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Irish Examiner
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Author interview: ‘Gay life and history keeps on developing and changing'
Alan Hollinghurst is recovering from a nasty bug and is still a little under the weather when he chats to me from his home in London. 'I will do my best to sound intelligent,' he says. The British author has been garlanded with some of the most prestigious literary awards throughout his career, and is considered by many to be one of the great writers of our time. The reviews for his most recent novel, Our Evenings, the story of a gay Anglo-Burmese actor and his life across seven decades, have been glowing. As a former deputy editor of The Times Literary Supplement himself, does he pay attention to the critical response to his work? 'Occasionally, I am warned by a kind friend or a publicist to skip a review,' he says. 'And I do because there is no point, you end up arguing in your head with this person you don't know and it doesn't do you any good.' But generally I do read them and bringing out a book so rarely, I feel quite interested in how it is going to fare when it goes out into the world. Hollinghurst's debut novel The Swimming Pool Library, published in 1988, was described by writer Edmund White as 'the best book on gay life yet written by an English author'. Hollinghurst went on to be named one of Granta's best young British novelists in 1993. However, it was his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, which really catapulted his work into the literary mainstream when it won the Booker Prize in 2004. It was an engrossing evocation of Thatcher's Britain, seen through the eyes of gay narrator Nick Guest — an outsider who is drawn into British high society. From today's vantage point, it is hard to imagine the fuss that surrounded the win; Hollinghurst chuckles about the newspaper headline that screamed, 'Gay sex wins Booker'. A great deal has changed in those two decades. 'Yes,' says Hollinghurst. 'A lot was happening already and gay fiction as a phenomenon really took on salience through the later '80s and '90s. 'But it hadn't broken into the echelons of Booker Prize shortlists and so on until that point, rather amazingly. 'I had been writing from a gay point of view for quite a while, so it did all seem rather like old hat to me.' It was an inevitable journalistic talking point about the whole thing and it didn't do any harm. The world of LGBTQ+ fiction is a completely different proposition now, and is flourishing thanks in no small part to writers such as Hollinghurst. 'The interesting thing of taking gay life and gay history as your subject is that it is a live subject, it keeps on developing and changing in ways that you couldn't have anticipated. 'Back in the '80s, it was all far more binary, gay, or straight. Now we are in a much more complex terrain of not so much defining as exploring sexuality. 'I love the sense that the whole thing has grown and become more complex and subtle,' he says. There are echoes of the political themes in The Line of Beauty to be found in Our Evenings, which takes in the rise of populism and Brexit although Hollinghurst is at pains to point out that is not the book's main concern — 'It is not, thank God, a Brexit novel'. Does he feel that what is happening in politics today is too fantastical to be portrayed realistically? 'The extreme acceleration in America, you couldn't keep up with it. My tendency has been not to write out of the immediate political moment,' he says. ' The Line of Beauty is set in the mid-'80s but it came out in 2004. Both the political moment of the Thatcher boom years and the extended moment of the Aids crisis, I had to let it settle before I saw how to deal with it.' The new book does take on the slightly more immediate thing of Brexit and that kind of nationalism. 'I address it fairly obliquely through the experience of somebody who is not in that world politically but on whom inevitably it impinges. 'There are writers who are up to the challenge of writing things that are more topical. I don't think that's generally in my nature.' The book is certainly elegiac in tone, with the protagonist Dave Win looking back on his youth in a very different Britain. Hollinghurst says it was 'awful' to watch Brexit unfolding. 'I am furious, incredulous, and very sad. I think it was an absolutely disastrous decision,' he says. 'We were led astray by implausible politicians. Nothing good whatsoever has come out of it.' Not unlike the character of Dave Win, who is an actor, Hollinghurst, aged 71, has been honing his craft across six decades now. In some ways, writing has become a more challenging process. 'I started writing in my early teens, I wrote appalling poems,' he says. 'The disconcerting thing about being a lifelong novelist is that I first imagined you worked out how to do it and after that it got easier and easier.' But I have found the reverse has been true. Each one is harder than the one before. 'There was a sort of ease and pleasure about writing my first book when I had a full-time job. 'I was writing it in the evenings and at weekends, and no-one knew anything about it, it was just this lovely thing that I was doing. 'I have never quite recaptured that sense of happiness in writing.' Of course, there are many more distractions now — although he is not really on social media, the online world still encroaches. 'When I was finishing Our Evenings and finding it a struggle, I went back 30 years, and I had the thing of having no phone or contact with the internet until 6pm,' he says. 'It was completely magical — you just take possession of your day again and you know you cannot be interrupted. 'It was like when I was writing in the '80s and I would just unplug the telephone in the morning. I do recommend it, it is absolutely wonderful.' Although it is slightly hellish when you go back on at six o'clock and you have 153 emails. He acknowledges that he has been fortunate to be able to ply his trade as a full-time writer for most of his career: 'I was lucky my first two novels both did very well. With sales of literary fiction going down, it is getting harder and harder. You really need another job. 'I am aware of the more perilous position of literary fiction and the problems of getting people to read anything longer than 140 words. 'It has become more cutthroat, the bid for public attention, and probably harder for new literary novelists to get established.' Hollinghurst has been enjoying some book-related travel, including a visit to the West Cork Literary Festival next week. Cork is a place he knows relatively well, having spent time in Skibbereen, and with his friend, the poet Bernard O'Donoghue, at his home place in Cullen. He is refreshingly forthright when I ask him if he is working on a book at the moment. 'Absolutely not,' he says. 'I am having a lovely time not writing anything. I usually feel quite emptied out when I get to publishing a book and it takes a year or two for the tank to refill. 'I'm far from starting anything else and I am very much enjoying not having that pressure. 'After a while I shall miss it and I shall long to be back in that other mysterious place messing around.' Alan Hollinghurst will be in conversation with Sue Leonard on Friday, July 11, at 8.30pm, The Maritime Hotel, Bantry, as part of the West Cork Literary Festival which takes place from July 11 to July 18; Read More Book review: Sublime characterisation and empathy make a novel to savour
New York Times
13-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Jennifer Johnston, 95, Novelist Who Probed Ireland's Fault Lines, Dies
Jennifer Johnston, an admired Irish novelist whose precise, carefully woven fictions depicted historic fault lines in her country's upper crust and frailties in its latter-day middle class, died on Feb. 25 in Dun Laoghaire, outside Dublin. She was 95. Her death, in a nursing home, was announced by President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, who praised her 'deep and meaningful examination of the nature and limitations of identity, family and personal connections' in 20th-century Ireland. Ms. Johnston's specialty was depicting the wounds of memory and the frustrations and disappointments beneath an apparently genteel coexistence of the social classes and within families, especially in the Protestant Anglo-Irish upper strata — hurts that sometimes boiled over into violence. She was herself born into a Protestant family. These themes were explored in nearly two dozen novels and a dozen plays, in settings that would become deeply familiar to her readers. Perhaps her most enduring novel is 'How Many Miles to Babylon?' (1974), which looks at a forbidden friendship across the class divide set against upper-class unease during World War I. 'Fool's Sanctuary' (1987) explores what can go wrong beneath the gilded surfaces of the big country house. 'The location, always in Ireland, may be in the country or Dublin. The setting may be a big house or a cottage, and almost certainly a lonely beach by the sea will be part of the story,' the critic Sarah Curtis wrote in The Times Literary Supplement about Ms. Johnston's fiction, in a review of her book 'This is Not a Novel' (2002). That well-used scene-making sometimes exasperated critics across the ocean; indeed, Ms. Johnston was better known and appreciated in her native Ireland and in the United Kingdom than in America. Her fellow Irish writers cherished her. At a memorial service for her in Dublin's Trinity Theater, the novelist Roddy Doyle called her 'Ireland's greatest writer.' She won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Book Award for the novel 'The Old Jest' in 1979, and she had been shortlisted for the even more noteworthy Booker Prize two years earlier, for 'Shadows on Our Skin.' 'She has for a quarter-century been turning out superior fictions that both embody the wounds of Irish life — its struggle to escape from religious, colonial and cultural domination — and offer the luxury of writing about things beyond its immediate orbit,' the critic John Walsh wrote in The Independent in 1998. Ms. Johnston herself was modest about her achievements. In a remembrance published in The Irish Times after her death, her son Patrick Smyth, a longtime journalist there, recalled her once writing, ''All I know how to do is tell stories.'' 'She would start writing in the late 1960s, saying later it was the only way she could see of escaping domesticity and its isolation,' he wrote. Recalling her first novel, 'The Captain and the Kings' (1972), which won an Author's Club award, recognizing the year's most promising debut novel published in Britain (she was 42 at the time), Ms. Johnston told the Irish state broadcaster RTÉ in 2015: 'I was so delighted to find that I could write on a typewriter, and I was so delighted to find that somebody who had nothing to do with me at all had said, 'You can write.' And I was determined to show them, yes, I could. And the bloody book won a prize. And it was more exciting than having my first child.' The virtues, and perhaps the limits, of Ms. Johnston's style are illustrated in 'How Many Miles to Babylon?,' which is brisk and fast-paced like her other works. She is efficient and descriptive in this book, immediately equipping the reader with the necessary background information about her characters and their social situations. She tends to tell rather than show: 'I was isolated from the surrounding children of my own age by the traditional barriers of class and education,' says the principal character, an isolated upper-class child who is brought up in a country house and goes on to become an officer. The BBC adapted the novel in 1982 for a television series starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Ms. Johnston's writing sometimes exasperated critics in the United States. Reviewing her novel about a spinsterish, unsuccessful Irish writer who meets a Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor on holiday in Italy, Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times in 1982: 'It won't do any harm for me to give away some of the plot of 'The Christmas Tree,' because there are no surprises in it anyway. She hasn't shown us a surprise, a quirk, a style all her own, a moment that sticks in the mind.' Other critics, however, found virtues in her prose. Marigold Johnson, reviewing 'How Many Miles to Babylon?' in the TLS in 1974, called Ms. Johnston's writing 'a delicate mixture of pathos and caustic, loving observation.' Jennifer Prudence Johnston was born in Dublin on Jan. 12, 1930, to Denis Johnston, an actor and playwright well known in Ireland, and Shelah Richards, an actress. A troubled, distant relationship with her playwright father shaped her writing, according to her son Patrick Smyth. 'His writing was undoubtedly the source, the impulse, for her to write, in no small measure an attempt to prove herself to him, although his sudden departure as a father and his aloofness hurt,' he wrote in his Irish Times essay. In Dublin, Ms. Johnston attended Trinity College, where she studied English and French before leaving school in 1951 without graduating. She then married Ian Smyth, who had been a fellow student. Trinity later awarded her an honorary degree. In 2009, Ms. Johnston was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2012 she was given a lifetime achievement honor by the Irish Book Awards. In addition to Patrick, Ms. Johnston is survived by another son, Malachi; two daughters, Sarah and Lucy; two grandchildren; and her brother, Michael. Her marriage to Mr. Smyth ended in divorce. Her second husband, David Gilliland, died in 2019.
