be remotely within reach. Well, we ended up in the same club one night after work, and she didn’t waste much time persuading me of my error. It felt like a moment of heavenly alignment, and it has ever since.

Is there a song or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?

Oh, there are thousands. I mean, that’s my resting state, more or less, so the repertoire needs to be extensive. But for me, music doesn’t have a remedial function in those circumstances. I don’t seek out stuff that will alter my condition, which I wouldn’t want, but music that conforms to it, while also complicating or refracting my experience of it.

I mean, I’m not allergic to joy, but being drawn to the melancholy just seems to offer more richness of choice. Yesterday, it was Strauss’s "Four Last Songs" and today it was "Thirteen Beaches" by Lana Del Rey. What’s not to like?

Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?

It’s not really in the spirit of these proceedings, but I’d rather people didn’t ask about me at all. I’m not an interesting subject, and there isn’t much to discover that isn’t predictable or disappointing. 

I looked into Margaret Elise Harkness/John Law and her book In Darkest London that you reference in The House on Vesper Sands.

What a fascinating woman, have you read much by her? With my interest in ancient Egypt, I was quite surprised that she also wrote about Egyptian life.

I’m a novelist, not a historian, so my reading for research tends to wide but shallow. I haven’t read anything else of hers, but she’s a fascinating figure and I’m not at all surprised to learn of her diverse interests. It’s typical of the time, though, when dabbling freely was common among those with education or curiosity. We tend to snicker now at, say, Conan Doyle’s obsession with fairies, but it was a manifestation of what seems to me a virtue of Victorian thinking. The Royal Society had its preening lordlings, then as now, but in general intellectual borders were more open and a social activist could also be an Egyptologist or a naturalist without inviting ridicule.

As I told you earlier, I found that after reading a few chapters, I found myself speaking in the same way as Gideon, one of your lead characters. Did you know already how to write the story in that manner or did you need to do a little research?

What novels are to me, ultimately, are occasions of language. You have other obligations to the reader, obviously, and those are relatively elaborate with something like historical fiction, but ultimately what I’m doing is giving myself access to the forms and registers of language that suit my purposes or just please me in some way. Gideon and Cutter have distinct and contrasting modes of speech, and I’ve obviously had fun with the comic potential of those interactions.

But what they’re also doing is using language to navigate their circumstances, to account for themselves and their actions in their particular moral terms. They seem at odds for much of the time, but in fact those moral visions increasingly converge and that’s as central to the story as anything else.

You have to be careful with period diction, because it can be alienating or just plain obtrusive if you’re just slathering it around to achieve decorative effects. But equally, there are endless socially and historically specific nuances that would just get irretrievable collapsed if you were flatten all those gradations of speech and thought and write the whole thing like it happened last Tuesday.

You use the language you need to create a particular experience. It’s like music in that way. Sometimes you can score something sparsely, like a minimal chamber piece, but sometimes you need to go big with the orchestration. Vesper Sands isn’t quite Mahler, but it’s not Philip Glass either.

Will we see Inspector Cutter in any forthcoming books?

At this point, that’s a decision that’s pretty much been taken out of my hands. The reaction to this book has been far beyond by expectations, and those who’ve responded positively seem all but unanimous on that question. That’s not an unmixed blessing, for a writer, but it’s not something you can just ignore either. So yeah, that seems highly likely.

Both The Maker of Swans and House on Vesper Sands focus on secret societies. Have you always had an interest in them?

Not especially, no. Or not in the sense that I’m fascinated by, say, the largely ridiculous arcana of something like freemasonry, which has never really been dedicated to anything other than nepotism and sectarianism. I’m sure the dressing up is fun for them, though. 

But they’re recognizable structures, and as such they can put to use in fiction in a way that’s emblematic. Because what those societies tend to have in common is their interest in aggrandizing themselves to obscure their purposes. And those purposes are rarely benign, and certainly not exalted. Otherwise there’d be no need to cloak them in all that trumped-up mystique.

So, they’re not really mysterious in themselves, because their artifices are generally so transparent, but they have a certain dramatic potency. Because in fiction they really can be secret, at least for a while, and you can exploit some of that theatrical apparatus, to sustain a real mystery for just long enough.

Have you ever participated in a séance? 

                                   

Oh, sure, but only of the drunken and shambolic variety. And I’m not much of a mystic in my private capacity, so it’s not something I’d approach with any kind of seriousness. 

I don’t draw stuff like that from life, but that doesn’t mean I take it lightly. The séance scene in Vesper Sands is both closely researched and liberally imagined, like most of what I do. The proceedings are more or less authentic, at a formal level, but it’s an upmarket affair with a corresponding degree of lavish staginess. I also tried hard to calibrate the atmosphere in the right way, to maintain a tension somewhere between flamboyance and something more liminal and unsettling.

That’s authentic, too, in the sense that the audience would have been as diverse as you’d expect, with varying degrees of susceptibility. It also serves as kind of a centerpiece in the story, which is pervaded by ambiguity about what’s real and what’s illusory. It’s a scene in which everything and nothing is explained, and it’s dense with possible meanings, each one depending on how you interpret what’s being said. Almost everything that subsequently revealed is encoded in those pages, yet you could pass over most of it without noticing.

I don’t write to any kind of formula, but if I did, that’s what it might sound like.

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME

to any period from before recorded history to yesterday,

be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice,

actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.

When would you go?

This is going to sound perverse, coming from a historical novelist, but I’m much more fascinated by prehistory than the relatively brief span we consider recorded. You can argue the fine points about exactly where the horizon lies, but let’s call it 5,500 years or so for convenience. Beyond that, all we have are artefacts and conjecture.

It’s a vanishingly narrow sliver of time, even just in the context of our species. All those preceding millennia of life and language are almost entirely opaque to us, and that’s both intoxicating and dismal to contemplate.

So, much as I’d love to spend an evening with Madame de Staël or Cardinal Richelieu or whoever, what would I have to report that might make the slightest difference?

Where would you go?

That’s the problem with this particular fascination. I have no way of knowing. I suppose I could start out in the caves of Lascaux, 16,000 years ago.

I could glimpse the people who created those extraordinary cave paintings, observe a little of the lives and experiences to which those artworks gave expression. But some of those images are as remarkable for where they are as what they are. People crawled incredible distances through barely passable voids to lie on their backs and leave marks that others might see only by going to the same extraordinary lengths.

Even if I were to witness that, without their language or any meaningful access to their thoughts and beliefs, what could I truly learn about why they did this or what it meant to them? 

Who would you want to meet?

Again, I won’t know until I get there, and making introductions might be somewhat fraught. I’ll probably come back thinking I met people called ‘tender prey’ or ‘crazy talk’, because that’s what they’ll shout at me when I’m nearby. I’m fine with that. It’s consistent with what passes for my philosophy. You should take the trip and see all you can, but don’t mistake seeing things for knowing them.

And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?

I don’t think I’ve settled on a time yet, but I think I’d end up pursuing this particular compulsion to its logical extreme. Maybe sitting on something resembling a beach in the deep Precambrian, looking out from the coast of Laurentia over the Paleo-Pacific.

The atmosphere would be breathable by then, but what life there was would be all but invisible. Maybe a few scraps of moss here and there, and some flickerings in the rock pools.

That’s the most enchanting prospect of all to me, the idea of all that empty magnificence. A world still untouched and innocent.

Thank you Paraic, not only for your thoughtful answers to my questions, but also for writing such a marvelous book that took me completely into another world.