Posted by Ardal O'Hanlon by May 26th, 2022

Describe Brouhaha in a couple of sentences. Brouhaha is a brooding detective story/existentialist thriller set in a small border town in Ireland centring on the efforts to find a missing person during a time of political change. Despite the grim themes it is darkly comic and quite satirical in places.

Tell us about your inspiration for writing this novel – where did the story and characters come from?

I was touring my stand-up show in England doing my research on a particular town I was playing in when I came across a chilling feature-length article about a missing girl. It was clear that everyone knew who was responsible yet nobody spoke out. I thought it might be interesting to transpose a noir-ish story like that - complete with some of its fascinating details - to the border region in Ireland where there’s a genuine culture of omertà and ambiguity towards the law given its long history of smuggling and paramilitary activity. The people there have a dry humour and deadpan tone which I think lends itself to a novel like this.

We gather you grew up in a small border town in Ireland not dissimilar to the setting in the book? Tell us about your childhood.

I was a watchful child, one of six, who played football all day and read in the evenings. My father was a GP, later a politician and my mother was a former teacher who instilled a love of books in me. From the age of about seven I used to run home from school every day to read the papers and always watched the nightly news so was all too aware of the ‘Troubles,’ the guerrilla war that was raging just a few miles away across the border.

How easy was it writing about the Irish troubles, and what your novel calls ‘the uneasy transition to peace’?

The book is not about the Troubles. Indeed it’s set a few years after the peace process. Inevitably, in that part of the world though, the legacy of the Troubles tends to intrude on peoples’ lives in various ways from time to time. As a writer, you would have to be sensitive to the delicate recent history but also clear-minded about some of the hypocrisies and failings surrounding the conflict and the peace. The Booker prize winner, Milkman, was an outstanding example of a proper Troubles novel.

Your debut novel, Talk of the Town, was published (to acclaim in 1998), how did the writing experience for your new novel compare?

My first novel came out in a splurge. I worked frantically on it between acting and comedy jobs and moving house and welcoming our first child into the world. So it arrived raw but fully-formed (the novel not the child). With Brouhaha, it wasn’t quite so hectic. A few years ago, I rented an office, took six months off and sketched out the story. During the pandemic when there were no distractions (apart from the existential threat) I paced myself, limiting myself to three or four hours in the morning, and polishing as I went along.

Is writing stand-up very different to writing a novel? Where do you get your material from for your comedy sketches?

Writing stand-up is bittier. Everything is distilled. In time, all the bits might add up to a coherent whole. The novel is all-encompassing in terms of time, and headspace - you need to hold on to a lot of detail during the process. You also tend to pour your whole being into a novel - everything you know and feel, or have seen and read. Stand-up is more ephemeral, based on everyday observations and fleeting feelings. Both are equally rewarding and mutually beneficial.

What projects are you working on at the moment outside of writing?

I’m currently filming a comedy drama which will air in the autumn.

Who are your favourite novelists? And why?

An impossible question to which the answer changes hourly. Lately I’ve been enjoying Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, VS Naipaul’s House of Mr Biswas and Michael Nath’s The Treatment. I love Toni Morrison and Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett and George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Kevin Barry. I suppose I want to learn something I didn’t know before, or see something in a new way, and above all I want to be entertained.

If you weren’t an actor/ comic/ writer – what would you be?

I can’t imagine not working in the arts which probably means I shouldn’t be working in the arts.

What are you looking forward to in 2022? What are your hopes for the rest of this year?

It’s hard to ignore the ongoing pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and a looming economic crisis but as far as work goes I’m looking forward to some semblance of normality which to me means a lot of travel and a variety of interesting acting and comedy jobs.