Through Hollow Lands is published by Urbane Publications, priced £8.99. It is launched today at No Alibis Bookshop, Botanic Avenue, Belfast (4pm)
Paul Burgess, punk star, academic and novelist, was back home on the Shankill this week for a dander round old haunts and an interview about his latest novel, Through Hollow Lands.
This book is a study in evil. It is one of the best novels I have read in years, but the only reference to the streets Burgess grew up in is a policeman having Shankill for a middle name.
What I want to know from him is how a Belfast working-class background through the Troubles leads to this, a book set around the 9/11 attacks on the US.
From where does he derive such plausible studies of human evil and ideas of redemption? Is it because he’s a Protestant? Well, sort of.
One might as well ask, however, how such a start in life, in a two-bedroom house in Jersey Street, to parents who had minimal education, led to him being a drummer and songwriter for the punk band Ruefrex, and what would take a man from there to doing his master’s degree at Oxford and now being a lecturer at Cork University.
It is all unlikely, or seems so. As for why the book is set in the days just before and after the 9/11 attacks, Burgess says he had a near miss. He had made a last-minute dash to board a plane to Las Vegas while on a fly-anddrive holiday with his wife, torn between that option and Flight 93 to San Francisco.
The lightness with which they made that decision saved their lives. They woke up in their Las Vegas hotel room to a call from his wife’s brother in Killarney to check that they were safe. Paul didn’t know why they shouldn’t be. Then he turned on the television.
They saw what had happened and learned also that they were to be stuck in Las Vegas. No flights were taking to the air anywhere over the United States.
And that sets the basis of part of the story in his book.
George Bailey has similarly ended up in Las Vegas on that morning, having thought he was going to San Francisco.
Paul and his wife, Mary, saw Las Vegas struggle to cope with being the city of fun while the big screens around the place were showing repeat images of the collapse of the Twin Towers and the scarring of a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, by the wreckage of Flight 93.
“It was surreal.”
The twist that unfolds in the book, however, is that Las Vegas, for George Bailey, is not what it seems.
Bailey is the sort of man it is easier to describe with expletives. He is a worthless liar and cheat. He is not someone you would be better off knowing.
Good women have loved him and suffered for it.
We meet them in the book. But as his journey takes him deeper into Hell, we, and George, realise that he is by no means the worst a human being can be.
There are angels who even seek to redeem him.
There are other people — and he has crossed them — for whom the depths of evil are the only redemption they can conceive of, for whom wisdom comes with loss of innocence.
Some are bad, some are just ru- ined by tragedy and misfortune. Even so, they are beyond reach.
For George Bailey, Las Vegas is a sort of purgatory in which the sins of his past revisit him and he has a second chance.
The echo here, of course, is with that other George Bailey, played by James Stewart in A Wonderful Life, who is given a vision of how much worse off the world would be without him.
In Through Hollow Lands, George is shown how much worse the world is because of him — and yet there is hope for him.
I put it to Paul Burgess that this is religious thinking.
“I have often wondered if human beings are fundamentally good but capable of great evil, or fundamentally evil but capable of great good,” he says. “As I grow older, I begin to think it’s the latter.”
Original sin. The fallen state. “Yes.” But he also says the book can be read as a comment on modern America.
“It’s ultimately about the redemption of the United States of America, because the main political premise that runs through it is how America has fallen from grace, fallen away from the American dream.
“And my belief is that the catalyst for that was 9/11.
“And so, while the rest of the novel is about a wrestling match for the soul of George Bailey, it is also for the soul of what the American dream is supposed to be about.”
Burgess failed his 11-Plus and went to the Boys’ Model in Ballysillan, into a stream which focused on metalwork and skills.
He demonstrated an interest in reading, and a teacher encouraged him to do exams, though he fell behind his peers doing that, having to make up a year.
He took a job as a clerk in Shorts and finished A-levels at night classes.
One consolation was his love of drumming.
“The first time I played drums was in the Pride of Ardoyne Flute band, when I was 16. I was not a monarchist then and I am not a monarchist now.
“It was what liberal unionists claim about loyalist culture. It was a genuine community thing.
“A lot of my buddies were in the band. It was a good way to meet girls. It was performance — you were out there.”
But the fit was not a good one, between his growing political awareness and the wider culture of loyalism.
“After about a year, it was plain that a lot of the associated culture was inconsistent with my emerging political analysis, which is that there are aspects of this triumphalism that I can’t sanction and don’t want to be part of, so I walked from that.”
He formed Ruefrex with other local boys. With Tom Coulter, a bass player, they made a single with Terry Hooley. It got played on Radio 1 by John Peel.
“And you couldn’t put a price on that at the time. Write-ups in NME.”
Playing one night at the University of Ulster, he saw the attractions of being a student, so he caught up again with education, only to find himself behind again.
His peers had moved on before he got in.
But he enjoyed his studies of literature and graduated, only to find himself back in the Boys’ Model and other Shankill schools as a supply teacher.
He had one boy tell him he would get his da’ up to shoot him and even had to put on a bit of swagger to counter threats like that.
“Then word went round that Burgess was connected. I enjoyed that for a time and then got sick of it.”
He faced a tension between being part of a working-class Protestant community but not a monarchist or a loyalist.
“I variously went through stages of being apologetic and, as I moved into bourgeois, middle-class circles, then flipping and saying my community is as entitled to a cultural expression as anybody else’s, and just because it doesn’t tick a lot of the boxes that are currently politically correct, I’m not sure that that’s enough.
“I respect people’s right to express their historical legacy in those terms, so that’s what became a mission with the band, lyrically.”
A chance came to go to London, sleep on floors, revive the band and make albums. In a very short time, he was successful beyond his dreams, being played on daytime radio.
For a time in London, the music press liked the idea that he was from the Shankill and made him out to be an extremist, often contrasting Ruefrex with a band from Derry, That Petrol Emotion.
You can still see him looking stiff and formal in his white shirt and moustache on old videos, hammering out the beat to the Wild Colonial Boy, not the traditional version, but a sneering parody on the attitude of the Irish-American who supports the IRA. The song ends with the words: “It really gives me such a thrill/to kill from far away.”
But success wasn’t going to last for ever. He saw himself being a teacher again and decided to get properly qualified. He applied to Oxford, since there was nothing to lose, and to his surprise got in.
Then he taught for a year in Chipping Norton, and went back to Oxford to do a master’s degree by research on integrated education in Northern Ireland.
He has great stories about that time and later that are not in the books.
A hate figure for him — perhaps a study in evil — is a former headmaster who suspended him and made him bring his parents into school and humiliated them.
He believes in class-based politics, a perspective drawn from his mother’s work in a clothing factory owned by Brian Faulkner, the former Northern Ireland Prime Minister, and his brother.
He recalls the deference shown to the Faulkners. Years later, after Oxford, he was working on the Opsahl Commission, a project to assess the prospects of peace in Northern Ireland, when he received a message that Lady Lucy Faulkner wanted him to call on her.
Intrigued, he visited her at home.
She had a job for him. She wanted him to move some boxes.
“I told Davy Ervine that story, God rest him, and he got a great laugh out of it.”