Martin Malone, a writer doing his best

Martin ‘Murt’ Malone with the Woodbine Books team in Kilcullen at the recent launch there of his latest book.

“I knew from early on that what money I would make would never pay for the time it took to write, so when you go for it, you have to derive some enjoyment from it.”

In a world where there are many more writers than there are blockbuster payouts, Kildare author Martin ‘Murt’ Malone has for some four decades been philosophical about writing as a career, writes Brian Byrne. Especially in a small market like Ireland. But he has always been a story-teller. “I was writing when I was 12 or 13, then I discovered football and let it go,” he says. “But when I was no longer able to run the length of the pitch, I went back to it.” His particular interest was in short stories, and when his first story was published in Woman’s Way, he remembers both the sense of achievement and some awe that they had actually paid him for it.

It was when he won the the John B Keane/Sunday Independent Award for his first novel, Us, the famous Listowel writer confirmed what Malone had instinctively known. “Don’t give up the day job,” he told the young author over coffee the day after he had presented him with the award and related bursary. “You write about characters well, because you can take the measure of them very quickly. But it’s not the kind of writing that’s going to make you a lot of money.”

Malone, then serving in the Irish Army, took the advice, and stayed on until he had earned his full pension. “So I have that, because you can’t be chasing money all the time, or you’ll be chasing it to your grave. You have to have space. The thing about writing is, you want peace of mind, and if you have to be thinking all the time about where next week’s money is coming to pay the bills, it takes from what you’re doing.”

In addition to whatever income is there from publication in magazines, radio, and books, competitions and grants are critical to helping writers in Ireland keep their financial heads at least some of the time above water. “Grants re very important to people like me who don’t make a lot of money from our writing. I’ve had a number of grants from the Arts Council through the years, and for my latest book I got a grant from Kildare County Council.” But he has issues with how the grants are allocated, citing how in some instances they are paid to publishers and not passed on in advances to the writers. Then there’s the matter of grants and tax exemptions made available to ‘celebrity’ and media writers, who because of their status are more likely to make the big money. “I think all grants should be means-tested, as should have been the recent scheme to give a thousand writers a weekly wage. Am I saying that a lot of hocus-pocus goes on? All the time … but that’s the world we live in and you have to accept it and get on with things.”

The Middle East has figured strongly in Malone’s body of work, beginning with his novel The Broken Cedar in 2003, and is also the focus of his latest book, The White Country: Novella and Stories. That comes from his service with the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in Lebanon over five postings, a total of three years or so living in the Middle East. “As an MP I would have been working on serious crime with civilian police assigned there from a number of countries, including Finland, Sweden and Poland. In that environment you’re dealing with all sorts of people, and in the course of the work you’re told all sorts of things that you have to put down in case notes. Things you’d prefer not to hear, sometimes. But you do get to know the people.”

Malone does have an ability to get on with people, which was helped by the fact that the Lebanese seem to have developed an affinity with the Irish over the years of peacekeeping. “They got to know us, they’d talk to us.” But just like anywhere in a complex and often deadly situation, they might be saying different and conflicting things. “You have to develop an ear for the fact somebody is telling you four different things at the same time, and you have to decide what he means. Some of them would be dark characters, like a South Lebanon Army sniper I met once. You’re told stuff, and you get it, and you just have to let things pass.”

It would be fair to say that such close contact with the ordinary people of Lebanon, and some extraordinary ones, brought Malone to a good understanding of them, perhaps even a love of that community. Though the names and the locations in his stories are different to those of his homeland, the characters come across as just the same as anywhere, families with family problems, situations of striving and strife, of ordinary people just trying to get on with life. His book, Valley of the Peacock Angel, is typical of this, prompted by a chemical weapons attack on the Iraq village of Halabja in 1988. A massacre of 5,000 people by Saddam Hussein which was on the same scale as Srebrenica and 9/11 but is the ‘forgotten’ one, the author tried for years to write his novel from the perspective of an Irish soldier, but eventually left it to Iraqi characters to tell the story. It’s a good example of how Murt Malone deals with the ‘big picture’ of a war zone through the small stories of people affected. He has done similar in his books and plays based in his home area, such as Rosanna Nightwalker: The Wren of the Curragh.

“I think there are great stories in the small picture. For instance, The White Country is set in 1996, and the characters in it are real of then. But they’re just passing through, as we are all passing through, and that landscape today is totally changed. I try to emphasise in the book that the slide into war is far easier than trying to get out of it. Today that country is bankrupt, and I think South Lebanon is gone back to being bandit country again. It’s a muddy slope, and it’s hard for them to climb out of it.”

Looking back on up to four decades of writing, Malone, though it never made him serious money, says he has been blessed with the health and situation to actually be able to write. “There are people out there who, because of work or other life circumstances, are gifted but they are not in a position to explore it. That’s sad. I used what little spark of talent I had, and enjoyed it and made the most of it. I’m happy enough with that. From my sport days I always realise that there’s some other fellow out there better than you, no matter what. So you accept that, and you write your own way the best that you can.

“That’s all you can do, is write your best and hope that you can make some impact with it.”

NOTE: This article was first published in the Kildare Nationalist.

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