In late 2009 I paid a visit to the Galway home of Man Booker Prize
runner-up, John Arden. Less than three years before his sad passing, he
was good enough to spare some time to speak with me about what turned
out to be his last collection of stories Gallows - Tales of
Suspicion and Obsession.
There’s a
man with a Palestinian flag on Shop Street. He’s 60 if he’s a day and
when the rain falls on the happy shoppers of Galway, he usually gets wet.
There are men and women who spend each weekend at Shannon Airport,
counting airplanes as they traffic in and out and engage in uneasy
staring-matches with guards through iron fences.
They are
people who are placed, or place themselves, on the edge of what most
people see as ‘normal’ society. People who sooner or later will pay some
price for that placement.
For the last four decades, John
Arden has lived in relative obscurity on Ireland’s west coast. After
exploding onto the literary scene in the late 1950s, Arden was quickly
hailed as one of the visionary playwrights of that era and was even
christened Britain’s Brecht.
But all truths must eventually
out and Arden’s unwillingness to keep quiet about his opposition to the
British military machine and their presence in Ireland soon brought
about a number of high profile falling-outs with the British theatre
establishment. And that, as they say, was that.
Now,
as he prepares to turn 80, he is about to release his most substantial
collection of work in years. Set in Galway, London and Yorkshire,
Gallows is a collection of short stories that attempt to lift the
carpet of polite society and peer at the goings-on in the underbelly of
life.
“It’s not deliberate, you know. It’s just what happens
when you write short stories over a period of years. The themes really
are subconscious. It’s only after [the story] is written that I realise
what the underlying theme might be,” he says.
