{"id":521464,"date":"2026-06-06T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T09:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/521464\/"},"modified":"2026-06-06T09:00:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T09:00:17","slug":"patrick-freyne-the-true-and-wonderful-weirdness-of-dubliners-always-surfaces-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/521464\/","title":{"rendered":"Patrick Freyne: The true and wonderful weirdness of Dubliners always surfaces \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t really believe in lead characters. Or, more accurately, I believe there are eight billion lead characters and that\u2019s kind of the same thing. I have always preferred ensembles to solitary heroes standing alone. My favourite stories were about groups: The Wombles, The A-Team, The X Men, Stephen King<\/a>\u2019s The Stand, Douglas Adams\u2019s The Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy, Joseph Heller\u2019s Catch 22, CS Lewis\u2019s Narnia books, The Wire<\/a>, Mad Men, the Six O\u2019Clock News, Muriel Spark<\/a>\u2019s Memento Mori.<\/p>\n

But what really drove it home for me was the last 20 years I\u2019ve spent reporting and writing journalism<\/a>. People \u2013 and, oh my God, I have spoken to so many people \u2013 just don\u2019t align with stereotypes. <\/p>\n

On the surface a person might seem like their just in a walk-on-role, but if you talk to them for more than five minutes their true and wonderful weirdness rises to the surface. Everyone is the lead in a strange story of their own. Very few people are out there unthinkingly servicing the plot of a self-imagined lead character, and those that do are a rare breed of natural born fascist (I\u2019m making an exception here for the parents of very young children \u2013 all babies are lead characters and there\u2019s nothing we can do about that).<\/p>\n

Consequently, my favourite form of reporting is not the celebrity interview or political profile; it\u2019s approaching \u201cpeople\u201d in \u201cplaces\u201d and asking them questions about \u201cstuff\u201d. It\u2019s the thing many journalists hate \u2013 the dreaded vox-pop. In its debased form, it can seem like pandering, thoughtless page-filling. Send a reporter out to get a view on a new government policy: \u201cI like it,\u201d they say. \u201cI do not like it,\u201d they say. And, also, \u201cPoliticians are clowns.\u201d (They often are, in fairness.)<\/p>\n

When I do this job, however, I have only a cursory interest in what the news angle is (don\u2019t tell my editors) and I just want to gnaw on my interviewees\u2019 life experience like some sort of journalistic vampire. Usually, I spend far too long talking to them, which is the best way to talk to people. They slowly veer away from the character they\u2019re playing and become the person they are. I love it when the slightly dishevelled man feeding pigeons on a hot day says, \u201cof course, that\u2019s when I was a banker in Germany\u201d, or the Brexit supporter in London\u2019s Parliament Square mentions casually that his father was an acolyte of the occultist Aleister Crowley.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent time wandering Britain ostensibly asking questions about Brexit. I went door-to-door with a postman in north Dublin at the height of Covid. I once spent 24 hours on O\u2019Connell Street<\/a> chatting to everyone who would talk to me \u2013 flower sellers, evangelists, homeless people, musicians. I did something similar in Temple Bar. And on Parnell Street.<\/p>\n

My novel, Experts in a Dying Field, is at its core, the story of a band called the Heathens who were active until a tragedy in the early noughties, and then reconnect, sort of accidentally, 20 years later, but it ended up being a sort of portrait of Dublin. Or at least my version of Dublin. And that Dublin is very busy and filled with people.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story told from the close third person perspectives of recovering alcoholic barmen, homeless vagabonds, financiers, migrant care workers, retired secretaries, struggling office workers, mundanely mystical priests, overly precocious children, musically gifted barflies, punk rockers turned suburban mothers, an urban fox and God. It\u2019s ultimately about ageing and creativity and loss and failure and death. All the good stuff. It is, I hope, sometimes funny and sometimes very sad. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Doing the coronavirus rounds with Joe the postman in Dublin 3Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

I love all my characters. None of them are based on real people but they are, in a way, remixes of all the people I\u2019ve met in and around this city and over the course of my life (including the fox). I stole the name of one of them, Snoopy, from a real local music industry stalwart who otherwise has few of the fictional Snoopy\u2019s characteristics. <\/p>\n

\"PatrickPatrick Freyne\u00a0 ear O’Connell Bridge which he references in his new book Experts in a Dying Field. Photograph: Bryan O\u2019Brien\/The Irish Times<\/p>\n

The Heathens\u2019 singer Joss Boland, who dies in tragic circumstances, has some of the qualities of my close friends Barry Jordan and Paul Clancy, who died as very young men. But largely I channel the experience of grieving them. I also stole Joss Boland\u2019s first name from the brilliant Dublin drummer Joss Moorkens, and his second name from my friend and colleague Rosita Boland, but I\u2019m only realising that now.<\/p>\n

One of the things I learned early on when trying to move from non-fiction to fiction was that people in fiction had to be far more \u201crealistic\u201d than people in reality. Real people aren\u2019t very realistic at all, and they feel no responsibility whatsoever to be plausible or to ring true (no offence to any \u201creal\u201d people reading this). They say bizarre things all the time, which if you put into the mouths of fictional characters would fail any metric of verisimilitude. Humans really do say the darnedest things.<\/p>\n

Some of my favourites novels have multiple voices. Critics call these \u201cpolyphonic novels\u201d. They include Ann Patchett\u2019s Commonwealth, the decades spanning tale of a sprawling blended family, and Jennifer Egan\u2019s Welcome to the Goon Squad, in which seemingly disparate stories told from the perspective of different characters in and around a music scene blend into a holistic whole. Both are incredibly moving and follow many people across time and space. In fact, I reread both those books as I was starting Experts in a Dying Field to see if I could \u201cborrow\u201d ideas. I couldn\u2019t really. <\/p>\n

In the end, my book held far more resemblance to the work of Jaime and Beto Hernandez, two masters of the polyphonic graphic novel (comic books). Like me, they\u2019ve told stories frequently and at length about the wider community in and around a very specific music scene in a very specific parts of Spanish-speaking LA. It was only when rereading their stories recently that it occurred to me that they were probably the biggest influence on Experts in a Dying Field. Their stories have numerous characters ageing realistically and surreally across history and geography.<\/p>\n

In her interview with Martin Doyle in this paper<\/a>, Wendy Erskine, the excellent author of her own polyphonic novel, The Benefactors, talks about how there might be something more egalitarian and left wing about the polyphonic novel, a collective reckoning with reality when compared to the more individualistic solipsism of the single narrator. S\u00e9amas O\u2019Reilly, author of another excellent Northern novel, Prestige Drama<\/a>, suggested to me that polyphony might be the only way to represent the fractured, contested narratives of his home.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0S\u00e9amas O\u2019Reilly: \u2018As I\u2019ve grown older I\u2019ve realised how formative the Troubles were\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

All I know is that writing this sort of book felt right to me at the time I wrote it. I wanted to write about Dublin and the people who lived there and that didn\u2019t seem right coming through just one voice. My novel is also a psychogeographic novel, a work of polyphonic psychogeography. That overcomplicated description basically means I have my many characters travel through places (and, also, that I probably need a slap).<\/p>\n

\"PatrickPatrick Freyne\u00a0at the statue of Luke Kelly in Dublin’s Docklands which he references in his new book Experts in a Dying Field. Photograph: Bryan O\u2019Brien\/The Irish Times<\/p>\n

I really want readers to feel like if they wander Dublin they might hear these voices and maybe see glimpses of the characters. In the book they wander the gleaming docklands (\u201cthe city\u2019s ungrateful child,\u201d Snoopy calls it), and O\u2019Connell Street, which I have always loved in all its faded grandeur. They jump off O\u2019Connell Bridge (to save a rabbit), visit soup kitchens in Smithfield, attend parties in south Dublin suburbs, sit in corporate meeting rooms, fly across the skyline in disembodied form, read tarot cards in prison, encounter the large shrieking head of Luke Kelly down by the canal, and hang out in a fictionalised version of Whelan\u2019s on Camden Street. Or maybe it\u2019s the old Dice Bar down near the quays. I\u2019ve kept that a bit vague. <\/p>\n

Some of the characters hark from Kildare and Cork originally, but little time is spent in those places (sorry Kildare and Cork). The band at the core of the story visit Cardiff at one point but they don\u2019t have a great time there (sorry Cardiff). They also go to Galway, but bad things happen on the way home (sorry Galway). For the most part it\u2019s a Dublin novel. I\u2019m no James Joyce (please don\u2019t argue with me). Joyce stuck carefully to Thom\u2019s Directory as he wrote Ulysses, I just went by memory and a frequent yen for plot convenience. <\/p>\n

So the book doesn\u2019t completely obey the geography of Dublin because occasionally I wanted to get someone from A to B in an unrealistic period of time and the easiest way to do that was the cheat. Sometimes, in fact, I kept things in my fictional version of Dublin that have ceased to exist in reality, like Ballymun\u2019s seven towers. This is my Dublin book but it really is my Dublin, filtered through hazy dream logic and filled with echoes of the people I\u2019ve known there. I\u2019m not too proud to say I\u2019m glad I wrote it. I think I\u2019ve said what I had to say. <\/p>\n

Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne is published by Penguin on June 11th. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t really believe in lead characters. Or, more accurately, I believe there are eight billion lead characters…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[52,18,117,19,17,134494,361,12950,12474],"class_list":["post-521464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-dublin","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-luke-kelly","tag-magazine","tag-o-connell-street","tag-patrick-freyne"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116702349538527503","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}