NICK CAVE, Leonard Cohen, Julian Lennon, Ray Davies, Louise Wener, Graham Parker, Gil Scott Heron...there is a tradition of singer-songwriters turning their hand to fiction via the novel or short story, and to that list we can now add Declan O’Rourke.
Thursday November 4 sees the launch of Declan’s debut novel, The Pawnbroker’s Reward (Gill Books ) set during a period, and a theme, of abiding interest to the Kinvara based songwriter - The Great Irish Famine and the struggle of ordinary people when the tide of history turns into a tsunami.
Declan could have been forgiven for resting on his laurels this year, having already released the album, Arrivals, produced by Paul Weller, and deservedly showered with praise by Pete Townshend (“a gem” ) and MOJO (“O’Rourke is a masterful lyricist and staggering guitarist” ). Instead, he closes the year with his first foray into fiction.
“It’s very exciting,” Declan tells me during our Wednesday morning conversation. “When you are working on an album you are trying out the songs on tour, getting a sense of them through the performance and audience reaction, but with a novel coming out, it is before anybody has seen a word. It’s more of a risk, but my instinct has been to push myself, develop more confidence into doing what’s right for me, and damn the begrudgers.”
A story begets a story
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Set in County Cork in 1846, The Pawnbroker’s Reward concentrates on the experience of Pádraig Ua Buachalla, a poor labourer dependent on the potato crop to sustain him, his family, and the wider community, and his growing realisation of what another crop failure will mean.
Pádraig and his family are based on real people and it was an event very close to home for Declan that set in train both this novel and his acclaimed 2017 album, The Chronicles of The Great Irish Famine.
“Around 2000, I learned that my grandfather was born in a workhouse in Gort,” he says. “I made a vow to find out more. One day in Easons I found a book on the Irish workhouses and on my way home on the bus, I opened the first page, and read, ‘the man who carried his wife home from the workhouse, back to their cottage, was found dead with his wife’s feet held to his chest as if to try and warm them’, and that whole world came alive.
“Anything I’d seen about the Famine seemed black and white or like old etchings. This made it very real. It spoke to me, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to try and share that’. By the end of the book I had the song, ‘Poor Boy’s Shoes’ practically written, but realised I could not do justice to this subject in one song, so I started reading more and reaching to create a collection of songs.”
That collection was The Chronicles of The Great Irish Famine, and following an interview on Lyric FM’s Marty In The Morning, Declan received an email from Gill Publishing asking if he would be interested in writing a book on the subject.
Declan was initially hesitant, but following encouragement from the late Shay Healy, and his own experimentation with a short story about “an old woman who lived on the street where I grew up in Dublin”, he began to believe a novel may be possible.
“After the record came out I was, ‘That’s the Famine put to bed!, but then I was invited to play the Irish Famine Summer School in Strokestown,” he says. “In 2018, in Skibbereen, I played a concert as part of the tour of The Great Hunger Museum, and I was talking to a man whose father was from near Macroom, near where the Ua Buachalla’s came from, so I asked him if he knew of an area called Doire Liath [the area in Cork where the Ua Buachalla’s live].
“‘Leave it with me,’ he said. He called me the next day, to say his cousin talked to another cousin who talked to a guy who ran a shop, who talked to a guy who owns land around there, and on his land are the remains of the actual Ua Buachalla cottage. A couple of days later, I found myself looking at the footprint of this tiny little bohán and that was two weeks after getting the call from Gill, and I thought, the Famine is not finished with me.”
As it happened
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Sinead O’Connor said the Famine is something Ireland has not yet confronted or dealt with, in terms of its impact and legacy. More recently, filmmaker Tom Sullivan, whose new film, Arracht is set during the Famine, said, ‘If Ireland is a young nation, then the Famine is our childhood trauma”. Declan’s own views are not dissimilar.
“I think it’s very underexplored,” he says. “This is something that needs to be shared. The story of the Famine needs more light shed on it as it has been misunderstood. Arguably it is the most significant event in Irish history but we look elsewhere. We have not given it it’s due.”
The Pawnbroker’s Reward deals, not only with The Famine and its devastation of the already destitute labouring poor, but with the impact of Catholic Emancipation, and with the emergence of a new social type in Ireland - the Catholic middle class of small business owners and farmers with substantial land, who now have a (very restricted, limited ) say in the running of Ireland.
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Recording their decisions is the journalist Cornelius Creed, who, while a member of that new middle class, is disturbed by the greed of his contemporaries - Catholic and Ascendancy - and how bureaucracy, red tape, petty politics, rivalries, and vested interests - as well as a change of Government in Britain - are exacerbating an already dire situation.
“There is a phrase I like: ‘The truth fears no interrogation’,” says Declan. “As I was finding these people and building a picture together, you start to see there were Catholics on the board of guardians [managers of the Poor Law Unions], and to do that you had to pay rates, and to pay rates you had to have money or land. There was a middle class Catholic seam of people and it’s interesting as some of that conflicts with what we’ve come to know about the Famine, that ‘all Catholics were poor, all Protestants were of the ascendancy’. I had to paint it as it happened, and not with an agenda. It’s for readers to make up their own minds on who was good and bad.”
Empathy
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The Pawnbroker’s Reward has already met with praise from Joseph O’Connor, who called it “a powerful and gripping piece of writing from a born storyteller”, while Michael Harding said, “the narrative is just like his singing voice, full of powerful strength and compassion”.
That compassion, and empathy, so key to Declan’s songwriting, are qualities very present throughout the novel.
“For me, empathy comes from writing songs and the lines of this book,” he says. “It was only when I pictured my own family in the situation the Ua Buachalla’s were in, that it became powerful. That’s how I relate to the world. Imagining if that happened to my family, it hit me in the chest. That is empathy. That is how I write, and that why it’s important to keep these stories alive.”
