Three Monkeys Online Magazine

The Nuclear Option - Declan Lynch and The Rooms

Athlone was part of the wasteland. His father worked in the post office, his mother in the civil service and Declan lived with two sisters, a younger brother and soccer. Soccer was crucial in a town like Athlone. The Athlone Town soccer team took up most of his time and eventually the time of his father when he wrote the history of the club, a book that was published before any of Declan's.

But Declan was graduating onto his own page already. At school, at the Marist in the town, his by-line appeared in the school magazine and as he ventured to Dublin and a law degree in UCD, he progressed to the Hot Press, by then becoming the Irish equivalent of the NME.

"It was quite a crazy thing to do, to say that you were going to stop doing law and start writing for Hot Press, which back then, if you mentioned Hot Press to people it was almost a pornographic magazine because there was no music industry in Ireland at the time. There was very little prospect of anything. To come from Athlone to Dublin and the music that was happening was so exciting. Again it's one of these clichés that when I was that age it was good, and people say it's because you were young and everything was exciting but I think you can look back and see one band after another emerging at that time, all of them fucking great. There was a real sense of excitement, there was no structure to it, and it wasn't until a few bands became really successful like U2, that a music business started to take hold in Ireland. To be suddenly in that world and involved and to be writing about it was great."

The only thing that might have bettered this existence was a job at the NME. Instead his writing continued apace in the magazine, only he relocated in the meantime to U.C.C. in Cork. The world he read about in the NME, the world he fantasised about, the world that fascinated him - now he was a part of it. And he had company. Drink.

"If alcohol had anything to do with brains then it wouldn't be a problem. It 's not stupid, it's something else, and who knows what it is."

His companion fed on his success as a journalist.
"I drank whenever I could. It was always a question of having the money for it. If I had the money for it I would drink it all. And in the '80s in Cork for a man to have money to buy drink was a very rare thing, it was a very prestigious position. A man would have any friends as a result.

The great tragedy of alcohol is the more you drink of it, the more you need and so you need more and more and more to have less and less effects. Eventually you finish up just consuming alcohol because that's what you do and you're not really getting a bang for your buck anymore but you're addicted to it now. It's the law of diminishing returns.
Even if you're having a great time a lot of the time, you're in a lot of bad situations too. It's a fuckin' drug and it drives you mad at times but it does be very boring, you always remember the high points of anything but eventually you're down in Cork, sitting in the afternoon, drinking pints in the Phoenix bar in this endless youth and adolescence but it can be boring as well if it becomes a routine."

Drinking is part of the past now although he brings that world to life in The Rooms. Neil moves through the decaying life of a recovering rock n roll star, a recovering alcoholic. Sober, sane. No music, no drink. Just unrealistic dreams. Writing the book was a wonderful process if a little weird. For a month it poured out of him and in one weekend he hardly slept while the words hit the page. Peace and quiet and a room in his house, a laptop, and a mind solely focused on Neil. After the rush of print and a whirlwind which fashioned most of the content, two years of tidying up brought him to the final draft.

"When you're writing yourself you tend to be wary of reading other things because a) you think you'll get discouraged because it's so good or b) you'll get angry because it's so bad and you think I'm great and they're terrible."

He doesn’t need a glorious vista to write, he doesn't need a favourite pen, a smoking jacket or a feathered cap. This world of writing has nothing to do with routine. His instinct brings him through the journey; it gives him belief that writing a book is something special and the anger to reaffirm it.
"You can have a very good book about geography lecturers having affairs with history lecturers but a great book more or less suggests how you might live your life. The Russians and the French had that sense of it being an ultimate activity. If you're actually going to go to the trouble of writing a book, it takes a long time, it's a real pain in the arse, do the fucking thing right. Cut to the chase."

"It's a real problem to me that so many people are writing books because most of them are no good. To this day I would still have this attitude that writing books is a very special thing to do. You can't just be writing chick-lit books, because they're not books. The stuff that they're dealing with, and the way that they deal with them, they are all shite. I don't know why people are reading them, because it takes time to read a book, it takes energy. I would prefer to listen to a record, so I just can't understand all these people buying all these books and wasting their time. Could they not drink or something and enjoy themselves?"

The subject of drinking swirls through the atmosphere of conversation, he's as exercised about it as he is about shite books. Neil's dilemma in The Rooms is that he's in love with Jamaica, Jamaica loves him and they both love alcohol.

"This is why Neil is always struggling because he enjoyed drinking," he says as he explains the genesis of the novel.
"A lot of things that can be said about alcoholism can be said about life in general. It is about the meaning of life, in a much heightened way. It's about 'Will I go out and destroy my life?' It's simple. Any alcoholic, any recovering alcoholic, any day of the week, has the choice to go out and destroy their life completely. And that's a very exciting thing and a very scary thing.

And so to write about it is a very interesting thing, it's a classic existential dilemma. You can get your life together after becoming an alcoholic, you can build slowly up to get everything together and in fuckin' five minutes you can destroy the whole thing. Over a period of time, you become far more resilient, but at the same time no matter what happens, life is far too fragile and unpredictable to say that even in three weeks time I will still be sober. It's such an interesting subject in that sense because no matter how much solidity you build up, no matter how satisfying your life becomes, you still have that option - the nuclear option."

In his life away from the novel he's better known as a Sunday Independent journalist. He's been there quite a long time now, a paper that sells more than any other Irish Sunday paper, and is happy to defend the fact that he keeps company there, in spite of the increasing levels of criticism directed in the paper's direction.

In 2005 the paper erroneously reported that a former Irish politician had been with a prostitute in Russia when he died in a car crash. He weighs that up. He contemplates the increasingly flimsy content of the paper; the reams of social diary and constant bevy of models on page one. And then…

"I couldn't give a fuck about what else is in it. In a Sunday paper there will always be a huge variety of stuff in it. You can see a piece by Colm Toibin in the Sunday indo, how bad is that?
There are almost no good articles in the Irish Times ever. Most Irish Times journalism is useless. I can't think of any particularly talented writers working with the Irish Times. I can think of Gene Kerrigan in the Sunday Independent. People have quite blinkered attitudes to these things. I've always been of the view that I've been able to do whatever the fuck I like in the Sunday Indo and that suits me fine. I really enjoy it.
Do you see why I shouldn't?"
Blank stare.
"Who do you write for?"
"The Kildare Nationalist."
"Well then…"
Quickly defeated.
"Every Sunday in the independent, I am given a platform to address the nation and I think that's fuckin' great and I don't see a downside to that at all, I really don't," he continues. "I get on great with the people that work there, they let me write and they leave my stuff alone. I could name a number of much vaunted publications in this town [Dublin] that have driven men mad, fucking jibbering nervous wrecks by their interference. I wouldn't name them for all sorts of reasons but they are very highly regarded publications who treat people like fucking shit.

I just think the Irish Times is shit basically. Even the way they treated my book, it took them three months to review it. I don't think they were even going to bother their arse reviewing it at all until a couple of people in there said 'this is kind of good'. I just think they don’t know about stuff like that.
I just don't think it's much good, I don't think the writers are much good. There are some like Tom Humphries, who is great, it wouldn't be a blanket thing.
There are all sorts of agendas in the Irish Times and yet you still have these people shiting on about the Sunday Indo – it's boring and it's also a kind of ignorance. It's not very clever as well. There are far more interesting things about journalism in Ireland.

The best people I've worked for are the Sunday Independent, in every sense. Throughout my life I've heard horror stories about people writing for other publications and being treated badly, being paid shit, all this kind of stuff and these publications are revered."

You wonder when the tap might get turned off. The truth is, it probably never is. There is too much inside him for him to consume. The books and the writing and the anger allow him to release it, yet it's the music he'll always love, in spite of everything else and in spite of his passion for all those subjects, but he still looks at the world around him and finds fodder for his ventures into writing. Reasons to question and write about the meaning of life.

"There seems to be a new way of thinking now, which I resent, and it is that everything you do is an addiction. If everyone’s addicted to something, then no one is addicted. There is a growing moralistic thing coming in that almost anyone who drinks to any extent is flirting with alcoholism and they' re not at all. Because there is more talk of addiction and we're more open about it, it allows in the anti-happiness people. They’re always there; they 're always looking for a fuckin angle, the cunts."

The Rooms by Declan Lynch is published by Hot Press books

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