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A recurrent image played itself again and again in Martin Delanore’s mind of him lighting a cigarette as he left a shop. He always hated smoking, but that one image of leaving a shop or theatre, surveying the crowds walking on either side of the street and then lighting a cigarette had permeated into his consciousness from some film or some combination of films, and had never left. For a couple of weeks when he was 20 he carried a pack of cigarettes, against his better judgment; every so often he would take one, light it, splutter and feel a heat rise behind his eyes. He hated the experience, and did his best to forget it, telling others he had never smoked at all.

Every so often he would drive through Dublin Port one Saturday morning, pulling in to look at the big ships, the cranes, the oil refinery, the miscellaneous, discoloured bric-a-brac of any port. Funny how any port, even in the economic powerhouse of contemporary Ireland, seems to have an atmosphere of decay, he thought. He wondered how to parse that thought best. Driving along the roads of the Port complex he suddenly took a right and came to an alley. At the end of it stood a grey prefab, and a blue sign announcing it as the home of the Mission for Seamen. He wrote down the scrolling display “CALLCARDS 20 EURO/DOLLAR – 66 MINS RUSSIA, 66 MINS POLAND, 66 MINS PHILLIPINES” Nice detail, he thought. He was thinking of a short story in the docks. How to put it together? A solitary walker encounters another walking by the quays. For a while his own romantic fantasies reigned, under the guise of creative brainstorming. Then he checked himself. Middle class romantic fantasy. Must write something about the real, working life of these docks. The hellish pressure cooker. How it moulds men. In this mood he returned home. He had set aside that weekend to review his progress on his planned stunning debut, “Paradise.”

As long as he could remember, all he wanted to do was to write novels. How to go about this was another question. Martin did not doubt his ability, but rather how worthwhile what he was writing would be. He wished that he was born working-class, or at least gay, having some kind of genuine struggle to write about. He had ascended easily from comfortable school to Law degree to this sabbatical year, which he told most people was for making money to see him through Kings Inns but he told himself (and Kay, and Shaw and Andrea) was for writing that first novel.

“Paradise” would, he hoped, be arresting enough to establish himself. It was the story of a middle class suburban Dublin boy who goes to college in England. He graduates, drifts into magazine work and then drifts into screenwriting with no small success. For his next project he returns to make a comedy of manners set in Southside Dublin.

At this stage the many versions of “Paradise” could take many potential turns. It might become a satire on the screenwriter’s pretensions and snobbish view of himself as an “artist.” Or it could become a savage indictment of suburbia’s warping of the human, as Martin put it to himself. Or both. Or neither. Martin told himself that he wanted to challenge the usual portrayal of suburbia as a spiritual desert, by having his hero reach a state of nirvana, an understanding that suburbia is really heaven. Paradise. Whether this insight would be true or false would be up to the reader to decide.

As he walked through the South Dublin suburbs that he hoped to immortalise, the housing estates he hoped to transcend by putting them in a story, he decided that he needed a gimmick to hang his story on. At the moment it sort of began, with the narrator telling of his time in England, how he came to be a screenwriter. He had an ending of sorts, a twist either satiric or maudlin as the protagonist accepts the job of scripting one of a formulaic series of blockbusters. Martin had come up with what he thought was the hilarious in-joke of making the hero of these blockbusters share the surname of one of his law school peers, one of the few he was still friendly with. But it needed more. Aside from everything else, it needed a middle; all Martin had was a hope that by sheer luck he would stumble upon a way of conveying the uncertain epiphany that would transcend everything. But at the moment, it needed an arresting beginning.

One day as he walked the suburbs he stepped out too fast and was almost hit by a car. He was not shocked or upset by this, and entertained himself with the arresting fantasy of flying through the air to his death. This lead to a familiar fantasy for Martin Delanore, the events surrounding his own death and funeral. After exhausting this, to the point where he was nearly in tears, he came back to the reverie of flying through the air. What thoughts would he have as he traveled? He recalled reading somewhere that the moment of violent death becomes immensely magnified, like time while dreaming. How this was known he couldn’t say. But he suddenly had his beginning; the screenwriter, hit by a car during his mystical pilgrimage through suburbia, suddenly finds himself with an eternity to tell his story. It owed something to Borges’ story “The Secret Miracle” in which a Czech playwright finds time to finish his magnum opus in the instant it takes a firing squad to kill him; but Martin was unaware of this, although he had read the story one summer when he was fourteen. He had read as much of Kafka, of Dostoyevsky, of Borges and of Nietzsche as he could, as well as Ulysses and Portrait of an Artist (in that order) with an intensity that was more diligence than understanding. He had forgotten it all beyond the superficial ideas that Metamorphosis was a story about a man who becomes a cockroach, or that Thus Spake Zarathustra was about transcending oneself in some way, yet ideas and plots and characters from that hallucinatory summer of reading still recurred, something striking him as original ideas.

Thus he had the following introduction to his novel.

No-one reading this knows what it’s like to die. Of course, there are those near-death experiences, those travelers who return with tantalising stories of lights and tunnels, or sometimes with mild variations; but they came back. None have ever been all the way there and back again.

So what is it like? I’m afraid, first of all, I can’t tell you what happens next, so to speak; this is the exact moment of death. I must explain what has happened. I have always thought in narrative terms. Even as I walked these suburban streets, I put my own thoughts into narrative form; he walked down the street, he crossed without looking. Ostensibly I’ve been thinking of ideas for a movie script; in reality I’ve been letting the narrative of my own story ferment; some straight fact, some composite, some entirely invented.

What has happened in this instant of death is this: all the units of my narrative have come together. In an instant I comprehend my story, like one can comprehend a circle or triangle. This is the tale that will never be written, but I see the complete narrative as one.

The legal authorities would doubtless love to know that this accident was entirely my fault; I strayed into a busy road without looking. I feel sorry for the unfortunate driver who I have, perhaps, condemned to a lifetime of fear and guilt. That is the one regret now; that in my leaving, this complete stranger has been thrown into sadness.

I have spent the past few weeks walking; walking around Dublin, from Northside to Southside to the West, along the shore, along the canals, the Liffey. I have enjoyed letting my thoughts flow where they would, without guilt, or the hint of utility. From Herzog Park in Rathgar to Pope John Paul II Park in Cabra, then to Griffith Park and out to Blackrock Park; from Malahide to Bray to Clondalkin to Chapelizod; from the grey strand at Merrion Gates to the green slopes at Glencullen.

I studied in Manchester – but of course it could have been Leeds, or Edinburgh, or Cambridge. Indeed, I could be from Manchester, or Leeds, or Edinburgh, etc., and have studied in Dublin. The illusion of a few proper names could transform the ostensible physical location of the action, such as it is, beyond recognition. 1

I remember McCormack, and his little speech about current affairs. The type of person, McCormack would argue, who read the Irish Times, watched the Nine O Clock News, listened to Morning Ireland and This Week, and generally concerned himself about the serious business of current affairs was just as much an escapee from reality as the most avid fan of the more lurid science fiction or fantasy novels. Reality is what we do and see every day, according to McCormack, and the newspapers – purportedly showing us “reality” – are an illusion as much, if not worse, than any other.

That was one of the last things I was thinking about on my reverie-laden walks. McCormack is real, or perhaps he isn’t. As I said, I have always thought in narrative terms, just as some people, I suppose (without really knowing), think emotionally, or matter-of-factly, or precisely. While walking I reviewed my whole life, all the while thinking in terms of narrative. Sometimes the narrative was what really happened; sometimes what I thought should have happened, shouldn’t have happened or might have happened. Or what could happen. I can’t honestly tell you which will be which.

That was his prologue, as it stood. He had put a lot of himself into the character, or at least the character as it appeared in this prologue – a love of walking, a tendency to think in narrative form. Yet he was not happy with it.

Manchester: redbrick university, studying History and English. Where I came to realise that my inclination towards these subjects wasn’t academic but imaginative. Where I read Heart of Darkness for First Year and conceived of the film I will never see. Where I met Jimmy Coper, who I’ve made two films with and still can’t say I know.

My flatmate, Paul Milton, has since disappeared into the anonymity of society, perhaps into Somerset. It is appropriate that we have never “kept in touch”, since he was what I had envisaged university life to be – well read, witty, eloquent, opinionated but in an utterly charming, non-dogmatic way that seemed to allow no contradiction – and it would be hard, almost painful, to see him in some other context. He gave the impression that, while his college days would undoubtedly be the highlight of his life, they were themselves filled with elegiac, decaying grandeur.

I had bumped into Jimmy Coper at a party, which I only attended as part of my ineffectual pursuit of Tricia Kane. I have never been someone who made first impressions of people – not on some kind of principle, but I simply have never been someone who made first impressions of people.Italic text

Milton told me later: “The thing is, Jimmy will undoubtedly succeed – success is, in his conception, being a well-known figure. He has persistence, and a complete indifference to his own apparent lack of talent, and even more importantly sees criticism as motivated purely by malevolence. You know of course, that he is likewise fixated on the possibility that one of us – one of his contemporaries in university – will be a prominent person in years to come. He positively hoards magazines, order cards, various other pieces of paraphernalia. He’s probably right about someone, but not the people he thinks. Society Presidents and so on. Success too early spoils one for success in the wider world. The people on the fringes of all this society life are more likely to make it. Though,” Milton added hastily “I’m talking of course of success in the rather brash vulgar sense Jimmy would see it.”

Milton, despite the atmosphere of decay and dissolution around him, did occasionally express rather too keen an interest in “getting on” to be quite coherent with his chosen persona. Overall though, I didn’t doubt the integrity of his persona. After all, he genuinely did fail exams, drink to unwise excess, be rude to those in any kind of power and was generally chronically incapable of “getting on” himself. All of us have surprising sides to our personality. Milton aspired to a kind of dandyism and indifference to the world that was somewhat religious, but we can all be forgiven not quite living up to our aspirations.

Jimmy’s incompetence manifested itself in many ways; as the Philosophical & Metaphysical Club’s Presiding Secretary (a title devised by that year’s President, Kenneth Oxlade, to ensure the minimum amount of work for himself) he was responsible for the philosopher Daniel Dennett addressing a largely empty Fowndes Theatre, while the philosophy department was abuzz with expectation of Dennett’s address the next day. Jimmy had simply put the wrong date on the poster. Oxlade of course didn’t notice and presided with the same pomposity as always. After all, he had once presided over a symposium on “The Mind” attended by precisely no-one besides the P&M Committee and guest speakers.

I had become interested in the workings of the P&M out of interest in their Freshman Representative, Tricia Kane. Tricia naturally became Oxlade’s consort, but I had already met Jimmy, and been added to his list of people who possibly might “make it”, on the basis of my short story in The Bugler’s literary supplement.

Oxlade was an entirely suitable character to be involved in any venture that involved relating, in a reasonably courteous way, to other people. Like Milton, he was another throwback to an archetype; in his case, the academic snob. There wasn’t even any attractiveness in his rudeness, especially since he was floridly sycophantic to those in power; counterpointing his ritual crushing of first years. The workings of the P&M he treated with contempt; his interest was obviously merely in the fact that it would advance his career in philosophy. In all my time, the only genuinely academically brilliant person I met was Alison Liddel, shy, stammering and self-effacing; undoubtedly Oxlade was the student who most strongly imagined himself a man of academic brilliance. He illustrated the truth that if you say something with enough self-confidence people will accept it; with a passing reference to Heidegger, and the implication that those in opposition were frankly ignorant of the subject in hand, he could make protagonists or potential antagonists feel unworthy of even considering opposition to the gospel according to Oxlade. So he was hardly an asset to the P&M. Oxlade was a sort of super-pedant, a career in which he has continued to the present day – a PhD student in Oxford, he occasionally writes Letters to the Editor, complete with all the various letters after his name.

The P&M was not a debating society but a philosophical society; it had enjoyed a chequered past ranging from thriving, active health to absolute non-existence. Jimmy and Alison Liddell had sat down just after the previous years’ exams and made a list of potential speakers. Thus they landed the considerable plum of Daniel Dennett – Jimmy however organised a series of talks on “issues” – Peace, War, The Mind, Genetics – and overloaded them with speakers. One couldn’t be sure if it was Jimmy’s reckless thinking big, or Oxlade’s pomposity, but all these events were held in the Fowndes Theatre, in opposition to either football matches or those occasional evenings when the Debating Union persuaded a famous politician or topless model to attend. Jimmy’s reckless misspelling in the Society minutes, published both on the noticeboard and on the website, were the stuff of legend; the most celebrated, garnering a snide comment in The Bugle’s gossip sheet, was a report that “a discussion followed on the political ideas of Norm Chomsky.”

When we met for the second time, Jimmy’s opening conversational gambit was “Enjoyed that story you wrote. That was you, wasn’t it?” It was me. This referred was a short story I had written in the summer holidays before going to Leeds; entitled “The Connoisseur”, set in Paris at the dawn of the new millennium. A gigantic art exhibition, incorporating major works on loan from the super-collections, was taking place in various locations around Paris. The narrator, an Argentinian private detective specialising in the artistic world named Menotti (a name taken from the world of football), was employed by the French Government to investigate the naturally embarrassing incident in which some of the most prominent artworks are destroyed by acid, despite the armed Foreign Legionnaires on duty swearing that none could possibly have penetrated their cordon. After a few of these incidents, Menotti, started to suspect something, and when the Mona Lisa is destroyed he rushes to the office of the Exhibition Director in time for a florid confession of guilt (“I destroyed this art .. so we could see it again.”) and the closing line “As I smiled at the confirmation of my surmise, LeBlanc brought a gun to his temple and fired.”

This story had divided the University Literary Society when it was read out (by the secretary – I exploited the nervousness of first year) – some decried its obvious lack of relation to anything in my own experience. But it was at least superficially clever, short and amusing as a pastiche; thus perfect for The Bugler’s literary supplement. For the rest of my college career my own literary endeavours were reviewing films for The Bugler – all of which I paid to see with my own money, never managing to be accepted in their inner echelons of our university newspaper.'

Although Martin had never been to Manchester, his college career had had certain parallels to his narrator. When he was younger Martin was determined that his first novel would be as unlike a bildungsroman as possible. He would not write about a sensitive young man becoming a sensitive young artist, feeling misunderstood by family and Church and society in general, having difficulty with the opposite sex or the same, depending on tendency. He intended writing about insouciant blackmailers or confidence tricksters, the amoral and self-confident. All his attempts to write about those sort of characters failed, as he realised he could hardly conceive how they saw the world. His characters began to take on some of Martin’s own experiences, display some of his quirks of thought.

He had tried to insert a minor character whom he felt was important to some of the themes of the book, but as a character seemed to be going nowhere:

Sean Leary had spent First Year (I could never adopt the university lingo of “Freshman Year”, “Sophister”, “Hilary Term”, “Trinity Term”) calling me a “D4” and shouting abuse at me when drunk. He gained a reputation as a college “character”, singing the more obscure rebel songs and uttering gross obscenities about “Mrs. Windsor.” While there were a reasonable number of students who obviously sympathised with the poor, unfortunate Irishman abroad, felt somehow guilty for what “they” had done to the Irish and who were eager to impress this on me (as unconcerned with the dream of a thirty-two county Republic as any other South Dublin Irishman living), Sean had obviously spread the word that I was the Irish equivalent of a “toff.” Reading Waugh and Anthony Powell had hardly prepared me for life in an English university; being a “toff” was not terribly far from a war criminal or child molester. Thus, after the first couple of weeks, I had no more conversations with earnest girls who wanted, without really knowing much about the situation, to give Ireland back to the Irish.

But a week into Second Year, Sean was a changed man. The transition from first to second year had seen much transformation; the medical and dental students who had been ostentatiously wild suddenly became studious, except for the occasional spree. Sean had shed much of his Republican (in both senses) baggage and in the pub we had a civilised conversation about the holidays. He hadn’t worked over the summer; so the likelihood was that his family were well off. After about three pints he started to become sentimental.

“Ah Johnny, I was an awful eejit last year. I’m sorry about it all now. You’re a grand fella.”

I was touched, and thanked him. From then on we were friendly. Sean and Milton never lost their mutual suspicion, though I suspected that they enjoyed each others company more than they’d ever let on. Occasionally Milton would hint at Unionist sympathies and an antipathy to most of the “Southern” Irish; I interpreted this as an unconscious form of flattery of me, since I was a “Southern” Irishman he was friendly with. Sean’s habit of bursting into song at unexpected moments endeared him somewhat to Milton; I remember once telling Sean that I had gone to the cinema alone, at which he suddenly burst out “Alone, all alone, by the Slievenamon” in full voice in the crowded canteen.

This jolly republican was counterbalanced by a figure both Jimmy the future screenwriter and Martin Delanore had more in common with than they cared to admit:

In second year a semi-acquaintance started Dentistry in Manchester. Michael Robinson had been in my equivalent year in St. Michael’s; had repeated the Leaving Cert to get Medicine or Engineering (two contrasting fields that were bafflingly popular choices of the same people) and had ended up getting Dentistry in Leeds. He had been a prominent rugby player and I knew him very slightly through David Murray; they had played on Leinster schoolboy teams together.

Rapidly it emerged that, by his own account, Robinson had largely been accepted to University based on his rugby prowess. Fortunately our social orbits rarely brought us into alignment; for Robinson proved to be a self-centred bore of the first order. As the years went by, and various contemporaries earned places on Leinster and then Ireland teams, invariably it would turn out that the one player they always feared had been Michael Robinson. Robinson was, for obscure reasons, even older than one might think for a repeat Leaving Cert student; his contemporaries by age had, of course, been equally terrified of him. Every conversation had as subtext the greatness of Michael Robinson; when he failed exams repeatedly and lost places on rugby teams, it was due of course to his intense socialising (by no means as extensive as he would like one to believe) It may be a sign of egotism to dislike someone for failing to listen to one, or to take any interest in one’s own activities and opinions, but in Robinson’s case it was completely justified. He was in all ways the exact opposite of Milton; Milton’s dandyism had a curiously monastic quality. Rarely talking about himself, he was genuinely interested in other people and his apparently opinionated disquisitions were motivated from a hatred of dullness. Milton too failed exams – but he did not attempt to turn this into a positive virtue. Sean Leary and Michael Robinson naturally despised each other – Leary, with justice, saw Robinson as the epitome of the worst side of “D4”, while Robinson saw Leahy as an especially annoying culchie.

These characters were to recur in the novel at some future date. But Martin had no idea how. One of his precepts for writing was F Scott Fitzgerald’s begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing from the opening lines of “The Rich Boy.” Yet he knew that these two characters were mainly types -–figures for the reader’s own sympathies and prejudices to work on.