New York redemption

Joseph O'Connor is on a scholarship and writing his next historical novel based in New York City library. He talks to Ailbhe Jordan

Woody Allen loves Renaissance art, but he once said he felt no need to visit the galleries and museums of Europe because he could find the best of it a few blocks from his apartment along Manhattan's Museum Mile.

On a clear, mild weekday morning in February, it feels like New York city has the best of everything – including weather. Apart from a weekend that witnessed the heaviest recorded snowfall in history, it has been a remarkably gentle winter.

Against the backdrop of a bright, blue sky, New York Public library looks even more impressive than usual, standing regally on Fifth Avenue, right in the centre of Manhattan.

One of the world's finest research institutes and one of New York City's biggest tourist attractions, the library has been author Joseph O'Connor's office for the past six months.

It's been three years since O'Connor published his best-selling novel, Star of the Sea. In that time, O'Connor's wife, Anne-Marie, has given birth to their second son, Marcus.

The family moved to New York last August after O'Connor won one of 15 fellowships awarded annually by the library's Cullman Centre to scholars and writers from around the world.

Fellows receive $50,000 (€42,243 euro), an office in New York Public Library and unlimited use of its resources in order to work on research projects of their choice.

O'Connor is using the opportunity to work on his second historical novel, Redemption, which is set in Civil War America. He hopes to finish the novel by June, when the fellowship ends, and to publish early next year.

"In terms of written resources, this is one of the great libraries of the world – if they don't have it here, they'll get it for you, they'll actually bring it to your desk, which is a most extraordinary privilege," O'Connor says, as he sipped coffee in the library's staff canteen.

"You come to New York, you get paid, you have 15 interesting people to talk to every day, they give you lunch once a week, there's your computer and your telephone, you know, it's a godsend," he laughs.

Like Star of the Sea, O'Connor's latest book is a work of fiction based on historical fact. Most of the novel's action takes place in Redemption, a fictitious town in Montana. However, the novel's central character, Thomas J Maher is based on a real Irish immigrant who lived in Montana in the 1860s.

"Thomas Maher was a young Irish guy who lived this amazingly swashbuckling life," O'Connor explains.

"He was sentenced to death but had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment in Tasmania. He later escaped to America to become governor of Montana. He disappeared one night from a steamship in Missouri and no one knows what happened to him."

O'Connor thinks the American Civil War was pivotal in shaping the perception of the Irish immigrant community in the US.

"Huge numbers of Irish people fought in the civil war – 100,000 for the North and 80,000 for the South. It was by far the largest immigrant population to fight in that war," he says.

"Before the Civil War, the view of Irish immigrants here was similar to in Britain. We were seen as troublemakers and drunks. We weren't welcomed with open arms in the way we like to tell ourselves we were. But, when the Americans saw Irish people fighting for their country, they gained a lot of respect, and Irish people became more integrated."

The last book in O'Connor's historical trilogy will be a novel based on the playwright JM Synge.

He's someone who interests me a lot," O'Connor says.

"He was a very secretive man. There are all sorts of things that we don't know about Synge and one of them is that, in the last few years of his life he had a very passionate affair with an Abbey actress who was from a completely different class. And, in the years after his death, she became a star, a great star on Broadway in Synge plays. I'd like to write a novel, from her point of view, set in the 1920s and the early 1930s in New York, about her and her relationship with Synge and the whole thing."

O'Connor has made no secret of either his views on the war America is currently fighting, or his disapproval of the Bush Administration.

"When I look at George Bush, I just despair for the planet," he said.

"He's made the world a lot less safe a place than it was. We'll be paying the consequences of his reign for a long time. I love Americans, but they must be the most hated race in the world at the moment, largely thanks to him."

O'Connor has never been afraid to voice his objections to those in power; former Irish president Patrick J Hillery was amongst the first great leaders to feel his wrath.

"I was in UCD at the time, looking for summer jobs and I wrote to everybody in town. I must have sent about 200 letters and the only response I had was from the Sunday Tribune," O'Connor recalled.

"The paper had just started and their files were in a mess. I was told to go off and put together a file on President Hillery and what President Hillery had been doing. And in these days before the internet and whatnot, the way to find these things out was to go down to the national library and sit for a week looking through the Irish Times for every, you know, sausage factory Hillery had ever opened. So I put together this thick file. And then, being an ambitious young fellow, the last piece of paper I filed was my article, which was a damning indictment of President Hillery's work rate. I felt very strongly that he wasn't working hard enough while I was lying in bed in UCD."

The damning indictment turned out to be the first of a regular column O'Connor would write in the Tribune for years.

In 1991, O'Connor's debut novel, Cowboys and Indians, was short-listed for the Whitbread prize. Since then, he has published several novels, short stories, essays and plays, becoming a household name in Ireland, thanks in part to being the brother of singer and media magnet Sinead O'Connor.

But Star of the Sea was O'Connor's breakthrough, becoming a best-seller in Ireland, and later Britain, after Bob Geldof appeared as a guest reviewer on the Richard and Judy show in 2004 calling it "a modern masterpiece", and quoting passages from memory. The book shot from number 337 to number one in the space of a week and went on to sell over 600,000 copies in the UK.

"I really think, in some ways, Star of the Sea is like a first novel," he said.

"I think I had to learn how a novel works in order to write that book. That was the biggest change in the sense that it's the first historical book I've written. It's very different from my early books which were set in the world that I lived in."

O'Connor's eldest son James, now five, was born around the time he was working on Star of the Sea.

"When I look at the book now, I'm struck by how the imagery of parenthood is all the way through it," he says.

"The whole story, in a way, is the story of a family or a group of families and how they knit together and how parents feel about their children and what it means to be a child. And I don't remember any of that at the time. I was just thinking about the structure of the book really and how to build the architecture of it in such a way as to keep people reading. When I read it now, I can see what was on my mind at the time."

Has parenthood affected his writing in other ways?

"Before I had kids I'd think nothing of staying up all night writing, and often did," he says.

"Now, my routine is to write every day. The memoirs of children of writers are always full of tales about how they never felt their father was there, he was away with the birds. I make a conscious effort to be there, when I'm there."

O'Connor's own childhood became the subject of media attention in 1993 when Sinead went to the newspapers, alleging that their mother had sexually abused her. Relations between the two have reportedly been fraught ever since, but O'Connor did not want to talk about it.

"Whenever anyone asks me about my family I always give the same stock answer which is to confirm, that yes, they're right, Sinead O'Connor is my sister," he said.

"I think people over here are surprised to hear we're related. Its like, is Sinead O'Connor really your sister? We're very different, I'm very proud of her, that's it."

Former Irish alumni of the Cullman Fellowship have included Colum McCann and Colm Toibín. This year, Dublin author Mary Morrissey is a fellow fellow.

"It's open to people from all around the world but this year everyone is American apart from myself and Mary," said O'Connor, who sees this as a good thing.

"I didn't know Mary before I came here, I'm very happy to know her now; I admired her work a lot. But it's not like its myself and Mary sitting in the office talking about the good times in Dublin. In a way, it's very interesting to get out of Ireland. There are many aspects of it that I don't miss. I think we're still a very small, very self reflecting society. We seem to find ourselves absolutely fucking fascinating. You read most of the Irish newspapers and the main subject is: US, you know? The front page of the Irish Times today is about the fact that Sean Haughey is upset because Bertie Ahern didn't promote him in the recent cabinet reshuffle. Now, I know that's very important to Sean Haughey and a very small number of other people, it's obviously not very important to Bertie Ahern. I just think the world has a lot more interesting things in it than we sometimes find interesting."

Writing in the Guardian last year, Donald Hiscock criticised the Manhattan portrayed in Woody Allen's films as: "an up market, white, middle-class world where the neuroses of the main characters are explored while wandering streets strangely devoid of the poor and the down-at-heel."

O'Connor believes the diversity of New York is what makes it great.

"I think it adds enormously to life here," he said.

"I can't imagine living in New York where everybody's a white or middle class or catholic. New York is such a remarkable success story. You have all these immigrant groups living together and it works – everyone gets along. I think energy comes from that." p