~Q&A Session on New Town Soul (Prescribed text for Leaving Cert) with Dermot Bolger~

dbolger wrote: »

Hi, I have two sons who were still (just about) teenagers when this book was written. I had long promised to write a novel for them, to sit alongside the novels I normally write for adults. While adults like to categorise novels very strictly (i.e. literary, crime, horror, etc.) teenagers are more open to writers playing with genres and generally categorise books are simply good or bad.

I cannot say how successful I was at capturing the excitements, anxieties, joys and tensions of teenage life – as that is a subjective question. But there is a long tradition of Dublin gothic horror going back to its heyday in the 19th century and I wanted to first tune into this (and pay homage to it), while setting what is essentially a horror story in a very real and recognisable physical contemporary world.

Too often horror genre tales can be set up in such a way that we know almost from the first page that we have entered the realm of the supernatural and are therefore not surprised by it. I wanted to bring the reader into a very real world. Therefore every street and place in the book is findable if you simply walk through the streets of Blackrock, except for the fact that the old diary is a building in another part of Dublin which is transplanted down a real cul-de-sac in Blackrock.

Having established this hopefully realistic teenage world, I then wanted to flip the story over into an alternative imaginative parallel gothic world, which – while it is paired with the real streets of Blackrock – by its nature does not make any sense in a logical world. This is because it is a work of imaginative fiction: a totally fictional fantasy world which I invented and where I make up the rules as I go along. That for me is the joy of writing. Writing for me is like doing a jigsaw puzzle where even I don’t know the final shape of what I am trying to make, so that I let my imagination take over and often it brings me somewhere totally surprising.

This does not mean that the book is totally divorced from reality, but just that it uses a story, that is non-realistic at its core, to explore real ideas, like, for example, the fact that we are all going to die and, if it come down to it, in the final moments of our life would we be willing to let go of life and disappear into oblivion (which obviously only applies for people who do not believe in religion and the afterlife) or would – like Thomas, Shane and other in that chain of dead souls – we would clasp at any chance that might allow us to live on in some form.

Hopefully teenage readers will feel that on one level they recognise the physical world in which it is set and then, on another level, will be willing to go on the imaginative journey that the novel demands on them, where is a far less clear cut universe.

Thanks for the question.