Ian McGuire

The working class is so little written and recorded in their own voices.

I mean, one of the great resources for anyone writing about 19th century Manchester is Frederick Engle's work about the working class in England, which features a couple of very useful chapters about the poor in Manchester and about poverty.

particularly about the Irish in Manchester.

So that was very useful.

But in terms of trying to render the sort of direct experience of the working class Irish, you have to really use your imagination.

Yes.

I mean, I think the first novel that springs to mind in answer to that question would be probably Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which is not often thought of as a historical novel, but it is.

I mean, it's a novel set in the west of the United States in the mid 1860s.

And that's been a very, very important novel to me over the last several years in terms of

beginning to think how to write a kind of historical novel in the way that I, I find interesting.

Um, so McCarthy's novel is about the kind of renegade band of Indian hunters, and it quickly becomes clear that they are just as savage as the people that they are, um, chasing.

So it's a very, it's a very violent novel, a very kind of powerful novel, but it's also a very lyrical novel in terms of the language used,

And all of those things have been very useful to me in thinking about how to sort of render a different place and a different time in a way which is kind of compelling and rich.

I suppose I think behind someone like McCarthy probably is William Faulkner.

I'm very attached to the tradition of the American novel, and I think the American novelists I most admire usually have...

have Faulkner in their DNA somewhere.

So I think Faulkner is behind McCarthy.

And Faulkner's exploration of the South and the post-Civil War South and the violence and the kind of racial violence of that is, you know, it's unmatched, really.

And it feeds into so much of 20th century American writing.

Yeah, people, when I've shown early copies of The Abstainer to other people, they often think, they talk about it as a kind of