It is with great pleasure that I host fellow writer David J. O'Brien. David is a busy man and I was honoured that he dropped in to tell us about his new book Five Days on Ballyboy Beach.
Mary Bradford: David welcome to my blog. I am going to hand it all over to you today to tell us about this wonderful second novel.
David O'Brien: Thanks for hosting me today, Mary.
MB: So David, take it away...
DO'B: My second novel Five
Days on Ballyboy Beach, is just out and it feels like the rushed second
album of a young songwriter, even though this book, like Leaving the Pack, was
written a long time ago. When I started it, however, it was as a more
experimental effort at literature than my first
novella-expanded-into-novel-because-the-characters-demanded-it.
In all drafts up until the second last,
even after I signed the contract, the main character was called David. It was,
and still is, written in the first person and I decided at the time to use my
own name - or it's derivative, Dave.
There were a few reasons. One is that Dave
is a common name. More than that, it's a kind of Everyman name, like Jack, or
Bill, or Chuck. I wanted the character to be a common or garden bloke, similar
to most other men.
Dave is also usually the name of someone
nice, someone likeable. I'm not just saying that because I am nice and likeable (though I seriously am), but I've never yet
met a real asshole called Dave. Not in real life - David Brent, or David
Copperfield (the magician) might be plonkers - even gobshites - but I've never
met them: one is fictional, the other a persona. The movie Dave with Kevin Kline, is a great example of the niceness of
characters with that name: a nice guy substituting an asshole president.
Calling the "hero" such a likeable name allowed me to make the
character a bit of a dick without (hopefully!) turning the reader against him -
because there are elements of his personality that originally might have made
you wonder whether he deserved a happy ending. Using a first person narrator
helps make the reader more invested in the character, which also allowed me, as
the writer, to let the character do things the reader might dislike him for. He
does of course later show that he at least deserves a little happiness, though
whether he gets a happy ending is something the reader will have to find out.
In addition, using my own name would make
the reader wonder if some of this weren't really my own feelings. I did inject
a few anecdotes and opinions that both the character and I share, just to muddy
the waters, too. I think that the closer the writer superficially seems to be
to the action, the characters, the more he hides real facts that are far from
his real life and experience. None of what happens in the novel actually
happened to me or to anyone I know. But the ruse was too well done and it read
more like a memoir than contemporary fiction - so I changed Dave to another
everyman's name - Dave's brother in Only
Fools and Horses - Derek. He's still a plonker, sometimes, but ultimately
just as worthy of our friendship.
MB: Gosh, David, that is a very thoughful insight into the naming of your character and clever too. So give us a bit on the novel to whet our curiosity.
DO'B: Well, the Blurb is as follows:
A startling revelation - the long-time friend you
never viewed romantically is actually the person with whom you want to spend
the rest of your life.
But what do you do about it?
For Derek, a laid-back graduate camping with college
friends on Ireland's west coast in the summer of 1996, the answer is …
absolutely nothing.
Never the proactive one of the group - he's more than
happy to watch his friends surf, canoe and scuba-dive from the shore - Derek
adopts a wait and see attitude. Acting on his emotional discovery is further
hindered by the fact he's currently seeing someone else - and she's coming to
join him for the weekend.
As their five days on the beach pass, and there are
more revelations, Derek soon realises that to get what he desires, he'll have
to take it. Events conspire to push him to the forefront of the group, and, as
unexpected sorrow begins to surround him and his friends, Derek grasps his
chance at happiness. After all, isn’t life too short to just wait and see?
MB: Please share some more, this is intriguing.
DO'B: Okay, here is an excerpt, so enjoy.
Excerpt:
The five of us
had been friends for about five years. We’d met in first year of our science
degree course, during freshman week, and conglomerated together the way people
do when they arrive in a new university. I used to cycle there from
Deansgrange, where I was still living with my parents. Sarah got the DART from
Blackrock, where she had lived with her parents until she graduated. Bill did
the same from Howth. Sinéad lived on campus, since she couldn’t be arsed
commuting from Naas, where she was from. John shared a flat in Donnybrook,
because it was nigh on impossible to commute from Bettystown, Co. Meath, from
where he hailed. We’d found ourselves deciding on mostly the same courses, and
were in the same classes for nearly all our time there.
I met some
people in those first few days of university that I would hate to meet now.
Some of them I could safely ignore and would, since our acquaintance didn’t
last long before I’d moved on to more fruitful associations. Others I could not
ignore, and would thus avoid if at all possible. The individuals I was camping
with, however, were people with whom I'd just clicked and stuck with, like
Lego.
They liked most
of the stuff I liked and that’s why we were such good friends. The major
difference between me and them was that they were more inclined to actually do
things, whereas I was more content to laze about and do nothing. Not exactly
nothing. I mean watch: watch them surfing, watch the waves, watch the clouds
travel across the sky. Look at the birds foraging and gliding over the sand and
waves, see the rabbits warily leave their warrens and seek out succulent plants
among the dry dunes. That was why we were there; to do things and to relax –
mostly the former for them and mostly the latter for me. There was a kind of gradient
of laziness, to give it a name, though; from me to Sarah, her to Sinéad, then
to John and Bill.
We had gone away
on weekends and for short holidays together in summer many times since we'd
met. This was our first summer in real jobs. Or rather, it was the first summer
after we had finished our degrees. I still didn’t have a job. I’d gone back to
study English and Spanish. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, I’d
discovered a love for the written word, and had decided life would be rewarding
even if all you did was read. I was prepared to be poor for this, at least for
a few more years—a bit like the narrator of A
Prayer for Owen Meany, though there was no way I would cut off my trigger
finger for it. Second, I’d decided that Spain was a place that I wanted to
become more familiar with, and it was necessary to learn the language in order
to do this.
It was
Hemmingway who brought the country to my attention. He wrote as if he’d known
the language all his life, which of course he didn’t. I never got an idea from
his writings when he actually learned it and how much difficulty he’d had in
doing so. But I hoped I could also become fluent one day. Third, I hadn’t been
sure quite what to do when I finished university. I had gotten used to the
quiet life, the one where quality is more important than the standard of
living. Time had become more precious to me than money—well, the large amounts
of money gotten by working hard for long hours. I didn’t want to give my time
to a job I wasn’t really interested in. I’d toyed with the idea of doing a PhD,
but had decided against it. The first years might be light on work, but the
long year or more of writing up the thesis would be unbearable. I'd only have
time to read literature concerning my project, and I'd probably end up no more
ready for work or employable than I already was, or would be with a second
degree.
The others had
real jobs. Sarah worked at Proctor and Gamble, doing statistics of medical
experiments and tests. Sinéad worked for an environmental impact consultancy, a
recently created company called EnviroSol. John had got a job with the Central
Fisheries Board, somewhere a high percentage of Zoology and Environmental
Biology graduates ended up, since it was one of the few places where there were
any jobs going. Bill worked as a sales rep for a company that sold medical
supplies. He liked to say he was a travelling salesman, and I suppose you could
call it that, because he did a hell of a lot of travelling, up and down the
country week in, week out. Luckily, he liked to drive, and was an expert in
living out of a suitcase.
So this was the
first time the others had two weeks holiday to spare in the summer, and they’d
decided to stay in Ireland for some of it and we’d spend a long weekend on the
west coast together.
MB:To find out more about this talented writer and to engage with him about his work, you will find David at any of the links below. The links will also take you to where you can purchase this book and find out what happens to Derek. It only remains for me to thank David for joining me today and to wish him all the best with Five Days On Ballyboy Beach, no doubts it will be a great hit with his readers.
