An Interview with Colin Barrett
Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, November 2024
In September I spoke to Colin Barrett about his latest book, the novel Wild Houses (2024), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. He is also the author of the short-story collections Young Skins (2013) and Homesickness (2022). A short story from Young Skins, ‘Calm with Horses’, was adapted by Nick Rowland into a film in 2019, starring Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan.
Years ago, I was working in book distribution when a friend first recommended that I read Young Skins. I responded, badly, to the recommendation, thinking that smalltown Irish malaise was overdone, and that I’d already read all about it. In our conversation below, Colin touches on the sweeping naivety of youth – how being dismissive, and growing out of it, is a necessary part of being a writer and, in this instance, a reader. Thankfully, I soon got over myself and read and re-read Young Skins and everything that Colin has written since.
Wild Houses unravels over the course of a single weekend during the annual Salmon Festival in Ballina. A teenage boy called Doll English is abducted by a couple of smalltown gangsters after Doll’s older brother, Cillian, racks up debts to a violent drug dealer. The kidnappers take Doll to a house on the outskirts of Ballina owned by Dev, a quiet recluse, whose close third-person perspective propels the novel. Doll’s girlfriend, Nicky, provides the other dominant perspective in a dovetailing narrative. Dev’s muted befuddlement, finding himself a sudden accomplice in a kidnapping, is counteracted by Nicky’s deft empathy, as she strives to discover what’s happened to Doll, while figuring out her own place in a town where she has been left increasingly isolated. The novel draws on crime tropes, but the aching, existential concerns of the characters, the quickfire dialogue and absurd tragicomedy are what defines the narrative. As Niamh Campbell describes it: ‘Failed masculinity and mental fragility, as well as interpersonal tenderness, are bigger concerns than any pursuit of plot.’
This interview was conducted online – I was in Bristol and Colin was in Dublin.
Liam Harrison, 2024
Liam Harrison (LH): I read Wild Houses when it first came out, and I’ve been listening to the audiobook to refamiliarise myself with its world, revisiting the novel from a different angle. I want to ask about perspective and how the characters Dev and Nicky situate us in the story. If you described the book’s plot to someone who hadn’t read it, Dev and Nicky might sound like minor rather than major characters. What motivated you to tell the story from their vantage points? Did you write earlier drafts which centred other characters, like Doll or Cillian?
Colin Barrett (CB): I spent six years on and off writing this this novel. I always had the premise that a kid gets kidnapped, and he’s brought to the house of a gentle giant, Dev. Everything else was built on from that premise. It didn’t become a proper novel until I’d settled on alternating the perspectives between Dev and Nicky. With Dev, I wanted to write a character who is psychologically and emotionally incapacitated. That’s a tricky character to write because they react passively to everything, and things have to happen around them. There needed to be a counterweight to Dev’s inertia. In earlier drafts, I wrote from a range of perspectives but it didn’t work because it turned the novel into a family saga. I found myself writing loads of exposition, having them all sit there thinking about the past.
Dev’s house is out in the middle of nowhere. It’s not that far from Ballina, but as a space in the novel, it’s in its own zone. Then there’s the town, where the community and interaction happens, and I needed a perspective for that. Nicky was a relatively minor character in the initial drafts but, in the end, she was the key. They’re on the edge of the action and I needed that for the novel to work. In a lot of my stories, there’s a character on the threshold of things, and it gives you a great amount of latitude – having characters who don’t know everything and are limited in their knowledge.
LH: There’s a big old goat on the cover of Wild Houses. What’s with the goat, Colin?
CB: I don’t know. The goat pops up at a couple of key points in the novel, and there’s also a dog, Georgie. It’s nice to write non-human characters. I try not to overdo it, but I like writing physical details – the weight, texture, colour and feel of things. There’s a certain strain of prose that would skimp on those things. I often find myself reading a book and it feels weightless, even if it’s well written and psychologically interesting, like, I can’t feel the world. Where I grew up animals were a big part of my life. I wasn’t from a farm, but my uncles had farms, I grew up adjacent to livestock – they often don’t come to happy ends. They are a part of the town – with the fair, the market and the Salmon Festival – they’re part of the reality of it. Animals are tough because they can do very limited stuff in a narrative, but you can’t forget about them either. They have to be kept in the story and have their place.
LH: Dev encounters the goat in a highly charged moment. There’s a shift in the language, and you vividly describe the goat: ‘He [Dev] turned and in the pall of the moonlight there appeared the candescent yellow eyes, long snout and raggedy beard of a goat, its ribbed keratinous horns perceptible at first only as whorls of negative space in the dark.’ These devilish hooves and keratinous horns start to blur the space between the real and the unreal, and it feels almost hallucinogenic.
CB: Dev is trying to gee himself up to kill himself. He’s a very young man at that point, and reality is buckling for him. Reality is very malleable and fragile, and one’s psychic disposition affects that. The goat seems to be coming from some other place and regarding Dev with indifference, which, if not consoling him, makes him realise he’s not ready to embrace death and the cold indifference of the universe, so he withdraws. You have to be careful with these things, I certainly don’t work out these symbols. It just felt nice, and I like having a goat that shows up earlier and those threads running through the narrative. It helps the world feel more lived in.
LH: You write very striking sentences. The opening line in ‘The Clancy Kid’ [the first story published in Young Skins] is: ‘My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk.’ Do you think much about the style of language in your work? Is style something you particularly value in other people’s writing?
CB: Yeah, I mean, it’s everything. We write in words and sentences and so the arrangement of them is very important and a practical matter. It reminds me of when Johan Cruyff did his Cruyff turn for the first time. He flicked the ball between his legs and went the other way to the defender, and they’d never seen anyone do this before, and everyone went mad. The journalists interviewed him afterwards, and asked: were you practicing that? Were you waiting to do it? To them it was an outrageous flourish, a gratuitous bit of skill. Cruyff just said, it was the easiest way to get out of the problem I was in. I think about style in the same way. I generally have my characters first and style is the way into them. I try to tune my senses to the characters, in order to portray how they see the world.
Stylistically, you can decide to tell the reader everything. The style in which you write a character or sentence allows you to write about things in a particular way, like with the hallucinatory scene with the goat, but it can also preclude other things. Like, Dev’s a smart guy, but he doesn’t have an outlet to talk about things, so his dialogue is barely existent in the book. Everything is in his head. Whereas Nicky is the other way. She is very astute but is quite guarded, even with herself. The challenge is to channel both those dispositions and make them cohere in the one book.
When you’re younger you can be quite ruthless in your judgements about books. You can dismiss authors and then come back to their work ten years later and realise you read them very uncharitably. It’s a pragmatic thing that you need to do when you’re young, because you’re trying to find your own voice. You have to read a lot, but you can make these judgements quietly and privately. You don’t need to go online and give out. You need to be ruthless for your own work, but as you get older, you realise there’s a lot more restraint needed.
LH: I love the notion of style as a practical matter, as a way of solving a problem. And I also like the idea, and agree, that developing writers need to critically dissect what they’re reading, but that they don’t always need to publicise it.
CB: When I was younger, I read a lot more contemporary writing. I still read the big books that come out each year, but I’ve been reading a lot more nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing, especially in translation. I don’t know if that’s factoring into my thoughts on style. I’ve been reading lots of Dostoevsky, who writes in a torrential way. He keeps using the same adjective over and over for twenty pages, and then switch to another one. These other ways of writing are certainly things I’ve come to value, whether or not I ever emulate them. I’ve certainly come to appreciate a wider range of style.
Novels are tricky things, because there’s lots of great books where the writing quality can vary. You read some novels that are perfectly written but feel dead on the page. You need elasticity in the writing. A short story can be pristine almost in the way a poem is. It can be extremely distilled, and, like a poem, a reader will generally consume it in one go. With a novel, you’re going to read a bit, put it down, then come back and read more, and so you need that elasticity in the text, at the sentence level. Especially when reading one of those Russian novels, with all the characters, and you’re often like: who is this guy again? It’s another bureaucrat, he was in it fifty pages ago, and they’re now using a different diminutive for his name in this part of the book. But you barrel along anyway. You can’t keep the whole novel in your head, so it needs to give a powerful impression.
LH: I remember you discussing the difference in writing short stories and novels, and talking about the register and voice you can inhabit when writing in a longer form. In short stories there doesn’t need to be the same elasticity or tonal variation. I read an interview you gave after being longlisted for the Booker Prize and you mentioned a detail in War and Peace where a character, Rostov, stylishly dismounts his horse while it’s still moving. You said how the inclusion of this detail doesn’t serve any great symbolic purpose or major plot progression, but adds colour and texture, and, as you say, makes the world feel lived in.
CB: It’s an action that is there for the hell of it. There is always a question about the necessity of those moments. In some bad writing those moments just get thrown in. Elif Batuman wrote about it in an essay called ‘Short Story & Novel’. She was reviewing that year’s Best American Short Stories, and it’s an excuse for her to demolish all the worst traits in American writing at that point. She’s a little unfair, in that she compares them all to Chekhov. But one of her points is about that welter of gratuitous detail that is thrown in to give an ersatz feeling of particularity. ‘Liam was the youngest of four kids, the second of whom lost all their teeth when a bully punched them on the playground ten years ago . . .’ It’s tricky trying to find those little moments, where it doesn’t serve a larger symbolical purpose, but makes the character feel more particular and real. You can’t think too much about it when you’re writing. You have to completely disinhibit yourself in order to get stuff on the page and not worry about the larger symbolic purpose of goats.
LH: Your story ‘The Alps’ in Homesickness is strikingly theatrical, and it plays out in the self-contained setting of a GAA club bar. It feels a bit like a Tom Murphy play, along the lines of Conversations on a Homecoming. It also made me think about the film adaptation of ‘Calm with Horses’, and whether there is an underlying dramatic or cinematic influence in your work. Do film and theatre impact how you structure your stories?
CB: Um, no. But with ‘The Alps’, I decided it was going to be like a little play. I was going to put three guys in a room, with a bunch of other characters, and that’s it, we’re not going beyond there. I think it certainly was influenced by plays. But I don’t cook, I don’t do anything. I don’t absorb culture. I watch three movies a year. I play with my kids. I play football and I read books and I write. I don’t do anything else. I can’t sit here and say, I’m massively into this, other than in the abstract.
Every so often I do buy a bunch of plays. Scripts are great for cleaning your head of prose and remembering that dialogue can be so propulsive. Film has to show you everything, it’s all surface. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. But it does relate to the visual components and that textured quality in writing – those are the two aspects that I find most useful. In terms of plays, dialogue can do a lot. I never wrote much dialogue in my early attempts at prose. It was all interior. I discovered you can do so much with dialogue. Nobody ever has to say what they mean. I spend a lot of time waiting to write the dialogue and then I just write it. It comes along in a burst. You know your characters and their voice by then. I couldn’t start with dialogue. Some writers will have two characters and they’ll write the dialogue and build the narrative out from that. I’m very much the opposite.
LH: What was it was like writing Wild Houses while living in Canada? What part did lockdown play in writing it? Not to sketch a narrative of Joycean exile, but there was obviously a physical distance from the Mayo environments you were writing about. Was it difficult capturing the texture of the place and the rhythms of speech while not being able to go there?
CB: During the pandemic I went to Ireland once in three years, but I was in the middle of writing this book. The characters and the world were already there. The problem was the execution. I remember I woke up one night and it hit me: I haven’t been home in years. But time moves on, and Wild Houses is a kind of period piece. I don’t make a big deal of when it’s set, but it’s probably around 2012, just about pre-smartphones, before good broadband. Most of my characters are teenagers or in their mid-twenties. Which is a way of saying that the Mayo I write about, the Ballina I write about, it’s travelling into the past, it’s already gone. I’m living in Ireland now, I go home regularly, and I see the signs of time’s progression everywhere. The world I’m writing about gets more tenuous, but I think that’s the same for everybody as you get older. I didn’t think that when I was writing Young Skins, but I was in my late twenties and early thirties then. I was fairly confident in my depictions of idiots in their twenties. Whereas, even writing Nicky and Doll, I’m like, I guess people still go to house parties . . . I didn’t want to do a scene where they’re watching fucking TikToks or something. It wouldn’t have felt right for the story.
LH: Your fiction returns to similar places – these Mayo towns, landscapes and people – from different angles. How do you feel about exploring familiar territory?
CB: The idea of writing about the west when I was younger . . . I thought, who’s gonna want to read that stuff? But when I started writing about Mayo and these communities, I went up a level as a writer, it was apparent even to me. It doesn’t seem to exhaust itself or be finite, though it could well be. I’m open to my writing going in a different direction. I touched on it already, the Mayo I knew as a kid is gone. But you have a constant overlay of your memories with what’s there now, and it keeps producing material for me. I open Word documents and often I don’t want to write, but I don’t struggle to write a story or a premise or characters, because I have Mayo.
LH: Lots of writers these days are author-critics – like Kevin Power, Nicole Flattery, Zadie Smith, Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor. They write fiction but they also theorise about the novel. Are you ever tempted to write criticism?
CB: I do all of that, but I don’t write about it in public, because then I can afford to have a stupid thought. You have to be very stupid to be a writer, capable of failing and going down creative dead ends to get anywhere. With Brandon Taylor, I think theorising helps him to write, it’s productive to his fiction to formalise things and nail them down. I don’t do it that way. I like to work those things out in private or with writer friends. We talk a lot of nonsense, but we also talk shop. It’s nice that there’s no evidence of it left behind, and you then have the freedom to change your mind. I’m being facetious about other artistic disciplines and my apparent lack of interest in them, I really just have to triage my time and write what I can. I love reading non-fiction and critical theory, and, for me, the function is to feed the furnace of my writing, it burns up along the way, and I like that there are no traces left. Any theories I have about novels I put into the books, and I’m content to let it play out that way.
LH: I teach an undergraduate module on publishing, and students are always navigating the moment when to send out their work and when to bide their time until it feels truly ready. Your stories have appeared in prestigious publications, like the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Stinging Fly. Are you selective about where you send your work?
CB: If I’m selective it’s only because it takes ages for me to be happy with anything. I work at it and work at it and work at it. I’m definitely not someone who indiscriminately sends stuff out. If I’m proud of the work and think it’s as good as it can be, I reach a point where I’m done with it. That means I can send it out and if I get a rejection a few months later it’s fine. I move on. I’ll send it somewhere else if I think it still has something to it. I meet writers who find the slowness of publishing frustrating. Literary magazines can take a long time to get back to you, because they get so many submissions, and can’t have twenty readers. Publishers, agents and editors can take a while too. The slowness of the cycle has always suited my temperament. I’m very happy to spend a long time working on something, and then I’ll send it out and if I believe in it, I will persist with it. If there’s nothing more you can do with it, you know you need another set of eyes on it. It’s really hard sending your work out, especially for younger writers. You have to be able to accept that it might be a no, and quite a generic no, and you might get that a lot of times before you get a yes. You have to believe in the work, so that even if you get a no, you’ll want to send it out somewhere else. I’m naturally quite tentative and cautious about where I send stuff.
LH: What have you made about the recent characterisations of Ireland as a ‘world literary powerhouse’? These summaries often come from UK or US publications looking to extract a digestible narrative, but if you talk to people in Ireland about it, the factors are more complicated.
CB: I became a writer through the magazine scene. I’ve now written a novel and published short-story collections, but the most important time for me, as a writer, was when I desperately wanted to be one and had no idea if it was going to work. There was and still is a thriving journal and magazine scene, which is a venue for writers who are not yet the finished article. You can get a story published and then you’re a published writer. Outsiders can make sweeping summations about Ireland’s thriving literary scene. But I’m a little surprised, when I’ve been in Toronto or London, that there aren’t the same venues for aspiring writers. There’s an expectation you have to try and get a novel published out of your MA or your MFA program or something. That’s not really viable for most people. I enjoyed the step-by-step progress of getting a story in the Stinging Fly, and one or two other places, then going to readings and meeting writers, and becoming part of a community. It felt like there were steps you could take, there was a path for aspiring writers, for people who hadn’t been published yet.
LH: One final question. Are there any contemporary Irish writers you think more people should be reading?
CB: I recently really enjoyed Sinéad Gleeson’s Hagstone, Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits, Aimée Walsh’s Exile and Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown.
Wild Houses was published by Vintage (UK) and Grove Atlantic (US) in 2024.
Colin Barrett grew up in County Mayo, Ireland. His stories have been published in the Stinging Fly, Granta, Harper's and the New Yorker. His first book, the short story collection Young Skins, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second collection, Homesickness, made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year and was a Book of the Year in Oprah Daily and the Irish Times.
Liam Harrison is a founding editor at Tolka. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
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