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Love in a cage | page 1, 2
Yes, and one that was quite regularly followed up. Did you try? Yeah, well, my only conviction is for escape from lawful custody. I escaped in 1975 and was immediately recaptured. How far did you get? Just outside. But it was dangerous because they shot dead at least one prisoner who tunneled out. In my case, I impersonated a prisoner who was about to be released, and bluffed my way past the guards. I was taken down to Belfast Court, and ... it was kind of half farce, but half very serious. They let me go, and then just as they did so, they discovered that I wasn't who they thought I was. I got about 10 yards from the actual court building and they jumped me. How did prison affect your literary interests? The Catastrophist By Ronan Bennett
When I went to Long Kesh, I was persuaded to stop reading fiction by a friend who dismissed it all as sort of bourgeois nonsense. For 10 years I didn't go near fiction. I just concentrated on history and politics. When I was finishing my Ph.D. [in history from King's College, London], I started to read fiction again. It was like falling in love again. A very intense experience. Is all your writing political? It largely is -- I hope in a way that ... I wouldn't want to preach to people. There are other things in "The Catastrophist" that are equally important to me. The love affair between Gillespie and Ines is as important as the political story, really. I was in Australia recently -- the Sydney Writers Festival -- and I met a Vietnamese writer who just wanted to be left alone to write nonpolitical stories. That got me thinking about politics and writing. So much depends on context. What you can say in one country in one environment clearly doesn't have the same kind of political impact as it does in another. There's the idea that the real man is the guy throwing a bomb and that writing is just second-tier. Yeah. When we were in Long Kesh that was the view. That the writer was a fairly miserable piece of work really. I don't want to speak for all Yanks, of course, but the mainstream has become pretty apolitical. After witnessing Bill Clinton become Joey Buttafuoco, who cares about politics? I think it's not just Americans that have grown apolitical. Conventional politics, mainstream politics, has kind of jelled into some kind of -- oh, I don't know, some big homogenous center with a couple of fringe groups around the side of it. But I think your kind of cynicism is terribly justifiable. Is that a danger with you, to get cynical? No. I think it's partly because of growing up in Ireland and kind of being politically formed during a very turbulent period. I've never had much of a belief in mainstream politics. I've never believed that mainstream politicians were going to deliver. And so they've never disappointed me. The love affair between Gillespie and Ines becomes a political statement. Yes. Gillespie just cannot bring himself to sign up for what she believes is happening in the Congo. He loves her, but he will not allow his art to be put at the service of her causes. And in a way, if he'd been more minded to compromise on that issue, he might have been able to keep her. You don't know. How autobiographical is the relationship between Gillespie and Ines? It's fairly so. And how did you end up? [Pause.] Not well. Not well. Would you ever repeat that? Repeat -- in what way? Having that kind of political love affair? If you meet someone and fall in love, you never -- unless you're a particularly calculating, cold-hearted kind of person -- ask yourself those questions. There tends to be more emotional kinds of responses that determine how this thing develops. I studied Marxism when I was a kid and it just seemed like an endless debate where everything is bourgeois, or at least can be called bourgeois. Even romance. Oh yeah. Sure. But it doesn't mean that it's not real. When push comes to shove, would you rather live in a bourgeois paradise or keep your finger in the mire of politics? Well, I don't think that the two are mutually exclusive. I would really hope they weren't. Again, I think I said to you at the start, for me, obviously the political story of the book is central, but at the same time the love affair is very important to it. I don't separate the two. Writing about the tension that those things create, well, I suppose that's my subtext. Your trouble is you don't live in New York where writing culture revolves solely around money and Tina Brown sucking up to celebrities. Well, I don't know about, and I suppose you don't either -- about Manhattan elegance and wealth. What I know about is the community that I was raised in, and the community that I live in now, and to me the kind of social and economic problems that I see around me in these communities. These are the things that I want to talk about in my fiction. But I want to do it aesthetically, and not in a sloganeering way. I don't think anybody's well-served by placard fiction. I keep coming back to the same point which is that I think it is possible to write about politics and love. It's possible to write about commitment and art. It is. And that's what I try to do. It's not that it's easy, because those things are often pushing you in different directions. I keep saying you never come to an answer, but at least you can have fun exploring all the contradictions along the way.
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