Niall Griffiths : Don’t kill the Wales...

-NG : I was born in Liverpool, but moved to Wales, lived in Wales, but I have travelled around Britain in every city, and in France too as well. I moved to Wales to go to university and to do a post grad. I didn’t have much money, so I'd take some time off, go to work to a factory or a building site to get some money, then go back to study, etc. And then I realized that I learned more on Wales and Welsh language and culture on building sites than in university, so I began to be very pissed off with the university, and, I don’t know if it’s the same in France, but in Britain you don’t get any money to go there anymore, you sort of only see rich people there, not really interested in the subject at all. They got nothing to do with personal or spiritual fulfillment anymore, there’s more to do with getting a good job and get money, so it pissed me off and I started taking drugs and drinking. In the town where I lived, in mid Wales, there’s a small melting pot, people coming from all of Britain, all over the world in fact and many of them have gone to the seaside to escape the problems from the cities. But usually, they bring their problems with them, so there's an awful lot of drugs in these towns, so I started using drugs and I began to write about it, in my first novel. When the writing about it became more important than the actual doing of it, I thought "Maybe I've got something here". I originally started writing about it to make sense of it, so that it wasn't a whole waste. Then the book began to stick together and it was published.

-Did you have influential writers ?

-NG : Oh yes ! I was looking at was happening in Scotland, with Irvine Welsh, Laura Hird, Alison Kennedy, James Kelman, those people were doing very unusual and original things with dialect and language, in Ireland as well, with Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe. But there wasn't any of that in Wales. Of course, it wasn't a conscious decision, it was more personal and passionate than that. I use the local dialect as a means of expression.

Ianto and « Sheep shagger » is very biblical in its style, and that was also taken by the American writers such as Hubert Selby Jr, Don Delillo, Dennis Johnson, but also singers and songwriters, like Nick Cave, who’s a huge influence. I used one of his quotes in the novel and he was very nice. When I was asking permission, his editors wanted 500 £, but I said, "You're asking for about 20 £ a word. I offer you 100, but I can't give you any more than that." But Nick Cave himself said : « You can have it for free, just pay the fees », which is fifty pounds. A lot of people wouldn’t have done that. He's been a huge influence, all his works have been. Also Tom Waits, those kinds of writers. Music is very important to the style and the rhythm of the books. Everything from Schubert to techno. No-one writes in a vacuum, you just absorb all this stuff and mix it all together and sometimes something quite nice comes out of it. You never really know what's gonna happen, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.

-Just like cooking ?

-NG : Yes, absolutely !

-You’ve been compared to Irvine Welsh and James Kelman : is it more flattering or irritating ?

-NG : Irvine came to Wales and I had his support and the second one is a lovely man, I met him several times, so it was very good to have them behind me at first, for my first novel, I really admire those writers, I think they do groundbreaking things in their works, so that was flattering. Of course, there are some lazy critics, and they‘ll just see the support of Irvine Welsh, drugs dialect, so it must be just an Irvine Welsh rip-off. They are very lazy readers too, they won't read it well. I've also had bad reviews that I've really liked, that can be constructive and intelligent, but largely, they've just been very lazy. In some small respect it's been a drawback being compared to those writers, but through no fall of them or their reputation, just through idle criticism really. I'm more than pleased to have their support, I admire them and it's good to be admired by them.

-How was born the Ianto character : pure imagination, real story, bits and pieces ?

-NG : Bits and pieces, but I suppose that the literary model for him was « The child of God » by Cormac McCarthy, which I suppose have been translated by l’Olivier, but more fed by the image of the wandering Jew, the Mark of Cain and all this stuff. That and also some local people where I live, and one close friend born in a place called Mydroilin, a very small Welsh village, stuck fifty years in the past. Some of the local stories were all about a big man, about fifteen years old who challenged the local minors to arm-wrestling competitions in the pub. One bloke beat him and he got enraged, he said "you think you're a man, I'll show you what it takes to be a man". He took him to the woods, started digging the earth and uncovered a corpse. He said "This is what it takes to be a man". So all of these stories abound in this area, all these influences were coming in and mixing up. And my own anger, of course ! I put a lot of them in Ianto and I'm storing a lot of them for future novels as well, I've got tons of notebooks, bits of paper stuck all over the walls in my house.

-You were born in Liverpool and studied in Cambridge : why did you choose to live in Wales after that, since 92 : family or simple choice ?

-NG : Well, Liverpool is in Wales, more or less. It’s geographically in England, but politically not very English : there’s a lot of Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Chinese, it’s a huge cosmopolitan pole, and my family, on my mother's side, were Welsh, they went ‘in service’ a hundred years ago, at the turn of the century ; they was a lot of sheep owners, who had huge houses, and a lot of Welsh people became maids in those houses, and my grand mother did that. She was Welsh speaking, which is a totally different language from English, very close to breton in fact. So I was brought up speaking a little of Welsh and to go to Wales on holidays. When I was a teenager, I used to go to Snowdon, where you can walk around, camp by lakes. Griffiths is a Welsh name, as another connection. So I suppose I always thought I'd come back one day, I used to come back for small periods of time. I went there to study at first, but I felt settled, which had never happened to me before. I met my girlfriend there, and we live together there, and there’s a sort of, translated from Welsh to English, a sort of homesickness, a longing for your roots. I wasn’t back to my roots.

-Ianto is very close to the roots of his family through his grand mother but the history of Wales, which he mixes with his own family life : so are you ?

-NG : Yes, I feel so ; as you said, he’s lost an awful lot and, when he meets the old lady, she’s speaking Welsh and he didn’t understand. That wouldn’t happen in real life : everybody in Wales understands English, and some of the old people may have some difficulties, but they’re still able to understand very good English. She’s a symbol, this old lady, the symbol of what he has lost, what he has been alienated from...

-It’s remembers me some pages of the novel Frankenstein, when it’s raining a lot and the poor monster is running away from the people of the village and find a shelter to this old man’s place who’s blind and musician, and the only to welcome him ; but they can’t communicate, and they don’t need it : it’s the same kind of situation...

-NG : Yes, I can see that, but I’ve never made that connection myself, but I see what you mean ! She welcomes him, but she gets rid of him in the end, because he doesn’t understand the Welsh she speaks : she feeds him, cleans his wounds, but she says that he’d better go. She’s very much a symbol. I think the symbol comes form midwives. She washes him 3 times, which is very much a celtic thing. The baptism is 3 times in the water. Its’ like she helping him to be reborn again, that kind of thing.

-Ianto is very close to nature, too, but maybe because he has always been very poor, without TV or video games etc, and only the nature as a playground...

-NG : When he was a child, there was no game boys anyway, but I take your point. In this area, it’s still very remote up there, even with cars and satellite and the Internet, a lot of people use those things because it’s a contact with the outside world. I've used a cottage in the mountains, and it’s very much like that. The cottage in the novel is modeled on it, it's very remote. When you're there, you feel rain, for instance, very strongly. The first thing you do when you get up there in winter is make a fire, it becomes very primitive, very primeval. I quite like that : it shows you what is truly important about living, first thing you want to do is get warm. You feel the rain and the snow very intensely up there, you’re really remote, and then you stop battling the elements there, you kind of accept them, and I think that's what Ianto did at a very early age. The opening scene in fact, when he puts the pebbles in the lamb’s eyes, when I read that out in London and a girl in the audience came to me after it and she was really pale. She said that when she was a kid, she was playing in a field and a lamb came up to her, a crow had picked its eyes out and she put twigs in lamb's eye sockets. She said, "You must have know it, writing about that". I said, it's just a coincidence, I'm sorry if it upset you. The relationship with nature is different in celtic countries, Southern England doesn't have this harmony with nature, it's all very nice and tame. Nature is a place where crows pick out eyes, it's a place of shit and blood and rot. I think that’s quite an imperialist attitude, that Southern England has. You see it in someone like Wordsworth, for instance, he's looking down on nature and it's always rolling hills and this loveliness and how all the Celtic people are always happy and dancing. It’s reducing people to one false idea, and I wanted to attack that. I'm not the only one to do that, Seamus Heaney has been doing that for 50 years. But I think in my "genre", I think that's the first time it's been done. In the movie ‘Trainspotting’, there’s always a theme, in this kind of things, where people in cities go to the countryside, and it doesn’t work, and they go back to the city. I wanted to get away from that. They’re still in the countryside, there’s still poverty and homelessness and violence and rapes and abuses...

-But it’s very important to read the book to the end, because Ianto also have a terrible secret of his childhood, a shock he can’t share. So he’s very lonely, more lonely if possible...

-NG : He ‘s completely lonely, even his friends don’t really understand. And there’s his friend Roger, who appears in my first novel : Roger is a bit of a monstrous character, he’s based on every sociopath I’ve ever known, and there are too many of them ! He’s a monster but he still has a humanity. There's also the character, who becomes the voice of reason in the book. And the third novel I write will be all about Danny and about him remembering hunting Ianto. It causes big crises in him, so he goes to the mountains, etc. But Ianto has an amazingly intense eye. Largely, my stuff is conversation-driven, I never really know my characters until I start to speak. But with him, it was quite a liberating thing, as he doesn’t really speak, he apprehends and assimilates the world through what he sees, rather than what he says. I enjoyed that, I could go on theses 80 lines-long sentences. It was quite unusual. So he does have that, which the other people don't, of course. But what he has is not enough. Sadly.

-Am I wrong if I say that Ianto is the Symbol of Wales through its conquests and humiliations by England through the centuries, the shame of Wales, at the point that his own friends finally kill him for being a murderer and a rapist ? They want to kill their own shame by killing Ianto ? Is he how the English people consider the Welsh ?

-NG : I think you’re right, that’s a very rich question, it would take me pages if I had to write the answer ! But, for me, it’s like black people appropriating the term nigger, or gay people appropriating the term queer, it’s offending the straight world. You've abused us with this word for centuries, now we'll use it as a term of praise for ourselves. The English call the Welsh ‘sheep shagger’ and I think you understand what that means, and when you see Welsh football team plays in England, they call themselves sheepshaggers, they’ve adopted this term, the same as the black have adopted nigger. It's like throwing it back in the straight face. It's also humorous. It means, "we don't care what you call us". But you're also right in saying that he's a hidden thing, because in many ways, he does conform to the English idea of what a Welsh person is. He doesn't shag sheep, but he's dim-witted in many ways. The impulse behind that was the same, it was to take the caricature, explore it and make it offensive to the straight eyes. As I said, it's a very rich question, I could go on about that for hours.

-The girls of the gang are more gentle, especially Gwenno : could women be the future of politics for you ?

-NG : Well, bear in mind that in Britain, our experience of a powerful woman politician is Mrs. Thatcher, who really presided over a reign of terror, I don't think that's too strong a term. She caused thousands of deaths and she really fucked the country up. But Mary Robinson is doing great things in Ireland. The women in the book are not gentle creatures.

-Gwenno is nice

-NG : Yes, she is...

-But she's more like his mother : they do nothing, and, anyway, they couldn’t...

-NG : Yes, and the other women characters do join in when they kill him. In my next novel, those characters of Fran and Jane appear too. I’d like to see more women in politics, but, it’s like with Thatcher, you can’t really compare to anybody else. Maybe if there were more women in positions of power, we could compare each to each. It would be more balanced and our faculties of perception could be more balanced. I’d like to see it. It's such an old boys' network, especially in Wales, in the Welsh assembly, where there's hardly any woman involved. It's a shame because anybody with a different background and a different sexual or ethnical orientation can only enrich political processes. It'll be nice to see whether that happens or not. I don't know, because it's still a patriarchical country, especially Wales.

-What have been the reception for « Sheep shagger » in Wales ? And in England ?

-NG : The reception for ‘Sheep shagger’ in both Wales and England has been largely a positive one, obviously moreso in Wales because it highlights political and social problems that have received very little media attention. Of course, it’s much more of a Welsh novel than an English one but there are people in the both countries who are sympathetic to the issues it raises and who also simply appreciate the language ; the kind of intense, hyper-real language in it isn’t a widespread component of British so it stands out.

-Do you have the feeling or the will to have done a militant book , and is he more social or political, social for homeless, but also for abused children? Are you yourself involved in political life ?

-NG : The book is a militant one on many levels, not as an incitement to physical violence but as a symbolic encapsulation and concretization of the rage a lot of people feel at social injustice, which includes homelessness as well as political impotence. Plus, the abuse of Ianto as a child points out another strand of the brutalization of innocence : how the powerful will destroy the weak to further their own ends or to satisfy their obsessions. It can be boiled down to the reduction of people to mere objects, things to be used and shredded and then thrown away ; that’s where the fury comes from, through protest at the prevailing norm.

-What was your main wish in writing this book ? Make react readers and take conscience of the situation of the land, of the other people ?

-NG : My main wish in writing the book was to re-invest human life and the natural world with the richness and diversity and beauty that is their proper property. This has been taken away, largely ; people have become tools in workplaces, a country has become a giant holiday home. To succeed in society, we are told to think one way, act one way, eat this, watch that, drink this, listen to this, because we have no minds of our own and we need to be told how to live an exciting and worthwhile existence. Absolute shite, of course ; people need to be recognized as autonomous beings with aspirations and horrors peculiar to them. The unfathomableness of the individual, and commensurately the land that has formed him/her ; that was my main aim in writing this book. Vague, yes, but the narrated physicalities in it give shape to that desire.

-What are your musical tastes ?

-NG : Huge : from Schubert to the Avalanches. Alternative country, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Detroit house, lot of different things. Anything with a bit of bollocks in it. Most definitely not Phil Collins or anyone of his insipid ilk.

-What do you feel about the fact that Radiohead adopted you, and so did many young readers, as well as Irvine Welsh or Will Self have been, with the support of musicians and progressive press ?

-NG : It’s always pleasant and advantageous to be supported by a band or musician, because it reciprocates that mingling of artforms that, hopefully, can be found in my books, and when an influence of mine declares that I’ve in turn influenced them, then the whole thing is made even more valuable. I like that whole interactive support that occurs. This also applies to the progressive, smallish press ; it’s essential to have an antidote to the established media. If my work is taken up and praised and discussed in such arenas as well as the other metropolitan-based media, then so much the better-I’m happy.

-What do you think of the Manic Street preachers ? And Super Furry animals, 2 very known Welsh bands ?

-NG : The Manics began wonderfully, passionate and fearless and seething and convicted and with a self-belief that was truly life-affirming, and of course some great fucking songs too ! They seem to have lost their way a wee bit recently, though ; their last album was, apart from one or two songs, forgettable. They’re not really experimenting like the Clash, say, did, with reggae and funk and calypso and stuff, they’re really just playing what they’ve always played except a wee bit slower. But I’m always certain that they’ll deliver something truly wonderful so my admiration continues ! And the Super Furry Animals are superb ; their humour is much needed in a field where too many colourless and clueless half-wits take themselves far too seriously. They’re a tonic, a vital one, to the Williams/ Halliwell/ Beckham axis of emptiness !

-Tell me about your first book, « Grits », and the new one, « Kelly and Victor »...

-NG : Grits » began when I was using a lot of drink and drugs and losing long sections of my life so to make sure what was left of my youth did not pass unremembered and unrecoreded I began to write down what I could remember of my drink and drugs binges. Gradually, the writing became more important than the « research » and other voices crept in and it became less of a desperate diary and more of a novel. « Kelly + Victor » is a story of a love affair, a sexually obsessive one that becomes uncontrollable and more and more extreme until...well, I won’t tell you what happens. You’ll have to read it !

-Do you have a new book on the way ?

-NG : The novel I’m working on now is called « Stump », about a young man who’ve lost his arm to gangrene. He’s an ex junkie / alcoholic so it gives me the opportunity to look at drug addiction from the point of view of someone who is now clean. So it’s interesting.

Interview made in Paris on 13th February 2002 by JP Coillard.

Photos JPCoillard (c)