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Sparkle (2)
I've been enchanted with Tana French's Dublin-set police novels since I read the first word of The Likeness, her second novel. Upon reading the last word I instantly downloaded and devoured her first, In The Woods -- and preordered her latest, Faithful Place. I love her focus on a different protagonist in each book -- each character an exploration of identity and the things that change a life for good. The plots are gripping, but they also serve to evoke character; and the beautifully written prose begs to be read out loud. Tana's thoughtful, provocative answers to my questions made me wish I were in Dublin with her, extending the conversation over a pint of Guinness at the pub (where, in fact, she came up with the idea for The Likeness).
I recently read an essay in which you said you always get asked how you manage to write from the male point of view, but no one’s ever asked you how you managed to write someone so badly damaged. First: Thank you for that excellent piece. And second: How do you manage to write characters whose lives are so damaged?
Like I said in that essay, I don’t have a clue! I just cross my fingers, dive in and hope it works…
Seriously, though: I think we’re all damaged to one degree or another -- it’s the very lucky few who make it to, say, twenty without being hurt in some lasting way. So we’re drawn to reading about damaged characters, because that helps us understand the nature of damage, the ripples it can send out, how people find ways to live with it. All my narrators have been seriously damaged: Rob Ryan’s mind was cracked straight down the middle by the disappearance of his best friends when they were twelve, Cassie Maddox in The Likeness is deeply traumatised by the events of In the Woods, Frank Mackey in Faithful Place has constructed his whole identity around the wounds he got when he was young.
For a writer, to a small extent, it’s about understanding how your own forms of damage have affected you, and then transposing and extrapolating. But that can only take me so far: the characters aren’t me, their wounds aren’t the same as mine, and they don’t respond to them the same way I would. So I need to ditch my own experiences and emotions.
Which sort of ties in with your other question about being an actor. I’ve always liked playing characters as different from me as possible -- and a character actor’s job is to get out of the way. Ideally, you want to take up practically no space on stage; all the space should be for the character. (This doesn’t fit with the tired old cliché of actors as egomaniacs, but it’s the reality.) So I’ve spent a lot of time working on how to see through the lens of someone else’s mind, a lens where the flaws and the clarities are very different from mine. That’s what I rely on, when I’m working on a badly broken narrator.
In the end, I guess much of it comes down to the old basics: imagination and empathy. Also huge amounts of rewriting and coffee.
Dublin is nearly as forceful a character as Frank Mackay himself in Faithful Place. I found this quite different from the almost-ghostly central locations (the woods and Whitethorn House) in your previous novels. What brought you away from those fictional settings and into a real place? Was it harder to write about The Liberties?
I’m a mix of various nationalities and I grew up as an international brat, moving country every few years, so I’ve always felt like I can’t really claim any place as home. I think this is one reason why I wanted to write about Dublin, and specifically about an old and deep-rooted neighbourhood like the Liberties. We’re all fascinated by what’s foreign to us, and to me this is one of the most exotic things around: a life where you have the same friends when you’re fifty that you had when you were five, where you live in the same street and maybe even in the same house where your parents grew up, where your relationships are shaped by generations of history.
There’s also the fact that I love Dublin. I’ve lived here since I was a teenager, and it’s the nearest I’ve got to a place I can
