June 2, 2002

You can meet an old friend and catch up over steaming cups of tea or you can read Maeve Binchy’s deceptively simple novels. Her slice of Irish — usually small town — life sagas are unassuming bestsellers which provide startling insights into the complexities of the human condition. Uncommonly for their bestseller status and despite requests from her publishers, her books are devoid of titillation and sex. For her the subject doesn’t merit discussion with friends, and that’s precisely why she doesn’t write about it. That, to a large extent, explains the secret of her success. Maeve Binchy writes like she talks...to a friend and says it has to do with being Irish.

“I think the Irish are lucky in that we never had the Victorian concept of waiting until you have something to say before you say it. We value good talkers much more than good listeners, and we love telling stories. This fluent delight in telling what happened is easily translated into writing down our thoughts,” she observes.

The approach has propelled her into the big league and she is comfortably ensconced amongst the top 10 of Britain’s most popular writers. But she hasn’t let the accolades go to her head and is almost self-deprecating. “I do not have a particular literary style, I am not experimental, nor have I explored a new form of literature. I tell a story and I want to share it with my readers. In today’s world, where audiences want to lose themselves for a while, there does seem to be a place for the stories I write.”

For Maeve Binchy the ball started rolling with the weekly letters she wrote to her father while working abroad in a school in Israel. Vivid and engaging, like her homely novels would later be, the letters described life in a country constantly on the brink of war. Her father sold one of the letters to the Irish Times for L18, and Binchy, who was earning L16 teaching at a school, thought she had ‘arrived’.

Chucking her school job she landed a position at the Irish Times and soon became a popular humorous columnist, moving to London to become the newspaper’s London correspondent. But that was back in 1969. It would be 13 years before the rolling ball assumed the proportions of an avalanche, heralding her ‘real’ arrival.

Binchy is glad it happened when it did. It was 1983 and she and her husband Gordon Snell, both writers, were on the verge of losing their home. They were two months behind on the L211-a- month mortgage when her debut novel, Light a penny candle, sold for a fortune — #52,000, the biggest sum ever paid to a first-time novel.

“It used to be Freddie Forsyth and now it’s you,” her publisher happily informed her, adding, “We’re so happy, we’re so happy.” To which Binchy naively asked, “Excuse me, do you get to keep that, or do I?”

“I’m very much afraid,” her publisher replied, “you get the L52,000.”

She bought the house right away and set about her spree of writing bestsellers.

Set in the troubled and relatively conservative island nation, her novels have a refreshing universality about their themes. The illusion of romance, the difficult parent-child relationships and the unwanted pregnancy are some of the issues she touches upon frequently in her work. But though the plots running through her books are powerful and are accompanied by a strong sense of place, the avid Binchy reader will tell you that the most absorbing element is strong characterization. There are few others who can spin such powerful and real characters — characters that the reader lives, eats and sleeps with. And of course “speaks with” because it is Binchy’s uncanny sense of dialogues which goes a long way in fleshing out her characters. When asked if she bases them on real people, her answer is difficult to believe.

“No, my father was a lawyer and he always advised me strongly against this. He said we would be paying the litigation for years. I sometimes steal little aspects of people’s personalities and add them to totally fictitious characters. When other people think I’m not looking, I eavesdrop and lip-read to learn how they live.”

And like a recurring trademark the reader bumps into certain characters such as the couple in a sham marriage, the good-for- nothing heartbreaker and the tormented priest over and over in Binchy’s novels.

Most critics don’t know what to make of her, and so the serious ones choose to ignore her. But that still doesn’t eclipse the fact that she has outsold the “greats of Irish literature” such as Samuel Beckett, Brendan Beham, W.B. Yeats, and Oscar Wilde in her native Ireland, as the Daily Telegraph revealed recently.

She’s also had a brush with celluloid. Her most popular work Circle of friends was made into a Hollywood film, which moviegoers loved despite the modified ending. And there are also talks of filming the sumptuous Tara Road.

“In all my books, it is the emotions, which start the story,” she says. Indeed some years back, the Philadelphia Enquirer reviewed one of her books and said: “There is nothing Maeve Binchy doesn’t understand about marriage.” Binchy recalls that when she read that, she smiled at herself for being so wise. And then the phone rang.

“It was Gordon to tell me our best friends were getting divorced, and we were the only people in town who didn’t know!” Unlike the escapist nature of most lazy summer reads, Binchy’s small town tales keep a strict check on reality. “My stories are not makeover tales. The fat heroine does not become thin, the poverty-stricken do not become rich, the single do not become married. I have known a lot of thin, rich married people who are wretchedly miserable.

“So, in the stories I tell the ugly duckling does not become a beautiful swan. She becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems.”

But what about her endless fascination with small town Ireland? It seems the furthest she ventures from a small town in her work is to a close-knit neighbourhood in a big city. Is it a deliberate attempt to retain the quaintness of her novels?

“I usually write about events in a small town, or in this case i.e. Tara Road a small neighbourhood of a capital city, for a very specific reason. It’s easier to keep control of your characters!

“You see, if they each lived in a different place, you would have to keep inventing reasons for them to meet each other all the time. Much simpler to herd them all together. I thought I had invented this device myself, but apparently the ancient Greek writers knew all about it and called it the ‘unity of space!’”

From juxtaposing small town Irish life in the 1950s with life in war-torn England in Light a 9enny candle to tackling divorce in an Ireland which is catching up, in Tara Road her books have in many ways charted the trials of this small island state.

“In the 1950s and ‘60s, when I was a teenager and in my twenties, things were entirely different. The main aim in an impoverished country was to get a job, to be considered ‘respectable’. There was a horror of premarital pregnancy verging on hysteria, and a general anxiety and nervousness that outside Ireland, in the big, dangerous world we may not really be safe. Ireland is now prosperous, confident, and more tolerant. It is vastly more liberal, permissive even, than in previous decades. So for Evening class and Tara Road I moved my setting to the present day. Not to comment on the change in the Irish and Ireland would be to write in blinkers.”

So while in Glass Lake the married female protagonist has to run away with her lover and pretend to be dead to escape a marriage of convenience, in the modern setting of Tara Road, the heroine Ria Lynch is divorced. In Echoes a priest decides to marry and in Lilac Bus the gay son of Anglo-Irish parents deals with his sexuality.

So as organized religion steadily loses its grip on Irish society, Binchy at 60 has decided to put down the pen. Her last, Scarlet feathers, before she gets off what she calls the ‘treadmill’ of writing bestsellers, is about two friends who go into business together — unfurling the economic confidence of present-day Ireland.

Unfortunately for her fans it looks like Binchy knows what she’s doing. “I’m not going to be like Frank Sinatra with lots of farewell concerts. This will be the one and only farewell.”

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