I had always wanted to set a novel in London but was daunted by those who have gone before me: writers born and bred there or who at least, spent most of their writing lives walking its streets and breathing its air. I hardly knew London at all – apart from a few weeks one long-ago summer, when I worked as a barmaid in the East End. And if I am to write a novel, I need to know the location. I need to know what it feels like to live there.
And so, despite the shadows shifting in the back of my mind – shadows that I knew somehow belonged to London, I told myself that London was out of the question: too complex, too unruly and far too bloody big.
Then, in 2016 at the Abbey theatre, I witnessed Fiona Shaw’s mesmeric performance of the Waste Land. As I sat there it occurred to me that one of the most striking poems of the modern age was, for the most part, set in London, and yet it was written by an American. Had TS Eliot been a Londoner, would it have been a different poem, I wondered? Would it have been written at all? Could it be that the heightened awareness of the outsider had forged a unique emotional connection to this sprawling metropolis? And did it allow him to recognise the loneliness of people he passed on the street or looking up, saw through a window?
An outsider is a good thing to be, I decided; an outsider will notice things that are often overlooked by locals. An outsider will find the true pulse of a city.
And this is why, in 2018, I moved to London and became an outsider. I had the two main characters living in my head by then: a poor runaway teenage girl from rural Ireland who would spoof her way into a job in a pub in the East End; the other a young boxer, half-Irish, half-English from a more privileged background, who had a fondness for drink as well as books. I baptised them, Milly and Pip. I knew the novel would be about their lives over a long period of time and that London would be a character in itself.
For months, I traipsed the streets of London, keeping my eyes open and my ears tuned until I was ready to slip first, inside Milly’s head, and then later, into Pip’s. I tried to experience what they were experiencing: awe, fear, loneliness and sometimes even love. Then I returned to Dublin for five years of hard-graft.
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