Ghost Story - An Interview With Joseph O'Connor

The bestselling author of Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls Joseph O’Connor spoke me for AU at the Central Hotel in Dublin about the final part of his historical trilogy Ghost Light and how he came to be inspired to write the work of fiction based on one of Ireland’s legendary playwrights John Millington Synge and the woman he fell in love with.



Ghost Light is a tale of joy, sadness and love. Set in the early 20th century and jumping every few chapters to a single day in 1952, the novel is primarily a celebration of a little know love affair between one of Ireland’s best known playwrights J.M. Synge and an actress from the Liberties Molly Allgood. On this fateful day the reader is introduced to quite a sorry character of the faded actress whose glory days of her loves and career have passed her and, through her memories on this day, we are given a glimpse of this tempestuous, passionate and secret love affair she had with Synge.

Joseph O’Connor has over the past twenty years become one of Ireland most distinguished and celebrated novelists. From his early semi-autobiographical tales of adventure and despair such as Desperadoes to his critically acclaimed best-selling historical fiction culminating in Ghost Light, O’Connor’s name has become synonymous with good fiction both in Ireland and across the world.

Having an upbringing that was far from normal shaped the O’Connor family in such a way that creativity became second nature to them. “I owe an awful lot to my parents who were big readers. They had a very turbulent marriage which was a powerful combination when you’re a bookish kid, or musical as my sister was. The world of the imagination becomes a safe place where you can control things: a place of refuge.”

Since O’Connor was a child he has always had a fascination with John Millington Synge. The O’Connor family lived just down the road from where the playwright lived with his mother. “I used to walk past that Victorian house every day in the seventies and early eighties and it was a bit run down and dilapidated and sort of spooky at night. When you walked past it you could almost feel the ghosts. I knew that Synge had lived there and my late mother, who died in 1985, was a great reader and she loved this story and she would tell us nobody knows this about Synge - this great respected figure who wrote Playboy of the Western World - but the really interesting thing about him is that in the last few years of his life he had a tempestuous love affair with this woman from the inner city and she was a Catholic of different social order and class. I thought it was an interesting story and nobody really knew about it.”

For O’Connor, Ghost Light was a story that he had been waiting to tell all of his life and, after the bleakness of Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, he decided something more uplifting was the way he wanted to end the historical trilogy. “I thought it would be great to write a short book about love just to remind myself that that was possible and the world - as Molly says - is not an abattoir and beautiful things can happen. I thought that structurally - considering the two previous books had been so big and so symphonic and operatic and there are dozens of narrators, time zones and all sorts of fireworks going on - it would be nice if the last book of the three had a kind of a purity; more like a ballad that a Wagnerian opera, to have enough possibility to have been all of our stories.”

When O’Connor speaks about the Ghost Light and its principle characters Synge and Allgood, it is with deep intimacy; much like he is talking about very close friends. For the three years it took to write this novel - like many writers - these characters were close companions and the novel that has just been published is a very different one to what he had initially planned.

Originally featuring Synge and Molly on more of an equal setting, the female lead came to life before the author’s eyes and took over the limelight to such a degree that it is not the famous playwright but his little known and long forgotten actress fiancé that became the centre of O’Connor’s attention. “It took a while to get that realisation that Synge would have to be sidelined as I had a draft that was narrated by Synge but, even in that one, every time that Molly came into a scene she burst into life and she was already saying ‘let me in here’ and I moved him out to the edge and the more you moved him out towards the edge the better the book would be.”

How appropriate it was for O’Connor to bring such life to one of the most pivotal figures of life for Synge. Over the course of their relationship, which lasted until his death of Hodgkin’s Disease in 1909, he wrote countless poems and letters for her and created two of his most famous characters for her to play; most notably Pegeen Mike in Playboy of the Western World.

Ghost Light is a fascinating tale of real characters whose secret relationship has been imagined for us in the most intimate and heartbreaking way. O’Connor’s skill as a story teller comes to the fore in this sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous and sometimes uplifting tale. The story itself is a suitable celebration for a relationship that was hidden because of the time it existed and a woman who was many years ahead of her time and tragically faded to obscurity while her influence lives on through Synge’s legendary work.

Ghost Light is now available in paperback