A long and winding road

A recent TV documentary and a controversial review for his newnovel have thrust Dermot Healy into the media spotlight. It is theendpoint of an 11-year effort to finish the book, writes KEITHDUGGAN

IT IS a squally, sleepy afternoon and Dermot Healy is the onlyperson to be found walking in the village of Carney. He has offeredto meet there and guide me back to his house which, he forewarns, isalmost impossible to find unless you know where you are going. Healybought the place pretty speedily more than 20 years ago after hisfriend, the artist Sean McSweeney, pointed him in the direction ofthe owner. A deal was struck at dusk.

"When I took Helen there to show it to her the next day, Icouldn't find it myself," he laughs. "Not the best start."

The Healy household featured prominently in The Writing In TheSky, a recent documentary about his enduring fascination with thebarnacle geese from Greenland that relocate to this part of Sligoeach autumn and whose presence stoked into life his long poem, AFool's Errand.

The geese, in fact, might be inadvertently blamed for the slowfermentation of his new novel, Long Time, No See. Healy had more orless finished the manuscript back in 2002. "But a final endingescaped me and I went off and did something else."

He worked on plays and tried to write the significance of thegeese out of himself until eventually he conceded that the materialwas gradually shaping into the epic narrative it became. He does notclassify himself as a bird watcher but the annual visits by thegeese became "part of the everyday", part of the landscape.

Healy's house is flush against the coast; a narrow gap betweentrees opens onto the most spectacular view of the sea, with ClassieBawn, the old Mountbatten pile, a shadow on a promontory on thisovercast day. Healy dealt with the problem of coastal erosion in hisown slow-burning, fastidious way. It took him several years tobuttress the exposed coastline bordering his house with gabions -wire mesh bales containing tens of thousands of stones. "They haveto be a particular size. Too big and they will break. Too small andthey will be sucked out of the mesh."

The workmanship is incredibly neat and must have been painstakingto carry out. Healy did everything himself. Once, a visitor got downon his knees in front of the gabions, as if in prayer. Healy wastaken aback and joked about it, but the man told him: "No, you don'tunderstand. These things saved my life in Lebanon."

When Healy was working on the stone bundles, the geese would flyby every evening, about five minutes before the light failed."That's when you knew it was time to stop."

The novel, meanwhile, languished in a drawer as Healy consoledhis ever-patient agent and publishers whenever they phoned enquiringabout his progress. "It must have been frustrating for them," hesays.

Eventually, about three years ago, he set about completing thething. So hot on the heels of A Fool's Errandcomes the first DermotHealy novel in 11 years.

"The return (after an 11-year absence) of one of the mostcelebrated contemporary Irish novelists," reads the introduction onthe inside flap: the publishers all but added a "phew" at the end.

With it come the attendant duties of book readings and launchesand festivals and signings. After a decade of being left to his owndevices, it has been a rather dramatic period of exposure for thelaconic Westmeath man, from the screening of the televisiondocumentary to a recent row in the letters page of this newspaperover Eileen Battersby's review of his book. This drew responses fromwriters Eugene McCabe and John Banville.

"You enjoy it when it is over," he grumbles happily about theattention in general, but he will not be drawn on the specificquestion of the review. "Ah, I am like a schoolboy. When I sign thebooks, I have to ask someone to tell me their name - people I knoweven - because I get a blank. I don't know whether it is nerves ofwhatever."

Long Time, No See is clearly set within the last 10 years andanyone who has visited Mullaghmore or Drumcliffe or the hinterlandwhere Healy resides won't be long placing their imagination therewhen reading it.

For all the perceived hardness of the economic boom, smallkindnesses abound in the story and rituals such as the stations ofthe cross prevail alongside the internet; surfers alongside spiritedold-timers with a fondness for Malibu. The narrator, Philip (knownto all as Mister Psyche), is a kid just finished his Leaving Certand you lose count of the number of good turns he does for people.

"That still goes on. I know it does," Healy says. "Calling onpeople to see if they are alright; doing shopping; lighting a fire.It goes on the whole time. I have seen so many young fellas aroundhere doing things for people - and getting a few pound for it too.And the other thing is that he [Philip] is the link between thefather and the mother and the grand-uncle, who won't go up to thehouse.

"He is the narrator but he is also a listener. And the Malibuthing did happen way back here one time. When I started going to upto Ellen's first, there was four old men and they asked for Malibu.They might go on to a whiskey or a brandy but they would always openwith a Malibu. It was because a German lad ordered it here years agoand they must have got a bottle in and the German bought for the barand the old men became addicted to it."

Because I ask if Ellen's was the bar shown in the documentary,Healy decides, after lunch, to show me where it is. It involvesanother drive which, again, would bamboozle a stranger, to athatched house with a wooden door that is reputedly 400 years oldand which, unfortunately, does not open to customers until six eachevening. He drives us a different route back - "This is a niceglide," he says of a hill which shows off the splendour of thecoastline once again - slowing and pointing excitedly when henotices some of the geese at the bottom of a field.

"Someone told me the other day they were gone. That's just asmall flock. They land in a field in Lissadell House too. And thatgoes back to Constance Gore Booth and them making reference tothem."

Moseying about the countryside is part of Healy's writing life.He will drive about and then pull in to write something down in thenotebook he keeps in the driver's pocket.

'I don't have a good answer for that," he confesses when askedwhy he writes, reflecting on boyhood days when a schoolteacherintroduced an extra hour where the class would read A Tale of TwoCities, of reading books his grand-aunts brought from France - oldEnglish histories and cookbooks - of going to London. All he knowsis that it started early. He isn't writing much at the moment.

"Not really. The head is empty. Each night the poems visit me butI don't write them down. Memory is not as kind as it was either. Alot of it is visual and it comes from a phrase - I remember writing'Half day Thursday' and it unlocked a whole load of things for me."

A Goat's Song, his celebrated 1994 novel took seven years towrite. The Bend For Home, his revered memoir, was written in aboutthree years. Sudden Times took about the same.

He is unconcerned about the gaps between his publications andcan't avoid it anyway. "I don't have the gift for it," he says ofproducing book after book. In fact, the biggest struggle he had withA Fool's Errandwas acknowledging that the work was complete. "It wasa case of letting it go."

And for Long Time, No Seehe removed the very dream sequences thathad originally provoked the book, reluctantly discarding all but oneor two startlingly psychedelic depictions and framing the storyinstead around the everyday conversations through which hischaracters joust their way through the days.

The Midlands low is still in Healy's voice but he has the Sligo-Donegal lilt bang on in this book, just as he paid careful attentionto the Belfast accent in A Goat's Song.

"I regretted taking those bits out because I had gone into depthwith them and it was going to become a sort of fantasy. But then thereality took over and it took me a long time to get rid of thedreams. With the dialogue, I wanted to have that sound - theconfusion you often hear when people speak. I wanted that experiencefor the reader. And the accent is a thing that fascinates me. Howcan the Northern accent change almost from one house to the next?"

Back in the house, he produces a gorgeous handbound edition ofthe book, the final proof that it is, at last, off his hands. "Thebook was so long in preparation that it is great to have it out ofthe way. The last three years were tight work."

Last week alone involved the intense bustle of three trips toDublin and a reading in London, a bout of travel he describes in away that suggests he is no hurry to repeat it. He says he had greatfun at The Irish Times/Poetry Now Prize award function, which he wasup for along with the eventual recipient, Seamus Heaney, andPulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon and which was spoiled onlyslightly by his turning on his ankle on the way home.

"It was dark," he explains.

But most of the time, Healy is content with more localisedtravel, ambling down to Grange for breakfast if Helen is out orsometimes to the coffee shop at Drumcliffe church.

And, of course, he watches the geese.

Among the pictures and cuttings on the wall near the fireplace isan article from a London newspaper about the Japanese soldiers whostayed in the jungle continuing to fight the second World Wardecades after it had ended. Healy studies it anew when asked aboutits relevance. "I don't know. Sometimes I cut out these things. Andsometimes it filters back into the books then. Sixty years after theend of the war? I couldn't believe that. Sometimes I put a piece ofpaper on the wall until it haunts me a little."

When we leave, Healy again drives lead car back to Carney,planning to stop in for a pint. He will be back in the bright lightstomorrow night, opening the Cuirt festival in Galway and doing hisbest with the signings. "The hand wobbles and the signature beginsto fade," he says. But as he pulls into the village and points theway with a steady thumbs-up, that seems unlikely. Carney is quietand all is right as rain.