Craicing good read
The atmosphere is The Clarence, Bono's modernist hotel in Dublin, is a perfect combination of style and surliness. Thank Jesus, Mary and Joseph, then for the Irish writer Marian Keyes, who is so down-to-earth you are tempted to look for soil under her fingernails.
Five foot nothing with the carefully crafted features of an expensive doll, Keyes is a cross between a young Vivien Leigh and the generic heroine of a children's book. Her cute cheeks, long black hair and green eyes combine to make her look naughty when she's trying to be serious and tragic when she's delivering a devastating one liner.
But then Keyes has a lot to smile about: shortly before we met she learned that her latest tragic-comic novel, Last Chance Saloon, out in Britain this week, had reached the number one position in the Irish book charts. It shot ahead of the competition despite the fact that bestselling Irish authors Patricia Cornwell and Roddy Doyle both have new titles out.
This is Keyes's fourth novel. Her first, Watermelon, published in 1995 by Poolbeg, a small Irish publisher, was an immediate success in Ireland. Reed International spotted her and a £435,000.00 deal was signed. Her second novel, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married followed in 1996. In 1997 the giant Random House swallowed Reed and Keyes decided to move to Penguin. The same year, Rachel's Holiday, her third novel, a semi-autobiographical story of alcoholism and recovery, properly established her as a serious contender in a by now burgeoning "single girl" market.
But just how seriously is a female comic novelist taken? Keyes, 36, is definitely earning serious money. She is seriously married to Tony Baines, a book editor, and lives in a seriously grown-up house. (In 1997 she decamped with her husband from a small flat in Gospel Oak, north London, to a townhouse in South, Co. Dublin). She has a serious past (the alcoholism and depression that plagued her twenties) and a serious future (two new novels in the pipeline and film deals coming out of her ears).
Last Chance Saloon, which is about the lives and loves of three Irish childhood friends living in London, is likely to be seen as following Bridget Jones (although Keyes was published before Helen Fielding's book) and lumped together with other, less stylish contemporary "women's novels". Keyes's latest is certainly accessible and addictive. But it is also well-written and entertaining. "There is a part of me that thinks something is missing, that I'm just not serious, which is a pity," she says. "The thing that most makes me happy is entertaining people and giving them a lift. But I want everything and nobody can have that."
In Ireland, she says, there is an even sharper division between literary and mass market fiction than there is in Britain. "There is a growing acknowledgement for what I write, but it's not going to win the Booker Prize, as people are fond of telling me," she smiles. "There is more than one set of criteria for judging a book. If you divert people, take them away form their own situation, that is valid. I think it is sad that mass-market authors take on the shame given to them by others. It's seeking approval."
Keyes's novels are character-based rather than plot-driven, but she reckons that this is hardly a crime. "I thin I'm just really interested in people", she reflects. "I love getting to know people. I don't want to write about perfect people. I like it when they're flawed."
But does she consider herself a key member of the girly gang led by Helen Fielding and which includes Jane Green, Louise Bagshawe, Lisa Jewell and Freya North? On this point she is impeccably diplomatic. "Everyone likes to think they are unique, but it is nice to be part of a Zeitgeist. I don't want to write a book that isn't funny. Not yet. It would be excruciating to write an entirely bleak book."
There is no commercial reason why she should. Watermelon is being optioned for a 90-minute film for Granada Television, with Caroline Ahern as executive producer. Rachel's holiday has been bought by Touchstone Pictures. And Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married has been made into a 16-part ITV series to be shown next year.
Although Keyes was an obsessive Enid Blyton fan as a child, she did not come from a particularly literary family. "I so wanted to go to those boarding schools and I loved Jilly Cooper and P.G. Wodehouse. But there really wasn't an Irish writer I identified with until Maeve Binchy." The eldest of five, she was born in Limerick but soon afterwards the family moved to Cork. When Keyes was 11 her parents, Ted and Mary, moved the family to Dublin because her father, a local government worker, had changed jobs. "I found it very hard to settle, but please don't make it sound like I'm blaming them," she says. "Some people have a propensity for feeling displaced and I'm one of them."
A model student ("I was too scared not to be") she excelled at school, despite persecuting the nuns at the Presentation Convent in Dublin with dodgy make-up and dangerously short skirts. "I had a great thing about justice," she remembers, "not doing what people wanted me to." After A-levels she took a year out working as a clerk in Dublin, and then went to University College where she gained a 2.2. in Law.
However, she realised that she did not want to be a lawyer and would have to rebel against her parents' wishes. So she fled to London in 1986, along with hordes of other Dubliners. This was before the trendification, when the city was deep in economic depression.
Delighted to be in London, despite feeling guilty at letting her parents down, she spent her twenties working as a clerk and later began an accountancy course which her subsequent success left uncompleted. Keyes's experiences during this period provided much of her inspiration for her novels.
Boredom with her succession of dead-end jobs prompted her to hastily scribble the odd short story in her spare time, although she didn't do anything with them until 1994.