THE GLORIOUS HERETIC
Bailey’s Prize winner Lisa McInerney talks creativity, class divides and ‘misfit’ characters with Tina Jackson
Tina Jackson
Last year, Irish writer Lisa McInerney won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction with The Glorious Heresies, her debut novel: a savage, multi-voiced, blackly humorous and very dark account of the repercussions of the aftermath of a murder in council-estate Cork. Its follow-up, published on 20 April, is The Blood Miracles. Equally filthy, funny and inventive, the focus, alternately tough and tender, is on a key character from Heresies, teenage drug dealer Ryan, as he is drawn deeper into the world of gangland trafficking.
‘I always knew that the second book would be a tighter, closer portrait after the multi-narrative landscape of the first,’ says Lisa. ‘I had the outline of The Blood Miracles in my head even as The Glorious Heresies was coming together – this story about the violent rebirth of a very young drug dealer – and given that theme, given his age, it felt more appropriate that it was focused on one protagonist.’
Of all the vividly conveyed characters in The Glorious Heresies, Ryan is perhaps the most remarkable: someone with exceptional qualities whose potential to be great is utterly compromised by the lifestyle options afforded him in underclass Cork. ‘He was the heart of The Glorious Heresies, I think, and I didn’t quite feel finished with him. There’s a lot of scope for story in a character who has so much potential and yet who so persistently abuses that potential,’ says Lisa.
In The Blood Miracles, Lisa takes Ryan way off the beaten track. She admits he’s the character who gives her the most pleasure to create. ‘He’s very easy to write, because I know him very well, and yet he still has the capacity to surprise me, so writing him never becomes a chore. He’s often funnier than I expect him to be.’ Is it because he’s a favourite character that Lisa writes him into such dreadful situations? ‘Ha! Well, I don’t know. I think it’s more the case that I love the characters with the most capacity to surprise me, and so I keep writing them into corners to see what will happen.’
At the heart of both books is the love story, very real and very tested, between Ryan and his girlfriend Karine. ‘I don’t think it’s worth my pretending it’s not an ongoing love story,’ says Lisa. ‘A complex one that gets very ugly at times, but that whole love is patient, love is kind thing is aspirational rather than realistic, isn’t it? At the heart of Heresies and Miracles and probably Book Three as well is a relationship between two people growing up together. They’re not always reasonable or kind to each other or even likeable, but each on some level defines themselves by their relationship to the other. Even in its darkest moment it’s a love story. My favourite moments to write are those where Ryan and Karine are bouncing off each other (and not necessarily in the biblical sense).’