Joseph O’Connor

Donal O’Donoghue meets the best-selling author to talk about his new novel, Shadowplay, a story of how Bram Stoker discovered Dracula

“Ifirst read Dracula when I was 12 or 13 and it’s one of those books I reread every four or five years,” says Joseph O’Connor. “It’s like going on a pilgrimage for me and has influenced my own writing a lot.” The best-selling author had long toyed with his own tale on Bram Stoker, the Dubliner who created Dracula, but something was missing. With Shadowplay, O’Connor has Stoker unmoored in Victorian London working for the great actor, Henry Irving, with whom he gets entangled in a complicated triangle with the renowned actress, Ellen Terry. Largely a work of the imagination, Shadowplay is an exuberant story that is a hymn to Stoker’s goodness and genius, a take on the alchemy of acting and an exploration of what we do, and sometimes are, in the shadows.

Bram Stoker was the first Irish author Joseph O’Connor ever heard of, the first Irish author he loved. His Dublin childhood was gilded by ghost stories told by his grandmother, including a tall tale about a relative who bumped into Stoker near St Michan’s Church only to learn that the great man had died the previous day. Stoker’s gothic style bled into O’Connor’s early fiction and is still there in his mature novels like Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls, with their narratives punctuated with letters, diary entries and telegrams. “Then I wrote The Vampire Man (a BBC radio play focused

on the relationship between Stoker and Irving) and part of that process was learning that what I was missing was Ellen Terry.” In Shadowplay, Stoker says that “all writers who have failed develop a healing amnesia without which their lives would be unbearable.” O’Connor concedes that he too has had to develop such armour. “Oh yes and I may have to again,” he says, and laughs. “You can’t get too fixated on the things that haven’t worked out in your life. But yes I have written books that I thought would be huge successes but they weren’t at all. Then with Star of the Sea, which was a massive success, it was the other way round. I wrote that book as a labour of love and didn’t think it would sell any copies. Sure I thought it would get good reviews and be respected by people who were into the literature of the Irish Famine but I had no idea it would sell a million copies. You never know.”

Aside from its dark undertones, Shadowplay is also fun and cleverly punctuated with subtle references to other works. Dracula obviously, but also O’Connor’s own novels, Ghost Light and Star of the Sea. “I loved writing this book which is not always the case,” he says. Apart from the central trio of Stoker, Irving and Terry, Shadowplay features other familiar characters including Stoker’s wife, Florence, an epic Oscar Wilde and a nod to Van Helsing. Rats freely roam the recesses of the Lyceum theatre and one piece of prose is arranged in the shape of a coffin. “When I was a young writer starting out I wanted my books to be very serious, even if they were funny,” he says, and while he wears such ambition more lightly, the artist still strives to hit the sweet notes in his prose. “Music is the most beautiful thing we have,” he says. “It is the most abstract art, unique and magical, and ever since Star of the Sea I’ve been trying to make musicality part of my prose. What I do now, before I start out, I ask myself ‘What is this book going to sound like?’ His own music tastes are diverse including the Fontaines DC, Puccini, Patti Smith, Philip Glass and Jackson Browne, and he recently wrote the liner notes for the 40th anniversary edition of one of his all-time favourite albums, Ghost Town by The Radiators. Did he ever want to be a musician? “Not really. I play a bit with my kids who are musicians. When you have teenagers in your house it’s a nice way of ‘talking’ to them without having to talk, it keeps the conversation going. But no, what I wanted to be as a kid was a writer.” Shadowplay is dedicated to the late Carole Blake, O’Connor’s friend and literary agent for some 25 years, who died in 2016. In the acknowledgements he writes that “one of the reasons why I would like life after death to be more than a story is that I would like to see the dedicatee of this novel again”. Does he believe in the afterlife? “I have religious belief. I don’t believe that we are just our bodies. There is an Irish notion of the dead being very close and my maternal grandmother would often say that if you had a problem not to worry because she would have a word with so and so in heaven. So I respect the notion that the dead are not gone. It’s like Bob Dylan says, death is not the end.” And O’Connor beats on, currently wrestling with what may be his next novel, about Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, the ‘Vatican Pimpernel’ who saved more than 6,000 people from the Nazis. “It’s at such an early stage that I don’t even know if I will call the character Hugh O’Flaherty,” he says. He has travelled to Rome to research his subject, “a fascinating, heroic man with so many silences around him, somewhat like Bram Stoker.” And how has O’Connor’s relationship with Stoker changed since putting Shawdowplay to bed? “It has gone from respecting him and admiring his work to love. I’d like to know Bram and spend a bit of time with him. Maybe I’ll find out one day. He’ll be up there waiting for me, either with an embrace or with a hammer and a stake.”

Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor is published by Harvill Secker