EP.230 - COLM TÓIBÍN

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 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 Colin Tobine.

Tobine facts.

Colin 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, Column 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, Colm 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 was 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 Column'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 Column'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 book, Can I Have My Ball Back?

But Column'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 Blackwater lightship, quite harrowing.

Other essays and articles in the collection deal with personal and cultural memory, religion, politics, and literature.

When I spoke with Column 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 Siria 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 Colum.

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 Colm 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.

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 Colin in his office out in New York's Columbia University, where he teaches for 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 Column to have been.

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 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 Starm has 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, Colum shared his thoughts about, among other things, what a 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 Column Tobin, here we go.

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 and it's a 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, 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 wrong the last time.

You know, 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 realized 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 Vradker, 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 to the big beast which is how do you keep Sinn Féin out of government in Ireland and it may be that we've got to give up the project you know the giving up that feeling that democracy itself would be damaged by the arrival of certain people who are who are around the Sinn Féin party that you know 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, you know, in 1922, 23, the Fine Fall Party came into the parliament in 26 and went into government in 32.

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 had a, you know, would have to hold our 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 response beneath.

I didn't realise 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 mean, I think a lot of their 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 radicalised, but they have been radicalised

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 the idea that they're going to take planes up in the air and burn people alive,

I have to say that the first thing you have to say about 9-11 was that it was a crime.

And then you have to say, you know, in other words, that anyone connected to it is a criminal, or at least there's a prima fascia 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 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 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.

She was sort of saying that.

No, no, no, no, no.

You're absolutely right.

But she said that maybe we should listen.

And you see, when I saw maybe we should listen, I saw red.

I saw, 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 arms, 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 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 there's 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 two hours, meaning that he would remove one of my testicles.

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 nasty denesis, anaesthetist.

And

the naesetist put me asleep, and when I woke up,

I had only

one ball.

This was 2018, is 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 what five years.

So I mean now I 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 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 twenties.

Mine was particularly severe.

Whatever way the cancer had spread, it had gone into, it hadn't gone into lymph nodes, which is a 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

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.

And

yes, yeah, it was.

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 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 smell became extraordinary.

If you went onto the street, as anyone approached,

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.

Someone said, 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, like 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.

So you can't read, you can't sleep.

See, you have no taste, which means that if you come to drink water,

the water could be sulfuric acid.

And so you look at the water and you think, how am I going to 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 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 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 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, Lord, I don't believe in you and I won't be getting involved in you after this.

You know, 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 whatever.

I'm using the word anguish, but it isn't as though there is a word.

And

you just simply find that the following day,

you have got through the previous day.

And

so there was no question of, I mean, 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: 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 wanted to know if you want any sausages or something.

You know, so there's a constant sense in hospital of life going on.

But once you're home, it becomes very, very dark.

And were you able to

have any productive thoughts 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.

Yeah,

but the thing is

and then it's over.

And it's hard to explain.

And the reason why, in a way, the doctors and nurses were so good-humoured 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 they tend to see people.

I mean, unless it's a terminal,

unless it's terminal cancer, but with chemo, they often find people out three months later, I've forgotten about the chemo.

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.

And I 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.

And 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 think I wonder if a lot of other cancer people who have gone through chemo and come out the other side just see it as a lost time.

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 there really is something wrong with your writing.

I think if you need cancer to let you know how valuable life is, then there'd be 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 it was irritating isn't the word for it, but it was a it was it was a

complete waste of my time and energy.

I was reading the Blackwater Light Ship,

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 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 that 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 these books are for.

Not that they're self-help books, but that it's not as though they spare the reader in the dramas they present

any

set of realities.

You know, in other words,

that there are no evasions and it's not as though they're there really to entertain you.

Well, there's, I mean, there's, 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.

That's 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.

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, 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

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 other.

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.

It's 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 it will 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 long hand, 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 elapse before she says 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.

Well, I have to worry about is this a theory from some philosopher about you know what speech, what language does to experience and is therefore it too heavy-handed in this conversation between these two people.

And then I realized, 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 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 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 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, I do that so that way I just say, ouch.

And it's a lovely feeling.

It often happens in the morning where you just say, ouch, ouch.

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 on.

On our first morning in Ireland, and you've moved the time and the reader will accept that.

So 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 Ailish, 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 they could.

You've got to leave that open.

And so you go on like that every day.

I mean, 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, you know, someone that you're with says to you, you know,

did you, when you wrote that, were you thinking about us?

And you always say, no, no, no, no, it it wasn't.

But you are sometimes, and people, I mean, members of your family.

No, 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, you know,

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 working that requires your own, 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 of 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

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 granny will really mind.

I'll have to wait till my granny dies and then I'll write the great short story.

And the answer is, you know,

I've never known any writer really to hold back.

If there was some story that needed 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

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 Starren, 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 Starren 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 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 whether people, when people start using icebox and when they use fridge.

Like just the basic 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 and I think at the moment if anyone asked me if I've 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 basis 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

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.

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 that 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 Northern Irish,

even though it's only a few miles away, you know, 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 dairy, I'm not sure I could get that funny mixture of cockiness and pride and ways of moving around, which is so articulate and brilliant.

And on 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 Astrid?

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 brutality.

I suppose as extensive and as unending and as brutal as that.

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?

I read 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 little hotels and all that.

And then she would come back and just describe 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 setting down at night to write for nobody, that you close the diary afterwards,

honestly the idea of it, 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.

Hmm.

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 either Gwendolyn or Cecily in The Importance of Being an Ernest keeps her diary as if she's a teenager, 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's diaries are interesting because he writes down, just only writes down ideas that might come in the future.

And

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.

Offensive.

It's good therapy, they say.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah,

journaling is supposed to be good.

Just writing down all about yourself and feeling satisfied and closing it and thinking that's the truth.

Yeah, no, it seems to be the opposite of therapy, and it seems to me

that writing a diary would, you'd 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, we're 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, 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 had 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.

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.

Not just

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 geez, you should see the way he so carefully 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.

And some people had brought their kids, but it struck me that more people had brought their grandkids.

And people were on all sorts of ingenious walkers and different type of machines that were allowed 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.

Just this was the one thing that we shared, that there was one moment somewhere in our lives where he

sang, it's all over now, baby blue,

or strike another match, let's start anew.

And, you know, obviously 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.

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 dot, la la do,

do.

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 Dylan, and he came out onto this opera stage, it was the opera house in Barcelona, I just felt, God,

he has really had an extraordinary effect on the world, this man,

with his beautiful songs, his uncompromising, also his irony, his wit, his mischief, and also the yearning, the love songs, you know, like just how much love.

And Bob Dill was when the children were babies, you know, we were all on the beach and Sarah, Sarah.

And I love when he goes into sort of, I suppose, what's called language poetry.

rhymes and songs where the meaning doesn't seem to add up, like Satellite Lady of the Lowland,

you know, with your mercury lips and 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 Travelling Wilburys?

I am the Travelling Wilburys.

I'm about to go on a book tour.

I was looking at the schedule, and I said, I am.

I am going to model myself on the Travelling Wilburys.

But I wasn't quite sure even who they were because I don't really know much about all that.

I just like 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 Lynn of ELO.

Oh, my lord.

And when they were together, they were still in their 40s.

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, cry 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, having your life blighted by him.

And then

you went on to Larry Cohen or something.

Yeah, God in dream, the candy colored clown they call a saleman, tiptoes through my room every night.

Just because he said, go to sleep, everything

is all right.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, of course, I love that.

Well, that was used so well by David Lynch in

Blue Velvet.

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Wait, continue.

Hey, welcome back.

That was Colm Tobine talking to me there and

me laying some deep level David Lynch info over the only bit of the interview where Colin 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 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 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.

BBC4 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 Dineen.

She did a very enjoyable profile of Gerry Halliwell

in the wake of Jerry's departure from the Spice Girls that came out in 1999.

It was called Gerry, 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.

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 programme 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 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?

It was around then, late 80s.

Two women, Margaret Wheeler and Blanche Rylott, 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 Ryletts 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 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 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.

Mixed Blessings is the name of that dock.

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 oural space.

Go carefully.

I love you.

Bye.

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