Author Caoilinn Hughes told Oliver Callan – sitting in for Ryan Tubridy – on Tuesday that she would try and write a novel – she really would – that doesn't have family relationships at its centre, as her two books to date, including her latest, The Wild Laughter, have. She'd try. Honest.
"I just think sibling relationships are just the most fascinating relationships. I can't really ever see myself not writing about family dynamics. I'll try. At a certain point I'll try and write a novel just about friends."
It's not the sort of commitment that would have you holding your breath, is it? But Caoilinn has her reasons for her infatuation with family relationships:
"They're the relationships that are probably going to last the longest in your life. But they're often the same, you know, they don't evolve. They get stuck at a certain point and you are always a caricature of yourself to your sibling."
The Wild Laughter is set on a potato farm in Roscommon during the last recession. It's "a bit of a state of the nation, family saga" book, Caoilinn tells Oliver, narrated by Doherty, who runs the bankrupt farm and cares for his much-loved, ailing father, along with his mother and his entrepreneur brother, Cormac, the first person in the family to have gone to college.
"There's a fierce rivalry between the brothers, but they have to come together to make an impossible choice that will change the course of all their futures."
Caoilinn also promised that there's a plot that follows this compelling set-up, giving Oliver a synopsis of the first 40 pages of the book, keeping things relatively spoiler-free. The novel is set during the last recession and explores the effects of austerity on Ireland and the Irish. Caoilinn did plenty of research to make sure it was authentic, including listening to people talking to Joe:
"There was a feeling in the country, and if you listened to Liveline, you'd hear it directly from many citizens' mouths that there was kind of a culpability taken on by people. You know, that they had maybe, as Brian Lenihan said on Primetime, you know, they'd all partied."
Given the deep dive she did into the crash, Oliver asked Caoilinn if she had any thoughts on where the country is heading now. She might have reasonably been expected to have been caught on the hop with such a question, but she doesn't even pause for thought:
"The fact that so many people were unable to go to their jobs or they lost their jobs of their hours were reduced or they had to take huge pay cuts. You kind of became aware of the fact that, well actually, this might be necessary in order for us to transition into a new Ireland, which doesn't try and just keep catching these pockets of air in various balloons and actually re-establishes what it wants to be and how it wants to get there."
Pockets of air in various balloons. Wonderful. To find out why Caoilinn chose Roscommon as a location and a potato farm as the family business, and what Cú Chulainn has to do with the story, listen to the full conversation with Oliver here.
The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes is published by Oneworld.
Niall Ó Sioradáin
(Photo: Danijel Mihajlovic)