‘Thanks for having me, and thanks for turning up. It’s an
extraordinary library you have here. I’ve never been into such a beautiful
library.’
Peter Murphy stood before us, book in hand. He was a slight man,
dark-haired and pointy with a whiff-beard, silver rings in his ears and
something steely about his eyes which belied his tousled appearance. Over the
next hour, he promised, he’d endeavour, whether on books, libraries, rivers or
mythologies, to speak coherently and with interest.
The venue was Shrewsbury’s Castle Gates Library, the event organised
by Shropshire Library Service, who are always working hard to bring books, authors and
the pleasure of reading to as wide an audience as possible. Shall We
Gather At The River was the book we’d come to hear about this time - Peter
Murphy’s second novel, which had garnered some stunning reviews. He kicked off
by reading us its Prologue. If we hadn’t known before why his publishers had
sent him to Shrewsbury, we quickly found out:
On the first day of November in the year of ’84, that enduring
river turned on the town of Murn…. The current picked up speed and the
river swelled to the lip of its banks…Local radio issued flood damage updates
on the hour…. Everywhere was besieged and soaked as that bloated old river conquered
the valley slopes and threatened the town’s worried heart…
This was a book of rivers, floods and death. And we in Shrewsbury
understand rivers. We get what they’re about. We also understand
about floods. In their dreams the townsfolk do not speak. Because they
do not wish to rouse the river, read Murphy. And beyond Castle Gates,
carving its path around our town was a force of nature that we, too, don’t wish
to rouse.
In 2002, there had been a
series of incidents in Enniscorthy, Peter Murphy’s home town, a succession of
young men entering the swollen River Slaney over a period of days and drowning
themselves. Why, everyone had asked - and it was to answer that question
[or at least find ways of asking it afresh] that Murphy set out to write Shall
We Gather At The River.
Enniscorthy is the second largest town in Ireland’s County Wexford. It
has a long history, going back to 465 AD, and is one of the longest
continuously-occupied sites in Ireland. Growing up in Enniscorthy, Peter
Murphy remembered Marconi living up the road. ‘You know, the man who
invented the radio,’ he said. ‘And our local church was a great, hulking
Pugin cathedral. The sort of place you’d expect to see the Hunchback of
Notre Dame swinging from the belfry.’
Certainly Murphy had plenty to draw upon. At one point, he’d amassed
so much material, about so many characters, that he wondered if he was writing
two books. He read to us again, introducing the book’s central and most
commanding character, the schizophrenic radio evangelist and Elvis acolyte,
Enoch O’Reilly, tuner-in to the airwaves of God.
Enoch dons his tinted glasses and draws himself up to his full six
foot one and breathes deeply and gives himself a bit of a wet-dog shake. Down
the hall he goes, his heartbeat tolling every step. He mounts the stairs and
prowls the wings like a caged animal until ‘O Fortuna [Carl Orff] has
crested its climactic final movement, and then he strides on stage…
There
was a moment’s stunned silence, as befit those who’d just witnessed
Enoch O’Reilly in full flood. A pause. Then applause. ‘Thank you,’ Peter
Murphy said. 'Any questions, comments anyone?' Then the comments started
coming. Somebody wanted to talk about the sense of harrowing in the book, that
drove men to the river. Someone else wanted to talk about vertigo - that
drawing to the edge of things, with its destructive urge that they described as
a vertical force. Murphy said he wished they’d been around five years ago. ‘I
could have written what you just said. You could have saved me a lot of
time,’ he said.
People talked about the powerful sense in the book of shadow forces at
work, that did not exist for anybody’s benefit. Self-sabotage was what
Murphy called it. The stuff of all great gothic novels. ‘Give me an audience,’
he said with a puckish flash of a grin, ‘and I want to have fun. But what
do I do instead? I bang on about suicides, death and things like that.’
‘Aaah,’ growled an old man in the audience. ‘I always says when
sumoon falls in the Severn there’s a lot a reeds in there. There’s not
much hope for ‘em.’
‘Robert Mitchum,’ Peter Murphy quipped. ‘Night of the Hunter.
One of my favourite films. There’s a scene where he’s murdered the
mother and she’s lying in the bottom of the river, her hair entwined amongst
the weeds.’
So, who is this Peter Murphy, writer of books, recipient of rave
reviews, creator of Enoch O’Reilly and answerer of questions on the subject of
floods? What makes him tick? And, more importantly, how did he come to be
a writer? Later, when the talk was over and the room had emptied, I had
the chance to interview him. Here he was, I said, everybody calling him the
latest this and best that, and an Irish writer of substance, and the most
exciting new talent to watch. But what were his beginnings? How had
he got to where he was today?
Peter Murphy lives again today in Enniscorthy. His dad was a post office
clerk, his mother a some-time model and a telephonist in between raising five
children. Peter was the youngest of the five. ‘The one who
got ignored,’ he said, adding, ‘in a good way, though. I’m not
complaining. I was fond of my own company. I liked reading. I liked playing on
my own.’
Educated by the Christian Brothers, young Peter Murphy made it through
primary school and two years into secondary education before being thrown out
for refusing to wear a uniform. Back in those days, it was music and comics
that grabbed his attention. And books, he said - his family were readers;
it was a constant in their lives.
‘Going to the library was a ritual,’ he said. ‘It was something
we as a family always did. It was just a bare room too – not a library
like this. It had a strip light and shelves full of books. I used to pick
out the action adventures. Alistair McLean. Stephen King. James
Herbert. Typical boys’ stuff. Horror and fantasy. Then I came
across John Steinbeck – my first truly literary writer, I suppose, and that
lead to the Beats, and Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Carver and James Kelman.’
There are moments in Shall We Go To the River that seem to me pure
Raymond Carver, the story literally hanging between the lines of words.
Some writers are just storytellers, but Peter Murphy is a craftsman.
Where did he learn to write, I wanted to know.
At the age of 17, entered by his school, Murphy won a national
essay-writing competition and was sent off round Europe sponsored by the
European Union. This was the first time he ever went abroad or saw the
world outside his small-town Irish life. Interestingly, the subject of
that winning essay hadn’t particularly engaged him. It had simply been a
job of work. More engaging was drumming, and rock ‘n roll.
‘For nine years I was a drummer in a rock band,’ Murphy said. ‘I
learned to be a performer. It was a full-time commitment. I enjoyed playing -
but it didn’t provide a living and I had two small children to support.’
Murphy remembers working as a kitchen porter and deciding enough was
enough. That’s when he turned to writing. Submitting to magazines features
about Stephen King or Motorhead certainly beat kitchen portering. And it paid
more than drumming.
It didn’t take long for Murphy to discover that one magazine in
particular, Hot Press, would take all the work he sent its way. It didn’t
pay much but if he worked hard he was able to keep his head above water. It was
a self-betterment exercise, too. ‘One thing led to another,’ Murphy said.
Soon he was doing major interviews and working on radio and TV, a regular guest
on RTE’s arts review show, The Works. For six or seven years he worked this
way, and he might have carried on. However, both on the same week, two
things happened that changed his life.
‘In 2001 my father died,’ Murphy said. ‘Then, within a few days,
my youngest daughter, Grace, was born. A month after that, I started writing
fiction. Within a year I’d started my first novel.’
John the Revelator was the novel in question. In 2003, Peter
Murphy was signed up by the agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor. She had a
six-year wait for his first book [in this modern publishing world of deals and
dates and deadlines, good to see a writer taking his time] but when it came
out, John the Revelator was published to great acclaim.
‘There was an emphasis on
collaboration in writing John the Revelator,’ Murphy said. ‘I worked
together with a group of writer friends work-shopping each other’s stuff.
We’d email work to each other by a certain date, then meet up and spend three
or four hours at a time going through it.’
Again, in Shall We Gather At The River, Murphy said that openness and
collaboration was important, sharing work with authors he felt close to, in
particular the writer Sean McNulty. ‘I trusted him,’ he said.
Shall We Gather At The River is a far more complicated novel than John
the Revelator. As well as drawing on local Wexford life and times, it
draws on legends about suicide cycles, flood mythology from Christian and
pre-Christian eras, the strange nature of obsession and the Gaia theory of
nature as a living entity that, as well as giving life, can devour. It inhabits
familiar territory to anyone who’s seen Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter,
or who’s read the novels of Flannery O’Conner, that most uncompromising of
authors, writing about Bible belt evangelists and holy roller prophets in the
Deep South of the US.
Indeed, it was from O’Conner’s Wise Blood that Murphy took the name
Enoch [along with a bit of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech, and
Enoch in the Gnostic gospels - the only mortal taken without dying to heaven].
It was a form of homage, he said.
Was Murphy a religious man, I wanted to know. It was the spiritual,
Murphy said, that interested him, not the overtly religious, especially the
how, when and why of spiritual manifestation in philosophy and
ideas. We talked about the power of religious language, words used as a
means of locating members of one’s own tribe. ‘Certain words have incredible
power,’ Murphy said. ‘They speak a sort of code.’ Writing was all
about weeding out the mamby pamby words, and getting to the juicy, high protein
stuff. ‘Like the pots of stuff my dad used to cook up for our dog,’
Murphy said. ‘Writing’s a bit like getting a gumbo going, reducing
it down to a pure stock.’
Within a couple of weeks of handing in the final manuscript of John
the Revelator, Murphy began work on the Prologue to Shall We Gather At The
River. At this stage he'd no idea where he was heading. All he had
was a few pages of words. The spark that set him off, however, came from a Hot
Press interview he did with the Manic Street Preachers, published in May 2007.
In it Murphy mentioned the winter of 2002 in Enniscorthy and the two-week period
when more than half a dozen young men walked into the River Slaney.
'Fucking hell,' said Nicky Wire. 'That's a novel waiting to get
written. Jesus Christ.'
He was right as well. It was. But it was a long hard process
before that novel saw the light of day. 'Four years of divorce, moving
house, bereavement and turning forty’ is the way Peter Murphy described it. But
encouragement came from his writer friends, and from the Manics, especially
James Dean Bradfield. ‘He’s been a powerful ally ever since. There’s
something between the Irish and the Welsh. A connection or something,’
Murphy said.
Currently Peter Murphy's not writing but travelling instead, doing
book readings or performing with the Revelator Orchestra. This is an experience
worth getting up on YouTube. ‘Imagine, if you can, music that sounds like
Tom Waits on drums and
Lightnin’ Hopkins on a battered hollowbody thumping
away down in the
cellar while Murphy reads. The Sounds of John the Revelator
is a neat
piece of work that somehow combines the weirdness of Poe with the
coolness of the Beats over a soundtrack that might’ve been created by
the
Velvet Underground.' That’s what one reviewer said.
What about the next book? There had to be one, surely. Murphy didn’t
know, he said. He’d have to write it to find out. I loved that for
answer. I never know, myself, what I’m up to when I start a new
book. This was my sort of writer.
It was getting late. There was a girlfriend at the door, and a
dog, and a car outside, and a ferry waiting at Holyhead to take them home. I
packed away my notebook, thinking we were done, glasses in pocket, pen in
bag. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You put stories together, characters,
words on a page, and magic happens,’ Peter Murphy said.
BUY: John the Revelator
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