Derry author Brian McGilloway: ‘For me, all stories are human stories’
Derry author Brian McGilloway is back with his 12th book, a standalone novel focusing on every parent’s nightmare. He says it’s a story that’s been in his head for quite a few years
How would you feel? Dora Conlon wakes one morning to discover her 17-year-old daughter Ellie has not come home after a party. Dora’s husband Eamon has already gone to work when she discovers her daughter’s disappearance and it’s clear no one knows where she is.
That’s the premise of Brian McGilloway’s standalone novel, The Empty Room, as readers empathise with Dora and the realisation that her very delicately linked life is quickly dismantling.
The Empty Room was written, like Brian’s previous novel, Blood Ties, during lockdown. It was early February 2021 that Brian found how he would relay a story that had been in his head for four or five years.
“It was a story that I wanted to tell; I’d been thinking about it for a couple of years and hadn’t quite worked out quite how to tell it,” he says.
“Then I woke up one day in the start of February last year, about six in the morning and knew what I was doing with it. I got up every day, I think it was about 40 days of getting up every morning at six, half six, and writing for two hours before starting online teaching at nine.
“It provided me with a bit of routine. On any normal morning I’d be trying to get the kids out, breakfast sorted, uniforms.”
He describes The Empty Room as almost a lockdown book insofar as Dora is isolated within the story, coupled with a claustrophobia around the narrative perspective.
“It’s all from her viewpoint and she’s quite limited in terms of what she knows and what she thinks she knows, and there’s kind of an awareness that something bad has happened outside of her home that she’s trying to kind of process,” says Brian.
“In that regard it probably was influenced by lockdown and that sense of isolation and claustrophobia.
“Strangely with the first one [lockdown], there was a much stronger sense of community and colleagiality. Maybe it was because it was kind of coming into the summer whereas the winter one last year, there was just a sense of closed doors and of bunkering down.”
The Empty Room feels like a very human story, focusing on a parent’s worst nightmare and the bond between mother and daughter.
“For me, all stories are human stories,” says Brian. “That’s primarily why I read, that sense of connection. As a reader, you know that moment when you think, ‘I’ve always thought that and never quite knew how to express it’.
“That’s one of those wonderful moments in reading when you’re reading a book and you think, exactly, exactly that. That’s primarily why I read, probably more than plots and twists, it is that emotional story and the thing that connects us as people.
“With this one, it’s a bit different in that a lot of my other books are procedurals where the central character is a detective and it’s very much about solving a crime. In this one, the crime is ultimately solved, there’s revelation in it, but it’s not really a whodunnit.
“It’s more about the consequences of what has happened on this mother and how she processes her grief and her feelings of being disempowered and learning things about her family and ultimately about herself.”
While he says The Empty Room offers a balanced ending, it’s not one where everything is tidily concluded.
“I kind of wanted that because realistically things don’t end with a neat bow,” he says.
“I think again, maybe that was a reflection of Covid too, that sense of even when this is over, it’s not going to have a happy ending. We’re not going to come out at it and think, ‘It’s amazing, we survived,’ because we didn’t. Lots of people did die, and lots of people did suffer and lots of families were left grieving.
“Ultimately, grief, even when you kind of process it and come through the other side of it, the thing that caused the grief hasn’t changed.”
Unbeknown to his agent and editor, who were expecting another Devlin case, Brian was working on Dora’s story.
“I wrote it quite quickly and sent it to my agent saying, it’s a book and it’s not what you were expecting,” he says,
“I said, I’m not sure if they’re going to accept it and if they’re not, let me know as I have to write another Devlin fairly quickly. But this is a story in my head and I had to do it.
“Blood Ties was the same — I had the central idea of blood in a crime scene that shouldn’t be there years ago. I tried using it in a couple of different ways, The Last Crossing was the same.
“I would imagine other writers are the same; you have an idea for it but you’re not quite in a space or your skill as a writer isn’t there yet for you to be able to do the story the justice that you feel that it needs, or just you try writing it and it’s just rubbish.
“Once it’s in the front of your head, I couldn’t write anything else, otherwise there’s no space for anything else.”
John Connolly calls this Brian’s best novel yet but it’s difficult, says the author, to look at anything you’ve written objectively.
“I suppose with every book you have this idea at the start of what it’s going to be and every day is a kind of diminishment of that,” he laughs.
“You start off with this ideal of what it’s going to be, 100%, and then after the first week you’re going OK, it might be 95%. By the time you get to the end, you think, it might be about 3% if you’re really lucky.
“Possibly with the more recent ones, like The Last Crossing at the end of it, I finished writing it and thought that I had done what I wanted to do with the story. It’s not even that I’m going, it’s an amazing or a fantastic book, it’s a sense of I think I managed to put on the page what I had in my head, which isn’t always the case. With an awful lot of books, you don’t get that satisfaction.”
By the time a book comes out, the author has read, re-read or reworked it so many times that often the last thing they feel like doing is reading it again.
“By the time you have got enough distance from to be able to make any kind of objective judgment, you’ll probably never want to see it again,” laughs Brian.
“It’s one of the difficulties of doing readings actually. When I’m doing a public reading and you’re reading from something you’ve written, you’re editing it again in your head. You think, that sentence is too long. Why did I use that word there, I should have used this word. A work is never complete.”
The Empty Room by Brian McGilloway, Constable, £16.99, is available now