As an avid reader of Hotpress in my teens, one writer's talents always stood out to me; as it did to anyone who read the magazine. Peter Murphy has always been an exceptional scribe and, after having had the opportunity to work with him after college in my first journalism job at Hotpress, when I found out his debut novel, John The Revelator, was being published I knew it would be something special and I was definitely not disappointed.
Writing, for Peter Murphy, was something that he intrinsically knew he wanted to do from a very early age, devouring every book and comic he could get his hands on; starting with the Alfred Hitchcock Presents... series and moving on to 2000AD and Starlord comics, then Stephen King followed by John Steinbeck.
His insatiable appetite for fiction became an apparent stepping stone to writing during his school days. "It was really my English teacher, Mary Whelock in the Vocational School in Enniscorthy, just cracking the whip and knowing I had an essay to submit every week. There was no sense of creative indulgence; you just coughed it up." From there "I won a writing competition when I was 17 which was called The Michael Friedman Award and I was packed off around Europe for a couple of weeks, visiting The European Parliament and The European Union. I had never been out of the country before then so it was a complete eye-opener.”
In between the writing competition and a career as a full-time journalist Murphy spent several years drumming with a band. After this, music journalism became the perfect marriage of his two great loves and, because of it, "I learned all the disciplines. I didn’t read fiction for about four or five years because I was trying to learn from the journalists and great music writers like Lester Bangs, so I was immersed in that for that time".
Then something changed. “I can remember in 1999, after listening to God Speed You Black Emperor, being inspired to write what ended up being an end of the world dream sequence in the book; a much more condensed and narrowed down version of it, it was quite millennial, as it obviously was 1999 and everyone was going on about the millennium. The combination of that and listening to God Speed You Black Emperor inspired me to just sit down, open up a document and just start writing something"
In 2000 Murphy’s father passed away and his youngest daughter was born a week later. This represented a huge change of direction for the Enniscorthy native. "I just kept waking up at night and wondering what was I doing with my life. I love journalism but I just wanted to create something instead of writing about something that somebody else created, and that started a long process. I wrote another novel - which was OK but not great - but I sent some samples of writing to Marianne Gunne-O’Connor, the agent, who signed me up and basically waited while I tried to figure out what the hell story it was that I needed to write first.”
Murphy laboured in solitude for a time before realising that the opinion and advice of others could be essential for such a feat as writing your first novel so he formed a writing circle with a group of friends and acquaintances. The set consisted of Murphy, journalists Nadine O’Regan and Jane Ruffino and writer Sean Murray. The group met every two weeks in The Library Bar of The Central Hotel for two years. “They were brilliant, kind, supportive, but also brutally honest, and I really respected their taste and judgement. They were also subtly different in ways that were good too and they also came from different backgrounds so they kind of brought the baby to term and mid-wifed it for me.”
John the Revlelator is really a work of literary perfection. It follows three essential characters; the protagonist John Devine; his mother the bible-quoting, chain smoking, Lily; and his Rimbaudian friend Jamey Corbery through the pains of growing up, the implications of living in a rural village in Ireland and the confines this produces. The relationship between the narrator and his single mother is magical; as is the inclusion of Jamey into the plot. The novel speaks of a hard learned wisdom one can only learn by facing adversity and struggle and surviving this the only way you can.
This is not a book that could have been written by Murphy without really experiencing the world in many ways first and all of this wisdom stands to him throughout this novel to make it an essential piece of literature. “You have to learn many things; patience, concentration, the very ambition and ego that drives you to write the thing has to take a back seat to let the story come through and determine itself. After a while you really become unimportant. It’s a funny thing about language; it will reflect everything you don’t like about your own character, everything that’s showy, or egotistical or craven or attentive will all come out in your work and you look at it and it’s like looking at a mirror of everything you don’t like about yourself and you have to hack away until the part that’s left is essential and honest and true really. It’s kind of humbling for you as a person but there is something very brutal about putting words on paper and seeing what you’re made of.”
An important feature of John The Revelator is the series of dream sequences interposed between the chapters of the novel. The dreams are incredibly surreal and almost frightening compared to the rest of the story but very much serve a literary purpose; “I love Guillermo Del Toro’s films like Pans Labyrinth or Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam’s films; they are slightly skewed at an angle. After my dad died I had a couple of really vivid dreams about him - unlike any other dreams I’ve ever had - which were so close to visitations to not make any difference. I woke up with my face wet from the presence so close to me. It happened about twice or three times in the immediate three months after he died. At the time I didn’t know if it was common but I wanted to write about it and I wasn’t particularly interested in an explanation for it; whether the mind is capable of really vividly constructing an image of a loved one through all the cues of memories or whether you could call it a visitation or something supernatural.”Although John Devine is the central character of the novel, he acts, to a point, as a writing tool to open up the world of Lily and Jamey to the reader. Despite this, whatever glimpse you get of John from start to finish leaves you wanting more. Murphy had considered that fact after completing the book; “I may come back to him. That’s interesting because he doesn’t really exist very much in it until towards the end. I love the term apostolic fiction to describe certain books like The Great Gatsby where the narrator doesn’t enter the story until the last act and is not active or has no effect on things; he just bears witness for the first two thirds. This is what John does for his mother and for Jamey until within the story he changes and within the scope of his personality he sees huge changes. He arrives in the last scene”.
Although the novel is very much rooted in an Ireland Murphy grew up in and lives in today he had no desire to use the novel to map out Ireland in a certain place and time; “I was only really interested in it in terms of my immediate environment. The book takes place in an alternative reality whereby chronology is mixed up; sometimes it seems like the seventies and sometimes it feels like the present day. That’s what it’s like where I grew up now, when i go back it feels exactly like it did in the seventies when I was a kid growing up except you’ve the internet and Polish and Romanian and Nigerian people around so it’s different but it’s also the same. People have pointed out that there seems to be a strange, temporal discrepancy going on and there is but it’s not journalism, it’s more impressionistic”.
Essentially characters drive the novel, from John Devine to the bizarre figure of the nosy neighbour Mrs Nagle. It’s hard to read such intimately described characters without wondering how much of the author and the people he knows exist in the figures so preciously described. Murphy explains; “I think maybe in every one of them. Just by dent of the fact that you have to write them, you have to become all of them. I’m Gunther Prunty kicking the shit out of Jamey at the same time as I’m Jamey getting the shit kicked out of me by Gunther Prunty. Jamey was based on several friends that I had when I was 15 or 16; not necessarily physically – they were young boys and girls – their mad intelligence and eccentricity and the fact that they were really smart and nobody’s parents liked them”.
The character of Lily was one that was very dear to Murphy’s heart and was inspired by two very important people to the author; “You can’t write about a mother figure, because it’s such a powerful iconic image, without, in some fashion, envisaging your own mother. My mother was an amazing gardener and my favourite part of the whole book is the start of chapter two where it just describes her planting the garden and that’s definitely my mother, but the sort of hard-bitten, wry, sardonic humour and the reading of the Westerns and the chain-smoking was my father. Lily is sort of a headlong collision between the two. Certain lines are actually verbatim. Looking back on it I am really gratified when people quote a line directly from my father’s mouth. That part when she is reading a Western and John asks her is it any good she says ‘Too many descriptions, I know what a tree looks like’. Every word of that was my father with a Louis L’Amour book open, peering over his glasses with a fag dangling out of his mouth.”
When picking up a copy of John The Revelator the eye is immediately drawn to two very significant quotations on the cover of the book from renowned Irish authors Colm Toibin and Roddy Doyle. Toibin says of the novel “So fresh, so original and disturbing and brave... it’s an absolutely wonderful novel”, while Doyle gushes “Everything about John The Revelator excited me – I couldn’t wait to turn the page and keep on going. It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I’d never read a novel before.” Such words of praise by such literary heavyweights long before the novel was released brought a huge amount of relief for Murphy; “Well it was amazing because pretty much the first things I heard were from other writers, which was extraordinary. Those were the first reviews and to come from people who know all the pitfalls and the mechanics and the technicalities of the day-to-day trying to string a sentence together grind of it was amazing and after that - not that I didn’t care what anybody wrote about the book - but it would always have been in contrast with those two writers.”
The good news for Murphy fans is that is he currently working on his next novel but hasn’t quite given up the day job yet; “There’s a contrast with the journalism that it gets me out of the house and allows me to learn. It was very good for me when I was younger and it gave me a confidence that I didn’t have and cured shyness and stuff like that. There’s an element of random discovery in journalism that can be really useful. If it came down to it and I could write or make little movies or spoken word recordings or collaborate on graphic novels or any of this stuff, my idea of heaven would be a day filled with creative endeavours and then to do journalism or fiction as the mood takes me. But, as day job, journalism is pretty nice. I think these stories have to be written with love and to think of it as just a money-making enterprise itself would seem to take the joy out of it.”
John the Revelator is available now and is published through Faber and Faber.
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