Meet author Cónal Creedon
The paternity of Jesus, the exploits of a heroic wartime racing pigeon and unrealised love are all part of the landscape of the Cork- based novel Begotten Not Made. Donal O’Donoghue gets the lowdown from author, Cónal Creedon
Most mornings, Cónal Creedon is up before the lark. In his home in the heart of Cork, the writer hears the city yawning into life. The phantom whistler out by the brewery, the odd motorbike rumbling past, the early delivery trucks clattering with industry and so on: orchestral manoeuvres in the dark. By nine, the city symphony is in full swing and the writer is halfway through his day, having zapped through his emails, completed his daily regime at the local gym and set up his workload for the day. “At that stage, I’m ready for my dinner, bacon and cabbage,” says Cónal. “Then I might head downtown to post a letter, which could take me three days!” Begotten Not Made, Creedon’s second novel, opens with a similar start to the day. Brother Scully, secluded in his monastery on the northside of the city, looks out over the rooftops. The elderly monk is observing the rituals of his day, one which involves flicking on and off his lights, a romantic signal to Sister Claire, who he met just once 50 years earlier on the night Dana won the Eurovision Song Contest. The novel is a fairytale of two love stories (Sister Francesca and her gardener), three if you include Brother Scully’s near obsession with the paternity of Jesus Christ. The author is wary of the funnelling of love into commerce. “I don’t do St Valentine’s Day,” says Cónal, a day too contrived to capture the many-splendored insanity of love.
Cónal Creedon, the second youngest in a family of 12, grew up slap bang in the centre of Cork at the foot of Patrick’s Hill. Among his siblings are artists, writers and the RTÉ broadcaster, John. The giddy days of childhood, both real and sometimes imagined, thread vividly through his memory and writing. With eight older sisters, he was blessed amongst women. “My mother used to say that I was five years of age before my feet touched the ground because my sisters kept passing me from one to the other,” he says. He loved the freedom of those years; the reason why he hated school even if he was fond of his Christian Brother teachers. “There is a time in your life when you should be out kicking football and running in the fields and that was school time,” he says now. Dana winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970 was, for Cónal, a watershed event. “We all learned the song ( All Kinds of Everything) at school, it was almost a statement of nationalism, of our identity,” he says. “Winning the Song Contest was such a huge coup for a relatively young nation. After that there was a sense, well for me at least, that we had taken our place among the nations of the earth. And to this day I’m still a massive fan of the Eurovision.” It’s all there in Begotten Not Made, alongside the mysteries of the scripture, the alchemy of love, the pathos of life and the legend of a war-hero racing pigeon: a picaresque epic that at times dips into the surreal. “Unlike fact, fiction must always make sense” says Brother Scully early on in the novel, a line that the author too subscribes to. “Fiction can be stretched to the limits of plausibility,” he says.
Under the Goldie Fish, a pseudo radio soap that stretched fiction to its elastic limits, put Cónal Creedon on the literary map. Broadcast on RTÉ between 1994 and 1998, it prompted further commissions from RTÉ, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. His first novel Passion Play (1999) was nominated by BBC 4’s Saturday Review as their Book of the Year. He has also written for stage ( The Trial of Jesus, The Second City trilogy), published a collection of short stories ( Pancho and Lefty Ride Out) and produced and directed a number of film documentaries, among them The Boys of Fair Hill (2008) and the critically acclaimed, Flynnie, The Man Who Walked Like Shakespeare (2009). He continues as a one-man band, writing, sketching (including the illustrations in Begotten Not Made) and running his own publishing company, Irishtown. It’s mid-morning when we wrap up the chat. I imagine Cónal is already thinking about putting on the bacon and cabbage, the gym and some literary spade work already behind him. Begotten Not Made was carved from the rib of thousands of pages that he had been bashing out since 1999. There’s at least two more novels in that ‘bible’ he reckons. Right now he’s reeling in the second, which bears the working title, Glory be to the Father (also the title of his 2001 play). Once again, it will be about the world, the universe and everything: Cónal is never entirely sure until he gets close to the finish line. “And who knows what I will be doing next?” he says. “Even now I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.”
Begotten Not Made by Cónal Creedon is published by Irishtown Press