In Conversation with Rob Doyle
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I want to start with Cameo’s very first page, which is an interview much like this one. Do you like being interviewed?
I do like it, and this time I’m particularly in the mood. Mainly for the reason that it’s been five years since my last book, and when I wrote that I retreated into myself and now I’m just enjoying the chance to kind of have my say and put the world to rights. I’ve been pent up a bit.
The other thing about being away for so long is that when you come back, you start wondering if anyone is going to be paying attention. Is anybody going to give a shit?
In the fictional interview that opens the book, Ren Duka talks about turning forty and how that’s the landmark male age. You turned forty in the process of writing this book. How has that changed your writing, and your life?
I think I started the book just before I celebrated my fortieth birthday. I was a few chapters in, riding on this Ren Duka thing at the time. It’s an interesting age, a landmark age, a transitional age. There’s the famous idea of the midlife crisis, and there is substance to it. You’re having to die in life. That’s what I found. You’re having to die to one phase of being.
There’s also the Islamic significance of the age of forty. It’s the age of accountability. It’s the age when Muhammad began receiving his visions, his revelations. I think it’s a process of dying to your younger self. Something is over, definitively, and things can become tragic if you’re not willing to accept that and move into a new phase.
I’ve made writing the core of my life, with everything else orbiting around it. There are benefits, and there are consequences.
It’s hard to say how it’s affected my life. I feel that each book I write, and particularly each novel, becomes a monument to a phase of life, and more often than not to the crisis it coincides with. This novel came out of some very rough, transitional years when I moved out of the last, final remnants of youth. That youth trails on through your thirties. But by forty something comes to an end.
Do you think that the quality of your writing has improved with age, and is that an indefinite process?
In certain ways, yes. I mean, Cameo, for example – I can say that there are things I’ve done in this book that I simply couldn’t have done before. I didn’t know how to. I didn’t have the skills. I didn’t have the formal dexterity or the capacity, particularly when it comes to the structure of it – this kind of mise-en-abyme thing, with all the tunnelling, the series of fictions and authors and authorships, worlds within worlds. I just didn’t have that repertoire when I was younger.
So in some ways you do get better. Of course you change. In youth there’s an intensity – emotions, passions, torments, even sexuality – that often manifests in the work in a particular way. If people are drawn to that, they’ll probably be drawn to the earlier books. But I think you have to trust the life process, and trust how writing mirrors it at every stage, how it interacts with it along the way.
One of the things that comes across in your interviews and books is that you are serious about living ‘like a writer’. I find it admirable – writing seems like the defining fact of your life, like everything else sits around it. Is that fair? How should a writer live?
Good question, and thank you for the comment. On one hand, I’m heartened to hear that you find it admirable. I agree that I’ve tried to live in a certain, almost idealistic way in relation to writing, writing as a vocation, in an old-fashioned, romantic tradition, an all-in, all-or-nothing kind of commitment.
On the other hand, I’m very wary of presenting myself as any kind of model for how to live. So much of it has been catastrophic, frankly. I’ve made writing the core, the nucleus of my life, with everything else orbiting around it. That includes everything: relationships, security, all sorts of things. There are benefits, and there are consequences.
I don’t think I could live any other way, though.
So it’s not like a value judgement or a choice? Do you have a puritanical sense that this should actually be a bit shit, this should hurt?
I don’t think I agree with that statement. I mean, I love ease. I love the good things in life. I think I write best when I’m in a state of comfort. There’s been so much chaos in my life, and not all of it is related to writing. Some of it comes down to bad life choices, some of it to obstacles you encounter along the road. Things that have set me back, drained my energy, distracted me.
Sometimes you can perform a kind of judo throw with that material, turn it into energy or impetus or inspiration for the work. At other times it gets away from you. My life is still a bit centrifugal, a bit chaotic. I’m in my forties and I’m semi-nomadic. I never live anywhere for very long.
I’m lucky to come from Ireland, which has a certain tolerance, a generosity towards writers. It doesn’t have the same level of neoliberal harshness that I associate with the UK, and with life for artists there now. There are ways here of making it work. So I don’t advocate masochism or self-flagellation. As writers and artists, I don’t think we need to make life more difficult than it is.
These days I do tend to keep a certain distance – not an unfriendly distance, but a distance – from the literary world.
If there are two things to be said about the writing life, the first is that it’s hard. It’s difficult. The second is that, for me, it’s the only possible way to live. I love it. It gives me a sense of meaning and purpose that, frankly, I didn’t have without it.
There’s that Friedrich Nietzsche line, ‘he who has a why can live with almost any how’. You can put up with almost any life if you have your purpose. I’m at an age now where I see friends with families and homes they own. I’m in a relationship with another writer, and we both live in a certain way. Sometimes I look at that other life and think it would be nice. There would be real comfort in it. But what I believe in just hasn’t allowed for that.
Again, Nietzsche: amor fati, the love of one’s fate, one’s destiny. Sometimes that’s where the action is for me.
I’m not sure if you saw that Ottessa Moshfegh posted a job spec on her Substack today, looking to hire a PA. It was hilarious. She listed desirable skills like gardening and interior design, alongside editorial work and dog-sitting. I just thought: writers trying to outsource elements of their lives is both extremely funny and something we can probably all feel a bit of empathy towards.
Do you think writers make good friends, or dare I say, good partners?
Well, let’s bring it back home. I’ve been, for six years now, in a very loving, affectionate, mutually respectful and supportive relationship with another writer. I know writers who think that would be their idea of hell. They couldn’t imagine it. For me, it works. It means the conversation is never very far from the act of writing.
These days I do tend to keep a certain distance – not an unfriendly distance, but a distance – from the literary world. I know plenty of writers. Some of them are very good friends, some are people I respect greatly. But I’m not massively drawn to the literary scene as such, to its intrigues, hierarchies, pettinesses, its inherent values. I’ve seen enough of it.
It intrigued me when I didn’t know anything about it. I wanted to see it. But there’s not a lot there. I don’t mean that disparagingly. It’s just that it almost doesn’t really exist. It’s people with alliances and friendships, some of whom become your friends, some of whom don’t. Eventually you realise it’s just people standing around talking.
So for me it comes back to what got me here in the first place, which is the work itself. The words. Even when I read great books, I rarely feel an impulse to know the author, or to meet them.
But that’s interesting because your writing is marked more than most by a willingness to put your shame on the page in a very personal way. The sordid things, even the morally questionable things, and the thoughts that go with them. I wonder how that affects your relationship with your readers.
What is your relationship with your readers?
My sense of my relationship with my readers is that I’m not a million-selling, massive bestseller. What I do have is a small but very intense and passionate readership, and I love that. Not that I love its smallness. I think every writer wants more than their fair share of readers. But what I mean is that while not everyone is into my work, the people who are into it are really into it.
It’s hard to speak for a semi-invisible, generalised mass of people, but if I had to speculate, my sense is that what they respond to is the intimacy. I’m laying a lot on the page, even when I’m writing fiction. Cameo is fiction. It’s metafictional, multilayered, autofictional, whatever you want to call it, but it’s still a work of fiction. And yet it’s as exposing and revealing and intimate, in terms of the externalisation of my consciousness and my psyche, as anything I’ve written.
I think that’s what draws people in: the candour, the intimacy, the sense that I’m coming from a real place, a place of honesty, even when I’m wearing masks. There’s that line, either Bob Dylan or Oscar Wilde, ‘give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth’. Fiction is often my way of telling the truth.
So yes, my relationship to my readers is one of warmth.
Do you feel an obligation towards them?
No, I can’t say I do, because the pact that seems to have emerged, naturally and organically, is that if I just do my thing as fully, as energetically, as uncompromisingly as possible, and if I can be myself on the page as much as possible, that’s what draws readers in.
So I don’t really feel I have obligations to my readers beyond the ones all writers should have, or at least should aspire to: trying to give the reader pleasure, trying to give the reader a good time. That matters to me.
Not all writers feel that way. With certain late-modernist writers, it almost became a point of pride to hate the reader, to disdain or repel them, to be deliberately difficult or lofty. I don’t like that. I believe in maximum originality and maximum pleasure at the same time.
That’s not so much an obligation as it is an expression of what makes up my art, what I want to achieve, and what I’ve learned from the writers I’ve loved.
Have you ever had any uncomfortable interactions with fans of your books?
[Long pause] Yes. My work, and the nature of what I write about, can sometimes attract unsettled people. People who are intense. I don’t necessarily mind that, but at times it can be alarming. I suppose that can happen to anyone in the public eye, and we’re all in some kind of public eye now because of social media and the online world. But if you’re putting yourself out there as a writer or an artist, all the more so.
I write about madness. Very well-adjusted, wholesome, happy, contented people are probably going to be less interested in my work.
When my first book came out, it was a really disturbed and disturbing work. It came from a very traumatised place. It felt like an exorcism of demons I’d been carrying around for years. But exorcising those demons also means unleashing them on the world, and you get a kind of blowback from that.
It’s like a blast wave, like a dirty bomb going off, disturbing the psychic atmosphere for miles around. That book seemed to draw out a certain degree of craziness in some people. Even now, I have to be a little wary, particularly online. People can fixate, they can become a bit obsessive.
Well, without wanting to sound too therapeutic about it, in Autobibliography there’s a sense that you developed a similar relationship with the writers you love, no?
But I’m also very reserved and discreet. That relationship exists in my head, which is a crucial difference. In my head I can do anything. Engaging with someone in an obsessional way in real life is something else entirely. I’m not trying to conflate things. Often people are simply into your work, and that’s great. I love people responding to it. I never object to people writing to me.
But the nature of what I write matters. I write about madness. I write about people at the edge of the psyche, at the edge of experience, at the thresholds of consciousness. It stands to reason that people who are having similar experiences are going to respond to my work. Very well-adjusted, wholesome, happy, contented people are probably going to be less interested in it.
I heard you read at a Soho Reading Series last week. You chose to read from two of the book’s more depraved sections – do you think of yourself as a ‘provocative’ writer?
I think with my first couple of books, I had a knife in my hand. I was running at the reader from the shadows, sticking the knife in, then fleeing back into the dark to plan the next attack. I was a disturbed person. I’d been through a lot of things. I’d seen aspects of the mind, of life, of the world, of society that left me rattled and haunted.
So early on my motivation in writing was, in part, to show the world something and not let it off the hook. To show it the horror, the abyssal terror, the things I had experienced or was experiencing, or was still haunted by. There was definitely an aggression in that. I probably took a certain glee in provoking. But more than that, I was trying to honestly express and convey my experience, my imagination, my emotions, my sense of the world.
Since then, that ambition has shifted. I don’t really have any desire to provoke now, certainly not for its own sake. What’s interesting is that I still get described as a provocative writer, and I think people are sincere when they say that. But these days all I’m really doing is calling it as I see it, again and again. I describe the world, I make judgements on what I see, I assess it from as candid a place as I can. Somehow that often places me far enough askew from the mainstream, consensual way of looking at things that it’s taken as provocative.
If I didn’t do that, I think I’d crack up a bit because I’d feel dishonest, like I wasn’t saying what was actually there. That was particularly true during the height of the culture-war years, when I felt radically alienated, even from the Irish cultural world, from the UK, from the literary world. I wasn’t buying it. I wasn’t going along with certain consensual judgements because they seemed absurd or fraudulent to me. That drew a certain amount of hostility.
Now it’s simpler. I describe things as I see them. In my writing, in my fiction, I’m still drawn towards the guts of things, towards the messiness of human experience.
Do you think it isn’t even so much about the angle from which you look at things, but about a willingness to look at certain things at all? Writing about sex, for instance, is something most people don’t even attempt. You’ve written about it a lot. Does that come naturally to you?
Yes, it does come naturally to me, in the sense that the energy I draw on when I write comes from a feeling of preoccupation and fascination. And it stands to reason that what fascinates and preoccupies me is often where the pain is, where the neurosis is, where the contradictions are. Sex, inappropriate thoughts, the vast contradictions between inner experience and outer public reality or ideology – that’s where the action is for me.
So I’m drawn to write about it. I suppose it’s the mirror inverse of a kind of prudishness, a squeamishness, even a sensitivity in my own life. I take these things very seriously. I can get fixated on them. And in the writing there’s an urgency. I need to express this stuff, to figure it out, to go into whatever tortures me, whatever lacerates me.
Someone like Michel Houellebecq was important to me when I was younger, and I still read him. He writes about sex in a very clear, almost clinical way, almost pornographic in the sense that it’s very visual, very explicit. That always spoke to me. I like that directness. It’s not overly lyrical or euphemistic.
The other thing, obviously, is drugs. I’ve also heard you say that Cameo is your ‘stoner’ book. Can you expand on that?
What I meant by that was that nearly five years ago now, in the summer of 2021, towards the end of the Covid era, I gave up drinking alcohol. I’d been a heavy drinker for many years, but it started to get the better of me. It took its toll, and it was time. So I moved on.
If you’ve been dependent on a substance for a long time, it can be difficult to give it up without replacing it with something else. I found myself getting into cannabis. I’d had to give it up years earlier, when I was about twenty, because it made me paranoid and depressed. But I discovered edibles. A friend of mine makes these cannabis brownies, and I realised they were beautiful. I could take them and have these rich, sensuous, elegant, philosophically sophisticated nights. I could read. I could write. I wrote sections of Cameo, including the final chapter, the death of Ren Duka, on one of those brownies.
Since then I’ve cut my ties with all of it and decided to move on in a more profound way, to leave those years behind. I’m very immature when it comes to this stuff. Things other people do when they’re much younger, I seem to arrive at when I’m already on the wrong side of forty.
I think of the book as a kind of hyper-dimensional novel. Not all of the storylines in Cameo take place on the same plane of reality.
What I was trying to get at with that comment was that, as I got deeper into the trenches of writing Cameo, formal possibilities began to open up that I simply didn’t have access to before. Part of that was getting away from the blurry euphoria of alcohol, which has its uses for writers too, and towards a more metaphysically subtle, imaginatively refined, more sophisticated cannabis mentality. Not that I want to credit the drug with everything. But it did help me tune into different frequencies, to look at form differently and to begin building what, for me, was a very complex structure.
I think of the book as a kind of hyper-dimensional novel. Not all of the storylines in Cameo take place on the same plane of reality. Sometimes in novels you have different narratives set in different historical periods or timelines. Here, many of them exist in slightly different versions of reality. What is only a novel in one section might be reality itself in another. Within that reality there may be novels that give birth to worlds. You get worlds within worlds within worlds. They’re connected by dreams, by authorship, by family lines between writers and their creations, between readers, writers and fictional characters. I still have whole metaphysical maps of it all, buried somewhere in notebooks, diagrams of how those worlds tie together.
Was it important for you to work all that out? As a reader, I don’t feel like you need to, I think you can enjoy it without fully understanding all the connections.
Yes, totally. I’m glad you said that, and I agree. I know how I am as a reader, and if I were reading it, it wouldn’t be all that important for me to know exactly how everything clicks into place. You can just get into the flow of it and go with it. I hope that’s the experience.
You get a sense of this tunnelling effect, this shifting reality, and that the characters link up in various ways. But you don’t need to have it all laid out in your head. It wasn’t even totally necessary for me. I write more from emotion, from passion. There’s an energy that drives it. Often it’s an image that drives it, or an emotion. And often an emotion is an image, and vice versa.
Later on, it became a source of intrigue and pleasure for me to ask: how do these things tie together? How do they fit? What is the structure here? That part was as much for myself as for anyone else. I haven’t really shown those diagrams or maps to anyone. They were tools for thinking, for understanding what I was doing as I went along.
It’s funny because by the end, when I got to the acknowledgements and the biography, it felt like part of the book. The way the hardback is typeset, you turn the page and suddenly you’re at the acknowledgements, and I had this moment of disorientation. I remember thinking, is this still the novel?
That’s great. That’s a victory. It wasn’t necessarily the plan, but the fact that you experienced it that way means the book is having exactly the effect I wanted. The borders start to melt. The lines of separation begin to dissolve. Suddenly you’re in the novel. The novel is about you. Are you the reader? Are you a character?
At that point the novel becomes everything. That’s why there’s a Rob Doyle in there. I’m in it. Or Rob Doyle is just another character. He thinks he’s writing the book, but maybe he’s being authored too.
I feel like we have to talk about Jorge Luis Borges, who is obviously the most direct influence. You do that great Borgesian thing of writing stories that function as treatments for whole books rather than writing the books themselves, but you take that conceit to novelistic proportions.
Was Cameo originally conceived as lots of different books, or did it all emerge from that single conceit?
It was a matter of taking that conceit and running with it. Borges is the patron saint of this book. It’s no coincidence that one of the epigraphs comes from him, alongside the Bhagavad Gita. Borges has always been a massive inspiration for me.
He was one of the great trailblazers of this technique, this medium, this notion of creating fictional books, fictional literatures, fictional writers. Roberto Bolaño, the other Latin American giant, took that up later, especially in Nazi Literature in the Americas. That’s one of the only other books I know where an author takes that conceit of fictional books, fictional writers and expands it to novel length. It was definitely one of the germs of inspiration for Cameo.
When I first started, I didn’t really have a plan. I never do. I was just following an energy. I found myself writing these series of synopses, these critical treatments of works by this Ren Duka figure.
It became really interesting once I got to the end of those pieces, when I had a whole cluster of them. I started asking: what subterranean tunnels can I build underneath this? And what if beneath those tunnels there are other tunnels, or whole underground cathedrals, rooms branching off to the side? Suddenly the book opened out.
The Ren Duka novels became the central core, and radiating from that were all these offshoots, satellites, moons.
The labyrinth, right? To be Borgesian about it.
Yes, exactly. Or the Hall of Mirrors.
I’m sure you’ve read his essays where he gets into the more specific philosophical ideas of infinity and things like that. There’s a lot there that overlaps with Islamic mysticism as well, which you’ve written about for the magazine. Is all that connected in your mind? It’s presumably not a coincidence that you got into it.
Yes. All of the specifically Islamic mysticism I’ve written about, I only became interested in after I’d finished the final draft of Cameo. But for a couple of years leading up to that I’d already been deeply interested in these ideas. The other epigraph, as you know, is from the Bhagavad Gita, which is a beautiful, ecstatic, densely suggestive philosophical and mystical text from about three thousand years ago. I read it years ago when I was in India, on that kind of hippie trail, and then I reread it at forty, here, and I got much more out of it. I liked it back then, but this time I felt I had more of a sense of what reality is, what the world is.
So all of this connects. Borges is probably my favourite writer for a reason. Like him, I’m awed and astonished and fascinated by eternity and infinity and time and chance and chaos. I’m drawn to write out of that engagement. There’s also a lot of human passion in my work, probably more than in Borges’s. He wouldn’t write as vigorously about erotic matters as I do. There’s a visceral component, but that’s only one aspect.
On one level Cameo is about the world. On another level it’s about the beyond, the porous border between life and death.
The other aspect is a very real engagement with ultimate questions, with mysticism. So it’s no surprise, in hindsight, that writing this book and exploring these themes led me quite naturally, after I’d finished, into Islamic mysticism. That was a huge discovery for me. I had no idea it was so subtle, sophisticated, complex and profound.
On one level Cameo is about the world – the chaos and absurdity of the literary world, the political world, the social world. On another level it’s about the here and the hereafter, about the beyond, the realm of the dead, death itself and the porous border between life and death. And about the dreamlike nature of existence, which all the great wisdom traditions and philosophers arrive at sooner or later.
There’s a Hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: ‘people are sleeping; when they die, they awaken.’ That amazes me, because I’ve come to see things that way. This is the sleep. This is the dream.
Well, that relates a lot to James Hillman’s work that you mention in that piece. The idea of dreams being an equally real, if not more real, psychic event than waking life. Not the most comprehensible book, by the way. I was fascinated by it, but I also struggled.
I think he’s a very dense writer, but not in an off-putting way, at least for me. It’s not easy, but I find it incredibly rewarding. I do need to read him slowly because there’s so much there. He’s operating at such a high level of intuitive sensitivity, intelligence and subtlety that it really pays off. I was reading with the red pen out.
Yeah, some of the quotes are great. There’s one, ‘reality is in the dream, the way the boat is in the water’, or something like that. And I was just like, God, this is seriously good stuff, isn’t it?
You know, that’s crazy. I love it.
But I understand he’s somewhat of a pariah in psychoanalytic circles?
Yes, when I was young – I did my master’s here in Dublin, at Trinity College, in psychoanalysis – even Carl Jung, who’s a colossal figure by any measure, was something of a pariah in psychoanalytic studies too, because everyone there was Freudian, they were Lacanian.
Ultimately, I think what they disliked about the likes of Jung and Hillman was that they upheld a philosophy, an ontology, a metaphysics, whatever you want to call it, that wasn’t materialistic, something other than material in the philosophical sense. And that does still seem to be the dominant orthodoxy. The mainstream academic orthodoxy is a materialist worldview.
I used to subscribe to it too, to an extent. My education guided me towards it. But I no longer do. It’s just not how I look at things now. I think science is beginning to catch up with all of this. I tried to get into some of it in the essay I wrote for you. The scientific worldview is getting so strange now that it’s almost as if the religious imagination and the scientific imagination, instead of pulling apart, are starting to come together.
I can’t really read Freud anymore. It just doesn’t resonate with me. But I picked up the Hillman book in the summer of 2023, while I was in Berlin working on Cameo, and it radically changed things. It made me overhaul the whole novel. It gave me so much. It became a huge influence on how I thought about fiction. It really accelerated my creative process for a while, in ways that are hard to pin down.
The other person I thought a lot about reading this book was Houellebecq, particularly in his relationship to satire. Alex Preston wrote that ‘we feel Houellebecq’s satire (like all the best satirists) is only half in jest and it makes reading him a shifty, discomfiting affair: we’re never sure quite how many steps ahead of us the author is’. There are moments like that in Cameo too. As I’m sure you’re aware it would be totally plausible for someone to launch a Twitter-level argument that you are a rampant misogynist and racist based on your books if they wanted to. To what extent are you in on the joke?
I mean, I like to think so. It’s funny you mention Houellebecq because I don’t always read his work satirically. And it’s also funny that the word satire is being used so much in relation to Cameo. I can see it. Not throughout the book, but there are sections with a satirical intent, which is interesting because it’s not something I’ve consciously engaged with before. I’ve never really aspired to write satire.
I think what happened is that, on one layer of the novel – the top layer of the Ren Duka saga, where this author achieves vast success writing a prolific series of novels about this character – it gave me a way to be hyperbolic, to look at things in their broadest possible terms. Because his success is so enormous, I could take anything and blow it up to the maximum. That includes small aspects of my own writerly ego, my insecurities, my pettinesses, my grievances and the things I see around me. The world of writers, artist friends, all of that. I could magnify those elements, inflate them to their largest possible form.
And the other thing I’d say is that the world over the past ten years has become so absurd, chaotic, unlikely, unseemly, unsophisticated—
Seemingly authored?
Seemingly authored, yes. Just mad, really. Like a Paul Verhoeven film, RoboCop or something else from the eighties. It’s all outstripped satire. It’s become such a shocking thing to be alive in the 2020s that using Ren Duka as a way to run headlong into the absurdities of the age was just fun.
There’s a whole sequence of chapters set in the late 2010s and early 2020s. In those chapters I had a good time plunging into what I saw then: the absurdity, the fraudulence, the madness, the mass hysteria, the fear, the panic. As you say, you could make a bad-faith, Twitter-level argument that the contents of the book add up to racism or misogyny or sexism or something like that. In those years that was the dominant discourse. The culture felt terrifyingly centralised. It was as if a group of authoritarian, sanctimonious people with a very prissy, easily offended worldview suddenly had the microphone, and they were the only ones with it. It felt like we decided overnight not to be adults anymore, to defer to people behaving not like adults but like children, with frightening consequences. Artists being shut down, destroyed.
It was absurd, interesting and distasteful to me, but it was great fun to write about. I’m not usually a satirical writer, but it was too rich. The comic potential was there. So there are two or three chapters where Ren Duka blunders headlong into the culture wars in a naive, opportunistic, cynical way, and it backfires. He gets hung out to dry by the left and the right. He tries to cosy up to the far right, then sell them out to get back in with the far left—
And then the Chinese Communist Party.
Yes, the Chinese get involved. That was a lot of fun. And it means I can move on. Those years left a bad taste in my mouth, watching institutions and people who should have known better kowtow to ideologies I felt were bad news from day one. Writing about it let me take the piss, have some fun at its expense and hopefully never think about it again, because there are far more interesting things to dwell on.
One of them hopefully being prose-style, which I wanted to ask about next. I thought yours was very much on the ‘clear windowpane’ side of things, like a vehicle for ideas and story rather than an end in itself. But then I wondered if maybe that wasn’t fair. Do you have an interest in language as its own end?
I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that portrayal. In a way, language is almost the first thing. I want to write beautiful sentences. Whether I succeed is for the reader to decide. I have my own favourites, and others I’m less convinced by. But there’s always a high degree of work on the sentences. I subject them to a lot of revision and polish.
There’s never an awkward sentence. That takes work, obviously.
Yes. I like to think there’s a fluency to it, a clarity and limpidness. That’s the style I favour. Within those parameters, I want it to be as musical as possible. It’s not always the same, though. There are degrees of it.
For instance, in the Ren Duka sections in Cameo, many of them are written in a slightly detached third-person, almost essayistic, almost academic register, which then crosses into summaries and descriptions of the plots themselves. That register is drier, cooler.
Then there are the first-person sections. Some of my favourite parts of the book are the long monologue chapters, where you get whole life stories of characters in the extended orbit of the Ren Duka universe. The piece I read at Soho Reading Series, for example, is the first-person account of the actor who played Ren Duka in the first three films, and who becomes involved in a sex scandal with his co-star.
Then there’s the Dina Tatangelo section. She’s a New York punk, underground novelist writing transgressive, junky fiction. Her whole section is one long paragraph, one extended monologue. I love the language there. In those sections, I think there’s a vibrancy, a vitality, a visceral descriptive power that I really respond to.
Prose style matters a great deal to me, even if it isn’t always showy. I’m still all about the sentences. And I do value clarity.
Do you read poetry? Does that play a part in your writing as well?
I only really started reading poetry in a serious way when I turned forty. I’d more or less given up on ever becoming a poetry reader, even though I’d been in a relationship years ago with a poet for quite a long time. I admired poetry, but I could never seem to slow down enough to get on its wavelength.
Then, maybe it was because I started smoking weed and having long baths and reading, I got into a few major poets, and now poetry is a big part of my life. I still only read one or two poets a year at most, but I tend to go quite deep into them. They’re mostly the big, Olympian figures.
Louise Glück was a big one for me. Wallace Stevens was a major revelation about a year and a half ago. I really went deep into his work. There’s a whole philosophy there, a whole cosmos. Ted Hughes was another.
I did read poetry when I was younger, but never in a sustained way. I’d always get impatient with it and return to the thing that felt most natural to me, which was prose.
I was delighted to encounter a pretty unexpected mention of Don Paterson in this book, not for his poems but for his aphorisms. I know you’re a card-carrying member of the aphorism fan club, as am I. What is the appeal of aphorisms?
That’s another great stylist I should mention, even if I don’t know how much of an influence he’s been: Emil Cioran. I know Don Paterson is a clear admirer; he says as much in those wonderful books of aphorisms. With Cioran, what he did with sentences gave me years of intense pleasure, real intoxication. I’ve probably passed the peak of my rapture with his work now, and I’ve grown out of his obsessive nihilism. I don’t share his convictions anymore. But as a stylist he’s immaculate. Explosive.
Yes. The Trouble with Being Born is ripe for ripping off in poems. That’s how I found him, actually, through Don Paterson, which is a strange route. Would you ever write a book of aphorisms? Have you tried?
I’ve tried the form. I’ve written a few aphorisms here and there, but I’ve never tried to write a whole book of them. I don’t think I ever could.
Your agent would kill you?
Yes, commercial suicide. It’s a very refined form, a very distinct and limited form. As Don Paterson says in one of his aphorisms, all the great aphorists seem to issue from the pen of the same minor, despotic deity. It’s almost as if everything that can or should be said in that form has already been said.
When I finally got around to reading François de La Rochefoucauld, I saw how much Nietzsche had taken from him. And later I saw how much Cioran had taken from Nietzsche. There’s a clear lineage, a chain of transmission. I don’t know that I’d have anything to add. That’s lofty company.
Don Paterson says himself – I think he uses the phrase – it’s like a wind tunnel. As people keep ripping each other off, you end up with something chiselled, wind-beaten, a kind of perfected thought. He sees it as an invitation to take up that mantle.
But you’re right. There’s also a specific tense that aphorisms are usually written in, the gnomic aspect, where everything is declarative. This is the case.
I love reading someone who can make that tone work – someone like Nietzsche or Cioran – but I’m not comfortable writing like that. Now that you say it, it reminds me of attempts I’ve made to write in that style, and I just don’t feel that way.
The centre of energy for my inspiration seems to be moving away from the strictly autobiographical, but not necessarily towards old-fashioned fiction either.
I don’t have that level of conviction, even momentary conviction, in my own ontological insights or judgments on the human race. I’m not as fervent as those writers are. And I’m not even sure I’d appreciate reading them in the same way now that I’m older. That kind of writing fascinated me when I was a punk renegade in my twenties. I couldn’t get enough of Nietzsche then, of his damning indictments of everything.
Which leads nicely to the last few questions. You mentioned Nietzsche earlier, and amor fati, being in love with your fate. All of your novels seem to be doing something quite different. Here Are the Young Men is working within a more conventionally novelistic tradition. In Threshold, there’s autofiction, and with Cameo, metafiction.
I wonder whether you’re simply following the whims of your interests, or whether there’s a kind of grand plan. Some artists have a sense of how their career is going to play out. Do you have a similar idea of what you’re going to write, book by book, or is it more instinctive than that?
There’s a strong element of making it up as I go along. At the same time, Jules Renard, the late-nineteenth-century French diarist, wrote that ‘in literature, as in billiards, you should line up your shots’. I like that. I don’t have a master plan, an overall game plan, but as I approach the end of one book, I can usually see the next couple of things ahead of me. I tend to have something to say to my publisher or editor or agent about what the next thing might be, or about some small idea I’ve got cooking on the side that’s about to be put on the main stove. I never really see more than six months ahead. I mean that literally. I’ve never planned my life very much, often to my detriment. But in other ways it’s given me a certain freedom with the books.
Every time I finish a book I feel completely done. I’ve poured myself into it. I have nothing more to give, nothing more to say. I’m exhausted and empty, and that feeling can last a while. But then something inevitably starts to bubble up. You have new experiences, hopefully deeper and richer ones. Life confounds and surprises you. I trust in that now.
At the moment my interests have taken a real turn. I’ve become inspired in ways I never saw coming. I don’t have a plan for it yet, but I can feel that sense of something going somewhere. Writing has become a way of life for me, how I move through the world and process experience. I hope that continues.
You said earlier that some of what you’ve been getting into recently, around Islamic mysticism, has had a way of encompassing your other interests. Do you stand by that?
Yes, I do. And again, not just Islamic. It’s a bit dangerous even talking about Islamic mysticism, because some people get weirded out. I was having lunch with a writer friend a few weeks ago, before the book came out, around Christmas, and he was asking me about publicity plans. He said, whatever you do, don’t mention Islam. People will get the wrong idea. They’ll think you’re proselytising or something.
And that’s not it. But I can see how people might think, what’s he talking about? Is he converting
Well, I think some people have a very backwards cultural idea of Islam. It’s literally the most modern of the Abrahamic religions, and in some ways the least conservative, or the least concerned with guilt or tradition for its own sake.
Yes, especially in its later flowerings. A few hundred years after its first emergence, you see something similar to what happened with Buddhism. Early Buddhism can feel quite rudimentary, a bit like dry bread and water. Then, a few centuries later, you have great minds, sages, visionaries and philosophers taking that tradition and turning it into something ornate, a vast superstructure. That seems to have happened very strongly with Islam.
I agree with you, and I shared some of that prejudice myself. But more broadly, it’s not just Islamic mysticism. This whole turn towards mystical philosophy and everything around it is what everything has been pointing towards for me.
In the last few weeks I’ve been preoccupied with my book and the process of seeing it out in the world. But for months before that, I spent most of my time thinking about and wondering about and dreaming about what lies outside this reality. Where it’s going. What happens after we die.
Everything now feels enchanted to me, full of mystery and endless possibility, even terror. If I could still buy into what now seems to me a cartoonishly simplistic scientific, rationalist, materialist worldview – the idea that there’s nothing to see here, that being itself is no great mystery, that something came from nothing, then we die and that’s it – then things would feel more straightforward. But I don’t see things that way anymore. And I feel confident that this sense of wonder and intrigue will continue to guide me into the second half of my life.
It would be remiss not to ask about your relationship with London, given this is The London Magazine. You lived here. What do you make of London? Do you think it’s a great literary city?
I’ll tell you this: I took the train down to London from Edinburgh last week, and when I got off at King’s Cross, I was hit by a very powerful wave of yearning, spiked with nostalgia. I had this feeling of, why am I not living here? My friends are here. Life is here. London fascinates me. It always has.
I lived there for four or five years, and they were rich, happy years. Not materially rich. Quite impoverished, really. But I could get away with that when I was younger, living hand to mouth. London feels endless. Its sense of intrigue feels infinite, in a way that just isn’t the case in Dublin, where I’m from.
Final question, is there anything in your life that still resists being written about?
There’s all sorts of stuff. There’s murky stuff, and there’s also material I just haven’t felt driven to write about. There are topics that feel not so much off limits, as fruitless. When you’re writing in an autobiographical vein, as I do, you have to be careful about collateral damage, to use the military term. You have to think about who you’re writing about and what you’re doing to them.
So there are things that might be tricky to write about, but it doesn’t really feel like a problem. In a way, no is the answer. There are many things in my life I haven’t written about, but I’m just not drawn to them. My interests and my dreams are taking me elsewhere. Even autobiographical writing, which was a huge inspiration for me for a long time, doesn’t appeal to me greatly at the moment.
I’m very glad I wrote Threshold. That book, maybe more than others, seems to matter to a certain kind of reader, people who really identify with it. I’m glad I wrote it, but I’m not at that level of personal excavation anymore.
There’s too much at stake?
Yes, but it’s not even about what’s at stake. It’s more that the interest in excavating the self isn’t really where it is for me now. I’ve become more outward-looking. This mystical, religious, philosophical turn I’ve taken does involve the self, but it’s a deeper self. The soul self, rather than the minutiae of my day-to-day life.
The centre of energy for my inspiration seems to be moving away from the strictly autobiographical, but not necessarily towards old-fashioned fiction either. Images appeal to me more than ideas. Discursive thought and commentary don’t fascinate me as much as images do, because images and symbols express what can’t be expressed otherwise. That’s where the real action feels like it’s happening for me now.
The image in a psychoanalytic sense?
Not really. In that tradition they always reduce the symbol or the image. They interpret it down into psychosexual terms. I don’t care about that anymore.
I’ve just rewatched the entire run of The Sopranos, I don’t know if you’ve watched it?
Several times.
I love it. It’s great. But the part that’s aged the worst is the material with the psychoanalyst. It’s good drama, but there’s something pedantic about the way she’s always interpreting his dreams.
Again, James Hillman talks about this. There’s a passage where he says that if someone dreams about a snake, instead of saying, the snake means this, you ask what the snake was like. What colour was it? You go into the image itself.
Exactly. That’s what I mean. It’s not that I’m returning to a psychoanalytic way of thinking. It’s the image itself that appeals to me. When I say that some of my favourite sections in Cameo are the monologue sections, that’s what I’m talking about. The Dina Tatangelo section, the anime sections with the Japanese character, and Henry K. Dillon, the night taxi driver, who’s a fiction within a fiction within a fiction.
It’s the imagery in those sections that gives them their mood and their magic, their mystique, for me. There are certain images that propel those narratives. That’s what I’m drawn to now.
Thank you so much, Rob.
Thanks a million, Jamie.
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Rob Doyle is the author of four internationally acclaimed books: Autobibliography, Threshold, This is the Ritual and Here Are the Young Men, which was adapted as a film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Dean-Charles Chapman, and was named as one of Hot Press magazine’s ’20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916–2016′. Doyle’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Observer, TLS, Dublin Review and many other publications, and his work has been translated into several languages. He is the editor of an anthology published by Dalkey Archive Press, The Other Irish Tradition, and the book In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep.
Jamie Cameron is Managing Editor of The London Magazine.
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