Faber & Faber

John the Revelator author Peter Murphy first met Shirley Manson - Garbage singer, solo artist incumbent, and actress in Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - in the Spring of 1998. Back then Manson and her bandmates were promoting Garbage’s second album Version 2.0. Murphy had just turned pro as a music and arts journalist. The five bonded in a mutual melding of spiky Edinburgh wit, sardonic Mid-western drollery and southeastern Irish gallows humour ...

Murphy interviewed Garbage several times over the next decade and contributed liner notes to their 2007 'Best Of' collection Absolute Garbage. Manson, a voracious reader, furnished him with copies of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.

John the Revelator, Murphy's first novel, has been published by Faber in Ireland, the UK, Australia and other territories. In the UK’s Guardian, Cathi Unsworth wrote, 'Murphy casts his debut novel like a blues noir, steeped in the music that has clearly inspired him. From the title, Blind Willie Johnson's 1930 gospel call and response, he follows the path of Nick Cave's 1985 Delta descent The Firstborn is Dead, with its shades of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews. But this spook-filled Irish landscape, rendered with gouts of blood-red humor, is entirely his own.' Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released the book in the US this August, coinciding with Faber's paperback publication and also Suhrkamp's German edition.

The pair’s paths have overlapped. Manson cut her journalistic teeth interviewing U2 several months ago, while Murphy has just completed an album-length spoken word/music adaptation of his novel entitled The Sounds of John the Revelator (on www.myspace.com). On a warm evening in late summer the tables were turned, as grand inquisitor became quivering quarry. No blood was shed. Well, not much anyway.

Shirley Manson: So Peter, you've been a music journalist for 13 years, and you've just released your debut novel. I want to know why it took you so long when we've all known for years that if anyone were going to write a book it would be you. What spurred you to take the plunge?

Peter Murphy: The spur I think was the oldest one in the book. My father died in 2000, and in the period of about a year after that I started to wake up in the middle of the night afflicted with what I call the Claw of Death, which was a sort of cold icy feeling that I hadn't achieved anything, that I was going to die having only written about other people's work and never having produced any of my own. I had ideas, stories that didn't yet exist and I wanted them to exist. And the only way they would exist was if I wrote them. And it took a long time because ... It just takes a long time. It took me a long time to get even a paragraph or a page that I could stand over and read without flinching, never mind a chapter or a whole book.

Obviously I have a little prior knowledge that I probably shouldn't have, but I know this wasn't your first draft.

No, it was a whole other book. What happened was, as you know, there were passages, one or two pages that seemed to tap into the electricity, the kind of writing that I wanted to do. So they were like little DNA swabs that I took out of the previous draft and grew a whole new book from. This was about 2003, 2004. I was in a fair amount of ... Despair is too strong a word for it, but everything else in my life had fallen apart, so this was the sole focus of my love and obsession. 

Did you have any themes in mind that you wanted to explore, or did you just sit down and start writing?

The strongest impulse that I had was to evoke impressions of the landscape of my childhood in Enniscorthy in Co. Wexford, where I moved back to last year. There's something crackling and magic about that landscape, it's very beautiful, but also the darkness of nature is very evident. You look around and you see this constant dance of fertility and beauty and death and decay all happening at the same time. When Twin Peaks was first on the television, I used to joke that it was just a documentary about Enniscorthy with American accents dubbed on. So the primary thing that I wanted to do was evoke that feeling, except it was filtered through that strange and impressionistic lens of memory, and everything became even more stylized.

Are you specifically referring to geographical memory or emotional memory?

I suppose it was how the emotional interacts with the geographical. For instance, the smell of cut grass or the smell of pines, and the way that sort of catches your heart. Y'know how sometimes as a grown-up you get a whiff of something that brings you back to that age and it's just like time travel?

Of course.

And once I'd begun to remember and describe that landscape, the characters grew out of it. I could hear them talk, 'cos it was the language of where I grew up, which very often reminds me of people from the South. I remember meeting Billy Bob Thornton once and he really reminded me of the people I grew up around. The accent was different, but the manner and the comportment really reminded me of those kinds of people.

When I read the book I knew your Mum was ill and struggling with dementia throughout the writing of it. I wonder if the fact that John's mother became a central figure was a result of that?

Without doubt. Actually, I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned it, but the whole process was book-ended by my parents’ deaths. And I didn't really get a handle on starting the next one until after my mother passed away in May.

Y'know, this is the somewhat eerie thing about art and music and writing, its predictive nature. Before my mother fell sick or was diagnosed, I had written some of those scenes. I think what happens is your subconscious divines certain things that your daytime mind doesn't want to acknowledge, so it looks prophetic when you go back and see something that you've written is predicting something that later happened, but I don't think it's prophesy. I think it's that we absorb information or signs or auguries in ways that we don't even comprehend, and some part of us understands what's going to happen, but our conscious mind doesn't want to face up to it. And there's no doubt about it, the character of Lily was a catalyst. I believe it's her book. While the narrator is John, I think his purpose is to bear witness to his mother.

Why did you call it 'John The Revelator'? I want to know that, even though it's a really moronic question.

Oh no, it's crucial. That song title, that aggregation of words was kind of like a talisman for me. What happened was I read Greil Marcus's book Invisible Republic, which was about The Basement Tapes and Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. And when I read it I was of course compelled to hear the Harry Smith Anthology. I remember I bought it in Amherst in Massachusetts and I was sitting on the porch as the crickets were chirping, drinking a beer in the really close heat and looking at the track listing, and I remember my eye just locking on this title. It was the Blind Willie Johnson version, and I just thought it was unbelievable. It was Biblical, it could have been from Moby Dick, it could have been a Nick Cave song or a Cormac McCarthy novel, it could have been a John Ford movie. And I couldn’t believe that nobody had ascribed a story to it. And once I decided this would be the title, it became a kind of dare. It was like, 'Well, can you write something good enough to stand up to this?' It became like a torch to follow. 

So now that the book has been published and incredibly well received, are you satisfied with it?

I think it's as good a book as I could have written at that age. There are cracks and knots in it, it's a handmade thing, but I don't like perfection in any work of art. I love the Dead Man soundtrack by Neil Young, I love The Wasp Factory, which you gave me, I love Riddley Walker, I love all these flawed, idiosyncratic, individualistic sort of works. I'd much rather that than some neutral Esperanto-voiced work of quote-unquote modern literature. That stuff's just spam to me.

And how did it feel to have legendary Irish writers like Roddy Doyle and Colm Toibin praise your writing?

Y’know, it just kind of ambushed me. Colm is from Enniscorthy, but typically I hadn't met him until about two or three years ago when I was interviewing him in Dublin. He knew who my agent was, so he asked me to give him the manuscript when I was finished. He gave me his address and I called by his house in Dublin and there was no answer, so I abandoned the manuscript on his doorstep like a little baby in a bag.

Wow, I love that. Hopefully it was a plastic carrier bag.

It was! It should have been a wicker basket! But evidently he got it. The first I heard about his reaction was somebody said it was in the newspaper and I should see what he said. This was a full year before it came out. Colm's been an amazing support.

The Roddy Doyle quote, I remember it was in the midst of a period last winter when I was really at an all-time low, it was October or November, and I got an email from my editor at Faber, Angus Cargill, and he said, 'We've sent the book out to a few people and Roddy Doyle's just sent us a blurb.' So I sat there and read it and it just knocked me for six. I'd forgotten what was about to happen, I'd forgotten that the book was about to come out, and I was in such a tunnel that I couldn't see outside of it, and this was just a shaft of light. And I really respected Roddy, particularly his later work, but in the 1980s growing up he was that thing whereby it didn't matter whether you liked his work or not.

He was the zeitgeist, right?

Yeah, he had a standard of excellence as a writer but also he spoke for people and to people. I asked that my deepest thanks be conveyed to him, but I'm sure he has no idea of the effect it had on me.

I know you've referenced American books and writers - how does it feel to have your book published in the States?

Some of the trade stuff like the Kirkus review and Publishers Weekly review ... I mean, that's wonderful for the book. I want it to do well for the people who work in the publishing houses, the people who set the type. I really want it to do well for them.

And for yourself?

For myself ... It's really corny, but I already got the reward. That thing saved my life.

Do you think your book will resonate with an American audience?

Absolutely. Because American stories resonated with me and were so similar to my upbringing. When I was 12 or 13 I started the Stephen King canon and just didn't stop until they were all devoured. That was my first obsessive reading of any one author. And then it moved onto Steinbeck. And it was quite late in life that I made the connection - Faulkner, McCullers, O'Connor - what do these names have in common?

There are obviously deep Irish cultural roots in America. Do you think there's more of an acute curiosity about all things Irish in the States that doesn't exist in other countries?

I guess there's a natural affinity. It's an emigration route. That's not to downplay the importance of Scots Presbyterian or Dutch or all the other stuff that goes to make up the melting pot. The first time I set foot in America I breathed out and felt at home, just the sense of possibility and openness. And I tend to get on with the people, particularly Mid-Westerners and New Englanders and those I've met from the South.

What did you learn from American authors that you didn't learn from other writers?

Well, Flannery O'Connor is the queen for me, she's my favorite writer of all time. And also I was just re-reading The Grapes of Wrath and it is an astonishing book. And Twain, Huckleberry Finn has the most delinquent, idiomatic voice I've ever heard. It's punk rock, that book. And To Kill A Mockingbird. And The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb, on which the Charles Laughton film was based, is a contender for my favorite book of all time, it's extraordinary.

Because of its dark underbelly, or the themes?

The themes, the bigness, the epic nature of it, the good versus evil, the children's uncanniness, the landscape, the river, the magic. And a Ray Bradbury book called Something Wicked This Way Comes for the same reasons. To answer the question, what I get from these books that I don't get from other places - although the Russians have it in a different way - is what I get off a Scorsese film, which is an absolute refusal to play small for the sake of it. They're completely unafraid to use a big canvas and address the stuff of life and death.

Plus, most of these books are from the age before post-modernism and irony and all that stuff. Which I admire, I mean, I read David Foster Wallace and I'm stunned by his intellect, even though Wallace would've used irony as a means of undermining irony itself - he was a very non-ironic writer. But there's something very healing and beautiful about story. It has the same function as myth, which is to teach us in a non-didactic way, it's entertaining, but it does what Shakespeare does which is to enact drama in such a way that we brood about these things and they become useful to us in our lives. I can remember lines of Macbeth that I learned when I was 16, when I could have had no inkling as to why they were important, but they stayed in my brain until I became such an age as I could understand them.

Being Irish I imagine is much like being Scottish, coming from a very small island with a strong nationalistic identity. How does being Irish shape your writing? 

I love Beckett and I love Yeats and The Dubliners and Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien ... I love Irish poetry more than any modern fiction, and the body of mythology, those strange, weird, surreal, hyperbolic, ludicrous, sometimes comical ancient mythic stories, I just can't get enough of them. I'd love to see more of that tradition in modern Irish fiction. I find a fair amount of the modern stuff to be a bit austere and grey and proper and a bit Sam the Bald Eagle.

What do you think is the purpose of fictional writing? Why do you want to write?

At a certain stage in my life I realized that this is what makes me feel useful and whole as a person. I'd be delighted if the book made people feel better than they felt before they started it, or if it made a bus journey shorter, or if it got them through a morning in the motor tax office. Beyond that, I've just surrendered to the fact that this is what I do, I live in language, the music of language. I discovered something through the reading of the work ... I don't think of it as separate from the person I am, I think of it as integral to my own organs and breathing and walking around. It's just hardwired into my purpose. When I'm working well I'm a dream to be around, and if I'm not working ...

You're a nasty old bear!

Exactly! I had to realize that this is what I do, and I just do it.

Do you have a particular strategy when you write? What's your method?

Faulkner gave the best advice I ever heard. He said go to bed with a fair idea of what you're going to do first thing in the morning, which will remove all faffing around or sharpening your pencil. Usually I'll sit down and revise and tighten up a bit that I'd been working on the day before, and then I'll get sucked into it and like a river it'll just pick up its own current.

I do a lot of thinking when I walk as well. Walking seems crucial, there's something about the circulation and respiration that's good for the head, and it's a good way of working out things that are problematic when you're sitting at a desk. I tend to be thinking about characters and stories and themes all the time. I mean, that makes me sound like some sort of hermit or something, I'm not, I'm perfectly capable of going out to dinner or having a couple of beers ...

Oh, I know that! As a child what came first for you, the reading or writing?

That's a really good question. The relationship between reading and writing is the same as between listening and playing for a musician. They're not divorceable. I don't believe you can be a good writer without being a great reader. And you have to learn how to become a reader of your own work too, in order to judge it. They are the same thing.

What was the very first book from your childhood that made a deep impression on you?

I remember, I must have been about ten, reading an anthology of the true-life stories behind great horror tropes like werewolves and vampires and stuff. For instance, they'd tell you about Vlad the Impaler, and I remember there was an extraordinary plate illustration of Vlad standing there with all his victims impaled, pronged on these big sharp sticks, blood drooling from the side of his mouth. Or the true tales behind werewolves, that these lycanthropic creatures were probably escaped from the local insane asylum, this kind of stuff. I also loved a comic called 2000AD and was utterly obsessive about it. On Friday my heart would pound as I was going down to the newsagent's to get it.

Is it true you're negotiating film rights to the novel?

We're working on it. I don't see any reason why they couldn't make a good film out of John the Revelator. I think it would have to be led by the actress though. I think an actress would have to really want to play the part of Lily. So the book has gone out and there are a couple of production companies and film studios interested. I've got a list as long as your arm of who I'd love to make it. People like Alfonso Cuarón who made Children of Men and the third Harry Potter film. 

You have a myspace page up that centres around a spoken word/music project. Was that inspired by the book or did it come before the book?

There was an open mike night here in Enniscorthy last November, and there was a lull between singer-songwriters doing their thing, so I got up and read a couple of passages. And afterwards an old friend of mine who I used to play in a band with and who was doing the sound said, 'Do you fancy recording some of that?' So he came out to the house and set up the mikes and we recorded some stuff. And he had a library of recordings by local musicians, and he almost randomly began to throw the readings at these pieces of music, and 60% of the time they just sat really well. That was a really effortless and pure experience. 

So now you're sitting in the hot seat where people ask you questions and review your work, I'm sure it must be incredibly strange. Do you feel differently about yourself?

Y'know, some people will tell you that it doesn't make any difference, the book comes out and it all passes in a couple of weeks, but I never felt that way. I felt like at last I had arrived in my body, I swear to god, I felt born again! It was profound!

You got a tattoo of the book's cover on your shoulder. What was the significance of that? I mean, I can guess, but I'd like to hear it from you.

I have to put this the right way without sounding like some kind of Iron John maniac ... It sounds bizarre, but before the book came out I felt like a boy. And when the book came out I felt like a man. (Laughs) And I'd had a hard couple of years and just wanted to mark it, figuratively and literally. I asked my brother John, who's covered in tattoos, he's like The Illustrated Man, 'Hey John, do you think I should get a tattoo?' And he's a man of few words, quite Zen-like, and he just said, 'It'd be good for you.' I think he recognized in that bovine way that brothers have that I was going through something.
And I think it's important ...

You know, if you read Joseph Campbell, you learn a lot about rites that have great use and significance. And there was something about getting a tattoo that was beyond cosmetic, it was important that there be a certain amount of pain involved, and also it seemed all these things were converging. I'd reached a certain age and gotten to a certain stage and the book was coming out and I felt like I was ready to start again.

So what's next?

The next book.

Well, I'm really proud of you, Peter. It's been brewing inside you for so long, ever since we first met you which was ... A decade ago?

Eleven years ago. April Fool's Day, 1998.

(Laughs) Well, it's wonderful to see that talent realized, and I think this just the beginning.

Thank you, Shirley.