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  • “To Bring All Loves Home”:An Interview with Jamie O’Neill
  • Marc C. Conner

Jamie O'Neill (b. 1962) has written three novels: Disturbance (1989), Kilbrack (1990), and the award-winning At Swim, Two Boys (2001). Disturbance and Kilbrack are relatively short and focus mainly upon a single character in a small community; At Swim, Two Boys, in contrast, is a long, sweeping, deeply historical novel, whose technique and style might best be described as modernist in the vein of Joyce's Portrait. The rendering of voice and consciousness is complex and tightly connected to the novel's major theme of coming-of-age within and against the tide of historical crisis. O'Neill has come to be regarded as one of the most gifted of contemporary Irish novelists; the novelist's sheer delight and virtuosity in language shows in such passages as this:

His moment had come the first week of their swimming together, that magical moment when the mind lets go and the body is released. You'll find it, MacMurrough had promised him, you'll feel it when you do. Then he slipped into the pool one time, and something the way he moved, with an ease, almost a grace, MacMurrough could see he did not strive against the water. Rather, the water had received him and he joined a little in its fluency.1

I met with O'Neill at his home in Moycullen, County Galway, on April 30, 2005. We spoke for nearly four hours, from which the following interview is drawn.

* * *

MC: You wrote your first two novels in the 1980s, and then worked on your third for over a decade. What changed between Kilbrack and the writing of At Swim, Two Boys?

JO: Well, I think there is that onus of being published. Once that was out of the way I wasn't desperate to be published anymore. I knew the sun still rises in the East even though you are published. So it didn't make a big deal. For instance, I sold the rights to At Swim when I was about halfway through, and they started [End Page 66] saying, you know, "We don't want any sex," and "We want it to be no more than 80,000 words," and worst of all, "We want it finished by Christmas." So I actually took a loan out of the bank and bought the rights back, which was a very brave thing to do, because I didn't know if I'd have something to give them.

MC: You must have been really committed to writing the book you wanted to write.

JO: Well, I had spent about six years on it by then, and I hadn't got very far—but I knew where it could go, where I wanted it to go. I just couldn't bear the idea of someone coming in at the end and saying, you've got to reshape it. Because when Kilbrack was edited, there was a wonderful moment where the editor had said, "I want you to get rid of two characters," and I said "Which two characters?" and she said "It doesn't matter." [Laughs.] I didn't want to go into that sort of business, I wanted to be sure. It was one of the nice things about At Swim, Two Boys. It's something I can still look back on and say, you know, that's okay, that's the way I'd still write it—or, I wish I could still write like that.

MC: All your novels are quite rich in the evocation of place—some place, like the sea, become many things: enchanted and mythical and threatening. There is also the exactness of the Forty Foot, and Glasthule streets, and places in Dublin. . . .

JO: It's the same with a lot of the dialogue. I was thinking more [that] I could convince people that I was right about things that could be checked up or in the spoken language, that authority would transfer to my story. So that it would become believable. There were times, you know, when the tides were exactly right for each occasion—so much...

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