Byron Writers Festival caught up with Irish storyteller Caoilinn Hughes about her latest novel, The Alternatives.
The Alternatives is made up of layer upon layer of life, some sedimentary, some fleeting. Are human layers harder to excavate than geological?
When you’re writing about people, you’re inevitably writing about place. You can’t really separate humans from their environment. For example, it is possible to write a story without characters, without plot, dialogue, even action … but it’s impossible to write a story without a setting. Beckett tried it in his play Not I, which blacks out the whole stage except for one tightly spot-lit mouth … but the effect is to make the setting absolutely electric! The background becomes foregrounded. The mouth inside it is eight feet from the ground! How? How deep does the darkness go? The mouth is speaking English, so already we know something about the shadow, the context. I definitely write character-driven fiction, but I’m always interested in the rock they’re standing on!
The Alternatives is a tale of four sisters and their razor-sharp banter. Are you from a clutch of sisters?
I have two sisters and two brothers, and I became aware when writing this novel that having more than one sibling is increasingly unusual in Europe. The fertility rate in the Republic of Ireland (which was the highest in the EU for most of the period between 1998–2011) is now just above the EU average, at around 1.5 (way below the 2.1 required to maintain population levels, without immigration). The Alternatives is chronicling the last generation of larger families in Ireland, and in Europe on the whole. Australia, too, is experiencing near record-low fertility rates, steadily falling since the 1960s – now at 1.6. The family saga as a genre will adapt with the times. In this novel, some of the sisters are already conceiving of alternative family arrangements.
Climate crisis, The Troubles, grief, addiction, class. Has writing The Alternatives changed your views on any of these big hairy realities?
Yes, very much so. Writing novels is a way of processing life – and in the case of this novel, what it’s like to be alive right now, given that it’s set as close to now as I could make it! The world is changing so rapidly that it felt urgent to set the story as close as possible to when the book would be published (I missed by nine or ten months, but it’s close enough!). This meant that I had to anticipate what the coming years would be like, as I was writing, while also trying to understand and capture the present. And this process reflected what the novel is about: the attempt to lurch forward in the story – to adapt – as the rug is pulled from beneath our feet.
There are no Flattery sisters without Ireland and its humour and its soil. Where might your next work draw you?
I can’t talk about a work-in-progress unless I’m very, very close to the end, which – alas – I’m not! It’s true that The Alternatives is an Irish book, in the sensibility of the characters, in the particular way people have of doing things (or not doing them!) and in the landscapes depicted … but it’s also Irish in that two of the four sisters live and work overseas. As someone who has spent almost as much time away from Ireland as I have in it, I’m reflecting upon that aspect of Irishness and of contemporary life. I suspect that no matter how far from the island future books will take me, my Irish pathologies will follow!
• See Caoilinn Hughes at Byron Writers Festival in conversation with Bri Lee, and Nam Le as well as the sessions ’Sisters’ and ‘Feminist Literatures’.
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