After Donal Ryan’s award-winning debut, “The Spinning Heart” was published in 2012, he moved on to other novels, but the characters who populated that book lingered.
“They were very present in my head since then,” Ryan says. “I was always aware of how they were progressing as people.”
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The book, which was written in 21 chapters, each from a different character’s point of view, was set in a fictional version of the small town in Ireland where Ryan was from. His mother, who still lived there, worked in a grocery store, and always told him he’d have to write a sequel.
“People would come into the store to ask about the characters speaking of them as if they were real people, asking, ‘How is Bobby? Is he OK,’” Ryan recalls.
“Heart, Be at Peace” answers those readers’ fervent questions, although Ryan regrets not writing it before his mother died.
“I did write it as kind of a thank-you to the people who invest their time in my books and because I also had such a fondness for the characters,” he says. “It’s a privilege and a joy to have people engage with characters I’ve created and to read books I’ve written. It seems unbelievable.”
While “The Spinning Heart” was set in the aftermath of the economic crash of 2008, “Heart, Be at Peace” is set a decade later when the town and its residents feel like they’re flourishing again while simultaneously facing a new threat: the encroachment of increasingly reckless and ruthless drug dealers. The story is again told in 21 chapters and brings back all the characters from the first one, although it can easily be enjoyed by someone who has not read “The Spinning Heart.”
Ryan spoke recently by video about the book and his real life in Ireland. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Your books are intimate, dealing not only with small-town life but also with socio-cultural or political issues, whether it’s the economic meltdown, the influx of drugs or the Syrian refugee crisis. Is that a conscious choice?
I’ve never sat down to write an issue novel, but those things are informed by my own experience. My stories are located in a very particular place, a fictionalized rendering of my home place, but those big things creep in because we’re all corks in the ocean. When I wrote “The Spinning Heart,” I was in the exact same position as loads of the characters, with huge mortgage arrears and personal debt and our income had suddenly been slashed.
I was working as a labor inspector for a government body, and our job was to make sure people’s employment rights were applied across the board. We had lots of cases that were very similar to the case of Pokey Burke, who in the book ripped off his employees.
Now I find it terrifying the impunity with which people deal drugs. Not long before I started writing “Heartbeat,” I was walking back to my house and a child offered me drugs. I said, “Are you selling drugs right here?” And he said, “Anything you want.”
When I said, “Effin awful,” he suddenly was threatening to burn my house down and kill my children. It’s as though the criminal world and the ordinary world have collided now, and this collision is horrible and messy and bloody. The world’s gone mad and people who make billions of dollars from crime are living it up and laughing at us.
Q. Was it easy to find the voices for the different characters?
I wanted to be true to the voice of my own people. A blog called Books and Bowel Movements once said that “The Spinning Heart” was the worst book ever written and after seven paragraphs of absolute invective she wrote that all I was doing was “using the slang and grit of his own people.” I forgave her for the whole horrible review because that’s actually what I was aiming for.
I didn’t have to work very hard to be able to wield language in a way that reads lyrically or poetically because it’s how language is used where I’m from. There’s a beautiful cadence and rhythm in rural Ireland in the way we structure sentences because we retained Gaelic syntax and there’s kind of a joy in it.
There’s an attempt to not be too direct and it’s lovely, the way people can speak for a long time without saying anything very much at all, but still the act of speaking is very important – those banal comments about the weather are done in such a way that the person listening feels connected to you for that moment.
Q. Were you wary of finding the right path for the characters that everyone loved so much?
It was hard to come back to Bobby and his wife Triona because they’re the two main pillars. [Both books open with Bobby’s chapter and close with Triona’s.] Their relationship was very important to me especially because I based Triona on my own wife – she even did the voice of Triona for the audiobook.
I was so worried about getting it right with Bobby and Triona. I wanted to show they were still completely and utterly in love, with an almost fairy-tale kind of level of miracle rightness I wanted it to be my own marriage, really. Triona’s voice needed to be as wise but still as humane and loving as it was in “Spinning Heart,” even though Bobby is still inexpressive, which is a bit selfish in a way. He must know how much it upsets her that he can’t express themselves properly to her. But they’ve developed a kind of silent language over the years. I wanted that to be expressed properly.
There’s a lot of silence in both books – for two books that are composed of people speaking first person to the reader, there’s almost no dialogue. There are very few moments where people actually communicate in the books. And also everybody is saying things they wouldn’t say out loud.
Q. When Bobby doesn’t come clean in the first chapter about a false rumor being spread about, his inability to communicate with his wife makes you want to bang your head against the wall.
I’m glad to hear that because I wanted people to feel that frustration. People say, “Just say it, Bobby,” but this is such a real thing for a lot of men. There’s a lot of myself in Bobby – there are loads of things that I find really, really hard to say, really obvious things that I should be able to say.
Q. Do you think you’ll go back to these characters in another 10 or 15 years?
I hadn’t considered it until I read a review in The Financial Times that said this book seems like “the second part of a tetralogy” and I thought, “That sounds like a good idea.” I don’t think I’m finished with this village and these characters.
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