An interview with Mark O’Connell
Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2023
Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence, is about Malcolm Macarthur, who, in 1982, murdered a nurse, Bridie Gargan, and a farmer, Dónal Dunne. Macarthur was from an aristocratic background, but at the time of the murders he was on the brink of bankruptcy and risked losing his leisured lifestyle. His actions were part of a flawed plan to rob a bank, characterised by what O’Connell has called ‘the peculiar foolishness of the intellectual’, and Macarthur was eventually arrested at the home of Ireland’s attorney general, Patrick Connolly, a friend of Macarthur’s, who had no idea he was hiding a fugitive. The resulting political scandal almost brought down Charles Haughey’s government. The unlikely events were famously summarised by the acronym GUBU: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Macarthur served thirty years in prison for the murders.
O’Connell is strangely haunted by Macarthur’s crimes, and a series of encounters and interviews with him provide the material for A Thread of Violence. Less a true-crime book than an interrogation into the compulsions to write, read and make sense of true-crime narratives, the book is about the limits of our understanding and the ways in which the crimes are ‘never more than partially knowable, like an underexposed photograph whose subject is visible only as a darkness’.
I met Mark on a Friday afternoon in June outside Trinity College’s front gate, very close to where he first and frequently encounters Macarthur in A Thread of Violence. We wandered down Dawson Street and sat down in a café to discuss the book.
Liam Harrison (LH): In A Thread of Violence, you describe a ‘thin fabric that separated fiction and non-fiction’. I want to ask about this relationship between fact and fiction, and how Macarthur contradicts himself and creates fictions of his own. There’s a moment in the book when Macarthur vividly remembers an article describing him as a classist snob, and you look everywhere for the article, which feels strangely familiar, but you eventually realise it’s not a real article and that it was actually from the John Banville novel, The Book of Evidence, which fictionalised Macarthur’s crimes. You often reflect on how you risk turning Macarthur into a character, imposing certain fabricated narratives, and here is an instance of Macarthur doing it to himself.
Mark O’Connell (MOC): Part of me thinks I wrenched the subject of this book around to an obsession that I’ve always had. But the topic demanded to be thought about this way. Like, what even is non-fiction? It is predicated on telling stories and making narratives out of the mess and chaos of reality. I feel that non-fiction is a niche subgenre of fiction. The only way we can make sense of the world is through narrative, through stories, and there is a whole level of fictionalising to that. This book began with an uncanny slippage between fiction and reality, with the fiction initially being more vivid than the reality. I’m trying to get to the real, while also being aware that there is fiction in everything. There’s an idea that all worthwhile writing is trying to get to the truth, and there are just different conventions about how you do that. In a weird way, fiction often has a less complicated relationship with truth than non-fiction does. It’s not that I pulled punches in the book, but there were things I agreed not to include because he requested that they be off the record. A fiction writer can be adaptive with the truth, to capture unvarnished aspects, while a non-fiction writer has to worry about getting sued or causing upset to victims’ families. You can’t tell un-truths, but you also can’t tell the whole truth. There are aesthetic reasons for that as well.
LH: I don’t know if you’d agree that you are more present in this book than your others, To Be a Machine and Notes from an Apocalypse, but you include quite a few personal details, such as your early attempts at writing novels. And there’s an honest assessment of your own investment in the story, as you reflect that if you’re going to examine Macarthur’s social background and origins that you’re also going to think about your own. You talk about doing your PhD on Banville at Trinity and about where you grew up, as well as questions of class and privilege. But I really want to hear more about the failed novels!
MOC: I spent a long time and trying to write fiction, getting nowhere. In a weird way I thought that my fiction was not true, and that’s probably how it feels for anyone when you’re just beginning. I never carried on with it because I started writing essays and then I immediately felt a connection with the material. I never really felt that with the fiction.
LH: In the book you discuss a tradition in true crime to sensationalise, as well as a shift in contemporary true-crime culture to recentre the experiences of the victims. You explain why you chose not to try to tell the full stories of Bridie Gargan and Dónal Dunne, the victims of Macarthur’s murders. The book also addresses questions of framing and how this isn’t a straightforward true-crime narrative; it’s a more meta- or a self-reflective meditation on the impulses to write and read these kinds of stories.
MOC: I’ve got nothing against the true-crime genre. Some of the best non-fiction books could be categorised as true crime. But I just can’t do it. Or at least I couldn’t do it with this. It felt false. In terms of not telling the stories of Bridie Gargan and Dónal Dunne, there were several dimensions to it. One was expediency, as there’s very little information about them out there and the families don’t speak about the murders anymore and what they went through, and I totally understand and agree with their decision. Then there’s a moral dimension to it, which I work through on the page. It was also an aesthetic thing. It felt right to just try to examine this man who did these things, and what it meant to write about him and what it meant to live in that sort of state of abjection as an outcast. Readers mostly understand why I made that call and appreciate the moral dynamics of it. Often people who haven’t read the book are more critical, and that’s not to say they would be convinced by reading the book. I did an event with John Banville in Boris recently. We didn’t have a moderator; we just sat down and started talking to each other. Within fifteen minutes people started shouting questions from the audience, and it was a bit intense. People have strong moral reactions to this book, even just the idea of it. I have confidence in the moral and aesthetic choices that I made. Not that I couldn’t imagine another way of writing it, I absolutely could, but I have enough confidence in what I have written to answer those questions.
LH: There’s another way that you’re more present in this book than the other two. Do you remember the guy who is selling bunkers in the mountains in South Dakota in Apocalypse?
MOC: Robert Vicino.
LH: Even when you’re writing about larger-than-life characters like Vicino, there’s never a sense that you’re taking the piss, unless it’s like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel. There’s a generosity in terms of how you approach people in your work. You bring an element of that to Macarthur and allow him to put what has happened in his own words. But because of the moral sensitivity of the murders (and I suppose you could say that transhumanism and the apocalypse are also sensitive subjects . . .), there’s something more intimate and complicated about this book, and you are more involved with the unfolding narrative of the book itself.
MOC: I’ve always felt that if I’m going to write about a person or a group of people or an idea held by a group of people, it would be really pointless, shallow and uninteresting if I were to just go in and take the piss. It might be funny in a fleeting way, but to me it’s fundamentally boring to walk into a situation and act like the only sensible guy in the room. There are loads of people who want that, and didn’t get it from my first two books. And some people might want a more uncomplicated encounter than they’re getting from A Thread. There are people who think that someone like Macarthur should never be heard from, never be given any kind of platform, even one like my book. But for me, it’s not enough to say that he did terrible things and that we should never hear his words. You have to try to understand, even if complete understanding is elusive or impossible.
LH: You’re not particularly antagonistic in your conversations with Macarthur. You say how you ‘disagreed as we so often did’ from time to time, and there’s a sense of a back and forth, but not a prosecutor’s tone. Do you think some people wanted that?
MOC: If I was making a TV show or a radio documentary, maybe I would be obliged to play the dogged journalist, cornering a subject with hard questions. I’d have to be the moral voice of the listener or the viewer. But in my position, it felt counter-productive. My job is not to make moral condemnations of a person like Macarthur, but to draw him out, to try to see him more clearly. My job, as a writer, is not to reflect the reader’s morality back at them. My job is to show them a person in all his contradictions and complexity.
LH: Which relates back to ideas about fiction. Good fiction often doesn’t reflect your morality back at you. It tries to interrogate loads of difficult questions, rather than give you a very digestible version of a story, like, this guy is bad.
MOC: If I wrote a book that began and ended with, this man did terrible things, he is a terrible man, we should shun him, that would not be very interesting. It’s not what literature, or any kind of art, should be trying to do.
LH: There is a strong focus on language in the book. Macarthur has an idiosyncratic vocabulary. He uses loaded and often menacing phrases: ‘a financial problem’, the ‘technique’ of the robbery, the ‘violent episode’, ‘a thread of violence’, et cetera, which are often used to distance himself from events. There are elements of the language which come from his social background, class and culture. He sometimes switches to the second or third person when talking about himself or uses the passive voice. This can be very chilling, like when he talks about how the fatal blows are ‘repeated’. How did you find speaking to him? Did your background as a literary critic help you pick up on that kind of language?
MOC: I don’t think you have to come from the literary background, or be a critic, to be attuned to it, but I was especially attuned because of the kind of writer I am. I am interested in how language channels and modulates power. A lot of it has to do with control – controlling himself and his emotions. Macarthur, intellectually, would not acknowledge or believe that he’s trying to distance himself from what he did, but psychologically, he has to. It’s the only way to keep himself together. I would often remark on it and see how he would respond. Most of the book is a conversation, him talking and me listening, occasionally intervening. Have you seen the Joan Didion documentary? The best moment of the whole thing is when she’s asked about Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the five-year-old kid who is on acid. She’s asked: ‘What was it like to be in a room to see that?’ She pauses forever, and you think she’s slipping into a coma, and then she says: ‘It was gold’. I think every non-fiction writer would completely connect with that – the totally amoral, almost gleeful sense of having struck gold. Not to keep going on about the reaction to the book, but some of the responses have been faulting me for the way that I speak about the book in terms of the theme or Macarthur as this resource that I stumbled upon. My language about that in the book is meant to be hyper self-conscious. It’s funny, because it’s something that you do in order to expose yourself, because it’s more truthful and interesting to do that. Do you know what I mean?
LH: It’s quite clearly signposted! There’s an interrogation going on throughout the book about what you’re trying to do. There’s a great conversation with your friend Katie about how you compare Macarthur to various literary characters. You say he’s kind of like Banville’s Montgomery, but he’s also like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, and he’s got shades of Camus’ Meursault. And your friend says: ‘What are you doing? Stop thinking about him like a fictional character’. I think that’s one of the best moments in the book.
MOC: Katie is great for those conversations. She totally cuts through the bullshit.
LH: Have you read the Rachel Kushner essay, ‘The Hard Crowd’? The essay is about growing up in San Francisco in the 1980s. She has this passage about a bar where she used to work, where there was a really good-looking regular called Tommy. Tommy gets into some dangerous shit, and one day he gets decapitated, and his head is found in a dumpster behind the bar. Kushner writes that she’s never tried to put this story into her novels, that it’s ‘not subtle’ and it ‘evades comprehension’. It’s an event that is stuck in the realm of the real. To try to fictionalise it would be unethical. There is something in that essay which reminds me of Katie’s comments about characters, and the whole project of your book more generally, about what it means to give this story narrative and shape, when it is so caught up in the horrors of the real. At the same time, with its political scandals and unlikely cast of characters, Macarthur’s life is so susceptible to becoming a ‘terrific yarn’, as you put it in the book.
MOC: That’s the main problem of the book, in a way, aside from all the other problems: what are you losing when you when you make a story out of this thing, what are you losing in terms of truth.
LH: The power dynamic is interesting, too. There is another conversation with Katie, where you discuss how the power balance will shift between you and Macarthur once you are in possession of his story. The first time you meet Macarthur outside Trinity, he’s edgy around you, and then he starts telling you things, and your narrative material begins to accumulate, and then the prospect of the narrative taking the form of a book arises, and now it’s finally published. How have you found that power dynamic, in relation to Macarthur and possessing the story, shift throughout writing it, and as the book has come into the world?
MOC: It’s really complicated. People keep asking me about my relationship with Macarthur. I’ve been on radio a few times and each time I’ve been asked, ‘Do you like him?’ It’s such a weird question. To go back to Didion, it’s impossible to separate your sense of a person, what I might like about them, from what they’re giving you, which can be pure gold. My relationship with him is so fucking fraught that there’s no question of it being anything other than a relationship defined by power. I can feel the power dynamic shifting. It goes back and forth but, as Katie says in the book, there’s the initial shift when you possess his story. Then there’s a slightly different shift in terms of the book coming out. He only really realised what he had done, in terms of talking to me, when I outlined the content of the book to him. He was kind of reassured by it, but he was also like, ‘You have me saying a lot’. He knew that his fate, to some extent, was in my hands, or at least that things could get difficult for him. That was uncomfortable because I didn’t want to damage my book, but I also didn’t want this guy to wind up back in prison. I feel a certain responsibility towards him.
My wife has told me that I’m stuck with him. I’d sometimes complain about how awful it could be talking to him or how uneasy it was to be around him, and she would tell me, not in an accusatory way, ‘You need to remember that you have got something from him and he’s in your power in this weird way you that have to be careful about’. I tried to do that. Some people want me to have walked away, cut off all contact with him, like I’ve got what I needed. The morality of it is so murky and it’s uncomfortable for me.
LH: I keep coming back to your role in the book. Maybe it’s not simply that you’re inserting yourself in the narrative more than in your other books, but that they were episodic and had more definitive endings, especially in terms of the people you encounter. While this book feels like it has a sense of aftermath, and that its conclusion and central relationship raise more questions than answers.
MOC: In terms of my relationship with Macarthur, some of the most interesting and intense material has been generated by the existence of the book, especially as it neared publication, and so by definition is not included in the book itself. He’s very exposed by what he’s done, and what I’ve written about what he’s done. There’s a lot going on.
LH: There’s so much in the book about Macarthur’s self-perception. There’s a really striking moment during the police interview, after he’s been arrested for the murders, where Macarthur is telling the detectives about his abiding passion for the arts, with the implication that it speaks to his good character. He also writes a bizarre letter to Charles Haughey vouching for Connolly, despite currently being under arrest for a double murder. He possesses a strange, internalised sense of decorum that informs his personal morality. It also relates to his ideas about his life and vocation (or lack thereof). His friends and acquaintances think he’s an academic in Cambridge, or a writer of some kind, and he has never done any of those things, but he has to maintain the façade of being a respectable man who is held in high regard.
MOC: He still sees himself that way. He refuses to let the edifice of his self-perception crumble under the weight of reality.
LH: At one point he claims: ‘I have never been discourteous.’ Reading that, you think of some things he’s done in his life that aren’t really ‘courteous’ . . .
MOC: Yeah, and maybe courtesy isn’t that important? Courtesy, in this context, is the least important thing, but it’s important to him. He tethers his self-conception to the idea that he is basically a good person, that’s been complicated by these things that he did, but he somehow does not see himself entirely, or even mostly, in relation to the murders.
LH: He has this idea about it being an aberration, and how there is no ‘thread of violence’ throughout his life, as he puts it.
MOC: He was really disturbed when he heard the title of the book. It was before he read it, and I told him that the book was going to be announced in the Irish Times, as he knew that could be a moment where he could get in trouble for speaking to me. He didn’t know the title of the book and he was pretty mad about it. He was like, ‘I specifically said there was not a thread’. He said that the title is misleading. I said it’s a touch of misdirection and ambiguous. That was an interesting moment in terms of that power dynamic, where he felt he had no control. And losing control of his story was always going to be a difficult thing.
LH: Another aspect in the book, which also has a thread running through it, is the ‘cartography of class’, as you describe it, that choreographed the style and circumstances of these murders. The crimes are deeply embedded and informed by Macarthur’s privilege. And these questions of class are linked to questions of time, that recur in the book too. He did these things because he wanted time. He wanted to use his time to be a member of the leisured class, and he stole these people’s time to take more time for himself.
MOC: That’s what class is, really, it’s about freedom and time. Especially when you look at the history of the upper classes, they just have always had absolute freedom to do what they wanted with their time, at the expense of other people’s time. I’m always reluctant to say the book is about any one thing, but the murders, as much as they were about anything, were about the threat of lost time, of what Macarthur calls ‘degraded time’. And the irony now, of course, is that that he has nothing but time.
LH: One of the other most striking moments of the book is an old RTÉ interview with Macarthur’s mother Irene, and she makes a comment about Macarthur’s son, Colin, and describes the child by saying ‘it’s fetching’. It’s quite bizarre, dehumanising language. I think you’re sparing in your literary allusions and, similarly, you reserve those moments when you’re going to intervene with a personal judgement. But when you do intervene, it seems very pointed. In this instance, you reflect what would it mean for your own mother to describe your child in the terms, ‘it’s fetching’, what it would mean for your mother to describe your child as an ‘it’? These snapshots feel very loaded, without feeding into the whole narrative about tracing childhood moments that Macarthur becomes capable of being a murderer or psychopath . . .
MOC: I think it’s very revealing. Have you seen Tár? There’s a moment with Lydia Tár’s mother-in-law, where Lydia walks into the apartment and they’re both really frosty characters. Lydia asks where her daughter is, and the mother-in-law says, ‘It’s in the bedroom.’ That’s a very deliberate word choice. But that part in the book has had some interesting reactions. Lots of people see it as very revealing and chilling, and I explicitly read it in that way, but I’ve spoken to people who have just said it’s a certain idiom or expression. I got an interesting email from a poet last night, and she took issue with that part, going into Germanic origins, and suggesting the language is not necessarily dehumanising. Like so much in this book, it’s really ambiguous. I’m obviously leaning into that and dwelling in the ambiguity, in a way that certain readers relish, and others are like, ‘What is this?’
LH: I enjoyed that ambiguity, and how the book is constantly questioning itself, and its own terms of engagement. There aren’t any gotcha moments, like, Look, she called her grandson an ‘it’; therefore, she was a terrible mother! Now it all makes sense!
MOC: It’s bullshit! Like, I don’t know anything. I mean, I know some things, but so much of it is . . . Well, the last word of the book is ‘darkness’.
LH: Those final passages in the book about ideas of not knowing get quite Beckettian, emphasising how you’re still in the dark in terms of getting a handle on this story. I also want to ask about Macarthur’s botched robbery in Killiney, after the murders. He tries to play it off as a joke, and he refers to it, really awkwardly, as a ‘call back,’ as if it’s a piece of stand-up comedy.
MOC: One of Macarthur’s more obsessive gestures was that he would tell me something about himself, something odd and revealing, and then days later would call me and say he had been joking. And I’d ask, what kind of joke? What was funny about it? And he would say, oh, just an in-joke . . . Between who? As reluctant as I am to tie things to his childhood, I got the impression that his dad did that, too, that he would pass things off as jokes that were not jokes. And, of course, Macarthur himself, when he called the guards to explain his attempted armed robbery of his acquaintance Harry Bieling, tried to pass it off as a joke, as you say, a ‘call back’. It goes back to those questions about what is real and what isn’t. It relates to power, to editing the narrative and reality, and revising the things that you’ve done.
LH: To bring it back to one of the bleakest and most harrowing moments, in the description of Bridie’s murder, he claims that she was ‘unresponsive’ in the car, when there was no way that she was unresponsive. Again, there is a rewriting of what has happened.
MOC: He sticks to that reading of that awful moment, as I think he has to, because the truth was that she was dying. We had arguments about this. I saw it as a total moral abdication on his part to believe and say this. Those arguments aren’t in the book, but I think it is pretty appalling. It’s revealing of a wilful, moral blankness that allowed him to what he did in the first place.
LH: I have a final question, which is about hope. I was trying to think if anything links all of your books.
MOC: I’m all ears, because I have no idea.
LH: You mention that sometimes in the moments when you’re happiest, often playing with your kids, you’ll suddenly think about Macarthur. There are similar moments where dread and happiness comingle in Notes from an Apocalypse and To Be a Machine. In Apocalypse you talk about refulgence, when despite the tides at the door and the terrors of doom-scrolling, there are joyous moments of illumination, which are always shadowed by these other horrors. Your books are about transhumanist cyborgs, the apocalypse and now a murderer. I mean, you’ve always written about some pretty dark shit.
MOC: All of them begin with my son, in some way . . . I didn’t realise that I’d done it yet again this time, in the most unlikely of narratives. I wrote that opening quite late in the process of the book, after everything else was more or less in place. In some ways this book is more discrete; the others are more open-ended, about some aspect of the wider world, and in that sense about all of us. The first two books implicate all of us in a more direct way than this one. But is there hope in this book? I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it in those terms.
LH: I’m not sure hope is the right word, perhaps it’s something hope-adjacent? The refulgence in your books seems to me to be part of that, or the Joycean epiphanies that recur, or Kafka’s notion that there is ‘plenty of hope, only not for us’. You’ve delved into bleak subjects over and over again, and yet, you aren’t a shell of a man . . .
MOC: This is the hardest question to answer: Why do I write about when I write about? I say I’m drawn to dark stuff, but it’s not even that. I would never be interested in writing about Fred West or Peter Sutcliffe. Have you ever read Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son? It’s incredible, but very painful to read. It’s about Sutcliffe, but also England in the 1970s, this culture of misogyny and casual violence. I could never write a book like that. I couldn’t bear with a character like Sutcliffe. I couldn’t live with a topic that dark. There’s something about Macarthur . . . I’m on shaky ground here, and it’s not even that he’s not irredeemable, I don’t really think of it in those terms. But as horrific as his crimes are, they don’t emerge out of obsessive misogyny or senseless sexual compulsions or anything like that. He didn’t enjoy what he did. He didn’t do it for pleasure. It doesn’t excuse what he did, obviously. But there’s a limit I won’t go beyond in my apparent advance into darkness.
LH: There is a moral ambivalence in the book, and not ambivalence in terms of whether these were good or bad actions, as that is very obvious, but almost like a moral narrative ambivalence. A lot of the people you write about in your work, apart from maybe some of the tech bros, are approached with curiosity and not judgement. There is a fascination that drives these narratives, as opposed to any moral framework.
MOC: I’m just not interested in moral condemnation. Outside of my work, I’m as susceptible to as the next person, but as a writer it’s just not very interesting. I’m trying to illuminate the complexity of things rather than simplify them. That’s my instinct. And there is no getting away, especially after three books, from the fact that my topics tend to be quite dark. So much of it is unintentional or, at least, instinctive. The standard reaction to the Apocalypse book was people saying that they wanted to read it, but were scared to, or they felt that they had to work themselves up to reading it somehow. People thought the topic was too painful. That might have been a mistake on my part, to write a book about something that people did not want to know about. But a common reaction from people who did actually read it was that they found it reassuring, and that was not my intention. It’s too early to say what the public reaction to A Thread will be. But I suspect people will not be reassured by it.
Mark O’Connell is the author of Notes from an Apocalypse and To Be a Machine. He is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, was published in June 2023.
Mark O’Connell’s ‘City of the Dead’ was first published in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
