It’s rare to meet a writer as seemingly self-deprecating as Joseph O’Neill. Most have a healthy dose of ego, but when talking to O’Neill about his latest novel, Godwin , that’s the last thing that comes across. First, he gets stressed “by verbal kinds of exchanges such as this one, because I know what happens: I always end up sounding like a complete idiot”.
Next, he says he gets an idea for a novel only every 10 years or so and then writes them very slowly. And talking about Godwin is tricky because, as yet, he lacks a distanced critical relationship with it. “I’m still sufficiently attached to the writer who was stumbling around making it happen, rather than the slightly sort of privileged interpreter, which the writer sometimes likes.
Some writers can’t wait to get to that moment where they become the privileged interpreters of their books and they can point at things that went into it. I’m not that sort of writer. Maybe eventually .
..” Joseph O’Neill says one of his problems as a novelist is that he doesn’t have a particular culture to focus on.
Credit: NYT O’Neill, who has lived in New York for nearly 30 years, had a peripatetic early life, living in Ireland, Mozambique and Iran before moving with his Irish father and Turkish mother when he was six to the Netherlands. He has written a family memoir, Blood-Dark Track , about his two grandfathers, both of whom were imprisoned by the British during World War II, one for IRA activities and one on .