The Irish writer on his childhood fear of the devil, his superpower – and one of the enigmas of his latest novel.
] It really is.You were dragged to Mass every Sunday, quite a tedious expedition. You’d put on reasonably good clothes, sit there quietly and listen to these kind of incomprehensible prayers. At school, we’d spend our pocket money buying pictures of the Virgin Mary. But when I was about 16, I told my parents I was going to church, but I’d just go and walk in the park, smoke cigarettes and listen to music. That was a lot more uplifting.
As a storyteller, though, are you grateful for Catholicism giving you all those foundational stories? The gift of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and the school that I went to, was to take stories from the Bible and make them as dull as possible. But a lot of it is quite gothic, and the idea of a virgin birth is just bizarre. The strongest effect it had on me was the concept of the Devil. I was terrified of the Devil. That probably shaped the stories I would tell. The terrifying stuff is very rich.Regularity. Show up every day. Do it even when you don’t feel like it.
It’s good for my mental health. The goal of it, for me, is to break out of my own little narrow corner and try to see the world a bit more broadly. It’s also a way to connect with things you’ve shut off inside yourself, or things you worry about, and to engage with them in some way that gives you a grip on them. That’s quite an empowering thing to do. But it’s also quite difficult, because writing is difficult. The discipline you need to sit at your desk takes a lot out of you.
I’d love to think there was an afterlife, but I just don’t find myself thinking that, which is really sad, in some ways. I don’t know if it’s hard for everybody to live in the here and now, or if it’s especially hard for Catholics. But if you’ve been trained to think this life is a kind of secondary thing before the main event, it’s hard to shake off. So I’ve shaken off the hope that there’s an afterlife, but it’s hard to enjoy the richness of life.
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