Three Monkeys Online Magazine

The Nuclear Option - Declan Lynch and The Rooms

For a while you think he's mellowed. You think the sober air and unspoilt halls of the National Gallery are trying to tell you something. The place can't speak but it resonates to the clatter of heels on ceramic floors. Upper-class accents utter niceties as middle-aged women, refined from years of comfort, ease their way through the crowded café floor.

Alone sits a greying, middle-aged man who lived for music, drink and books. A cup of coffee sits on the table. No books. No music.
He's far from alone. His hair is wiry, unkempt almost because the thoughts which move through his head are of far more importance. Those thoughts dare him to question life itself and compelled him to write a book that considered what that life means.

"I love the Russian classics and the Americans like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer. There is something about their novels that a writer sits down and thinks 'I'm going to write. This is what I think the meaning of life is' . They're not concerned with bed-hopping in Hampstead. They've kind of said 'ah fuck it, the meaning of life. Will I write about middle-class adultery or figure out if it's worth staying alive for another hour?'"

It started as a journey out of youth, delving into something deeper. A teenager growing up in Athlone in the '70s he devoured newspapers and books, his mind becoming a dervish of thought in the process. As he neared the end of his teenage years the dervish had found a home on the pages of Hot Press. Declan Lynch was born. A music fanatic, a student, a journalist.
Now a novelist, a recovering alcoholic and a father.

"The old line that Behan was a writer who drank, became a drinker who wrote and then just became a drinker, I would say fuck that, he still created something worthwhile. I would find that view very attractive, that it's worth sacrificing yourself to create something worthwhile. If you wrote one really fucking great book - that would do you. Somewhere I would have that idea still. I think it's a very important idea. The Rooms is the book that is closest to the one I want to write, it's getting at the meaning of life."

So The Rooms sits on our bookshelves and Declan Lynch sits across a table discussing life as a student, life as a drinker, life as it is. But he hasn't mellowed; this genteel place doesn't represent the rooms which housed his life. You have to listen and wait. You have to understand that the journey to the point of self-destruction is attractive, that he has come close to stepping on the plunger and that he could come closer still.

"If I go in here and have this drink, I will die."
[Opening line, The Rooms]

****

He went to college in Cork, having studied law for a year in U.C.D. before dropping out. He admits that the pressure of keeping up appearances played its part in his brief spell in Dublin, but once he realised law wasn't for him he retreated from the spectre of prestige and wealth. Instead he headed for U.C.C. to pursue his heart, but only to the extent that U.C.D. was a decision guided by his head and the impressive exam results he achieved in school. Any romantic notions about pursuing his passions are secondary because it would add colour to a life that wasn't any different from any other student. Drink was the common currency, he doesn't pretend any different. Whether he studied English or not was irrelevant in the milieu of the student bar and the maelstrom of boozing.

"I met a lot of great people there. I was working for the Hot Press and had a few quid like. And because every so often I would actually have money to buy drink, that made me almost unique probably. I was always going to be doing journalism so English was the least nonsensical progression."

English was something he was good at, music was something that he loved and the Hot Press became a natural medium for him to marry the two. In England the NME wasn't just a bible of rock music; it was as pivotal to growing up and out of Athlone as food and water was. Lynch says he was educated by the NME, by the music and the writers they wrote about, by the way the NME writers wrote and by the way the NME could chronicle a world no one else was bothered with. Newspapers didn't write about this sub-culture, this obsession with music and the changing reality of the world they reported on. Rock, punk and pop were oblique terms that defined a restrained reality. Slowly it began to seep, the laces became frayed.

"The NME was like another world, even just reading the ads for gigs. And then there was the Horslips. Horslips were the great bridge from the show bands. The Horslips were crucial. With Horslips you would see things like a mixing desk. You would literally live for a Horslips gig and it might be only every six months. They had roadies, they wrote their own songs. They were a precursor for punk rock in many ways. They were brilliant. They did things that real bands in other places did. They were vital, there was nothing else. There was nothing else going on, it was just a wasteland."

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