Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1527558
14 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 6 OCTOBER 2024 INTERVIEW 'To be alive is to be narrating Your work is defined by people struggling against an often cruel universe — you've even written an essay about authors whose engagement with the 'cosmic' you admire. What do you find so enriching about this particular mode of fiction, and do you think it's something that is lacking in today's literary landscape across the board? So many of today's fiction writers are narrowly focused on the socio-political and do so in the belief that society can provide the answers to all our problems. This is a strange assumption, it seems to me, because there are metaphysical questions to do with our meaning and our place in the universe that lie out- side of society. If you are without faith, as so many of us are, how are you to define yourself in a silent world without God? How can you arrive at meaning? So many of us are spiritual in that we have no religion but still feel deeply connected to life, to wonder and a sense of the good. What are we to do with this when it is no longer captured by religion? Serious fiction used to speak to such problems and for much of the 20th century, writers and thinkers grappled with the problem of meaning with great sincerity. Today, such questions play little role in public conversation. We are no longer alienated in the world, as the existentialists once put it, but are now alienated from ourselves. Technol- ogy has shattered our attention and dis- connected us from the more authentic, spiritual aspects of mind. We have ex- changed wisdom for an endless stream of information and brushed the prob- lems of meaning under the rug. But at what cost? I believe there are serious ramifications for modern societies. How have your preoccupations as a writer evolved over time? Looking back at some of your earliest attempts at writing fiction, can you identify any recurring themes and stylistic gestures, or was there a point where your work simply took a sharp turn, for whatever reason? When I look back at my younger self, I can see a writer trying to push language to its limits in an effort to capture some of the more ineffable aspects of life. My novels have always been plot driven, but those early novels were written in a dense, poetic style influenced by writ- ers such as Faulkner, Melville and Mc- Carthy and poets such as Heaney, Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I wanted to take the reader down to the heart- beat of the moment and capture it in all its strangeness, wonder and beauty. Today, my writing is less ornate and largely that is because I have found new ways to express such matters in a more refined style. You often see this with other writers. Over time, the writ- er gains a certain mastery over the lan- guage (never a true mastery) that allows one to express greater complexity in simpler forms. It is something that can only be arrived at after years of work. You've previously worked as a journalist — notably, as a film critic. Would you say this has impacted your fiction, subsequently, and if so how? I reviewed over 1,000 films for the now sadly defunct Sunday Tribune in Ireland and what I learned during that time was the power of story. Even the most fractured arthouse movies are still telling a story. The human brain is wired for stories and at a very funda- mental level, as neuroscience will show you, the brain is always narrating reali- ty. To be alive is to be narrating to one- self a perpetual story. And so all of us are born storytellers, and perhaps this explains why stories are so attractive to us — they are like cheesecake for the Ahead of his participation at the Malta Book Festival, Irish author PAUL LYNCH — whose novel Prophet Song won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2023 — speaks to MaltaToday about the evolution of his literary style, the need for novels to rise above the merely social, and the weight of fame on what is otherwise a deeply solitary profession Paul Lynch's gruellingly beautiful novel Prophet Song, which imagines Ireland sliding into fascist dystopia in 'real time', won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2023