Spinning a tale with great heart

PROBABLY the first novel to seriously deal with the human implications of the economic collapse, Donal Ryan’s first published novel The Spinning Heart marked him out as an outstanding talent.
The Tipperary native works in Shannon for the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation as a Labour Inspector. He will be reading at the Temple Gate in Ennis this weekend.
The Spinning Heart was the Bord Gais Energy Book of the Year last year, while Ryan was winner of the newcomer of the year award. His debut novel is told through 21 different voices, all belonging to people living in or associated with a small Munster town that has been struck by the recession. Several of the characters have been cheated by Pokey Burke, a local developer who has just run away from his responsibilities.
Quite dark at times, there is real warmth and tenderness in it too and a sympathy for many of the characters. Donal felt the subject matter of The Spinning Heart, which he wrote in 2010, would make publishers sit up and take notice.
“At the time there was an awful lot of commentary in the media about the lack of contemporary fiction dealing with the current situation. I said that if there’s a bit of a gap in the market there… I was thinking commercially because, at the time, I thought I had no hope of getting published. I knew the statistics and I had been getting nothing but rejections from publishers and agents for the whole year before that. Just for myself I wanted to do it really.”
Many of his characters are facing difficulties that are to be found in most families now. “Most of the situations are familiar to everyone. It’s the same story being told a thousand times in Ireland at the moment. It’s great that everyone seems to find something in it, that it’s close to their own experience or they can empathise with it.”
The central character, Bobby Mahon, is a heroic figure facing turmoil, while Pokey Burke is a cowboy builder who avoids the consequences of his actions. However, Ryan says he wasn’t particularly looking to blacken developers.
“I only know one developer personally and he’s a lovely man. There were rogues who let people down and pretty much ran, they didn’t stay around when the chips were down. In fairness most of them did stay but there are guys who just legged it and left people in the lurch.”
He resents how people’s lives have been turned upside down. “I just hate the way that people’s perception of themselves was shaken so much. Even the other day we were celebrating my Dad’s 70th birthday and he was saying, ‘God, remember my 60th birthday, everything was flying’. There weren’t enough hours in the day, people couldn’t keep up with the work, everybody had money and there was no one emigrating. Look at the difference now, a lot of people who were there had kids who emigrated and were scrambling around for jobs. It’s the opposite now to how things were ten years ago.”
Before The Spinning Heart he wrote the novel The Thing About December, due to be released in Ireland in September. It is set in the early part of the last decade and, by the sounds of it, the Irish economy is a central theme once more.
“It’s about a guy who inherits land, about 50 acres of a farm and it’s rezoned. Before he was left it there were machinations going on regarding planning. All of a sudden he’s left this notional fortune and massive pressure is brought to bear on him. People are telling him if you don’t develop the land, you’re holding back people’s prospects and you’re stopping employment and stuff. He’s under terrible pressure and it describes that year in his life and how things pan out for him.”
His first novel has marked him out as a serious talent. He says he might have had something on the shelves earlier if he hadn’t been as self-critical as he was.
“Even when I was a child I always thought of myself as a writer and I always wrote. I never had anything published really. In my twenties I got to the end of a novel I was happy with at the time but reading back over it, it wasn’t something I was prepared to put out in the world, because I thought I could do better really. For years and years and years when I was writing I was thinking, ‘I can do better, I can do better’. Then in the last few years I settled down to it and got into a proper groove of doing three hours every night, from nine to midnight and being strict with myself.”
It’s a sobering thought for aspiring writers that someone like Ryan, who has won awards and shown rare talent, won’t be giving up the day job. “Not unless something happened out of the blue. At the moment there’s pretty much no money in writing at all.”