Novels & nostalgia Paul Murray, celebrated author and Trinity alumnus, reflects on the enduring influence of his alma mater on his life and work, from the chaotic creativity of his student days to his current role as Rooney Writer Fellow ‘T rinity feels like part of the fabric of my life: I was a student here. I taught a creative writing class here. Now I’m Rooney Fellow in the Long Room Hub, and I live not far away… it feels like I’ve been coming in and out of Trinity since I left school.’ Paul Murray, prizewinning novelist, graduate, BA(1997) and current holder of the Rooney Writer Fellowship – launched in 2021 by Dr Peter Rooney, Director of the Rooney Prize Foundation – has a sense of déjà vu being back on campus, or perhaps a sense of being a character in one of his own novels. Murray’s fictional characters also ‘come in and of Trinity’: Charles Hytholoday, protagonist of his debut, An Evening of Long Goodbyes , is a Trinity drop-out, and the boarding school boys in his second novel, Skippy Dies are bound for Trinity (some anyway; others will go to UCD - the fictional school is based on Murray’s old school, Blackrock College). His most recent novel, The Bee Sting , a family saga hailed by the Los Angeles Times as ‘a big, sprawling social novel’, is about many things – most obviously, it is the Great Irish Recession Novel that everyone was waiting for – but within the sprawl is a campus novel, or rather two campus novels: Trinity in the early 1990s, when Dickie Barnes attended, and Trinity in the early 2010s, when his daughter Cass does. Trinity is one of the locales which grounds the novel, connecting characters through the generations (another such locale is the more sinister bunker in the woods behind the Barnes’ house). Dickie thinks that passing beneath Front Arch is ‘going through a portal’; two decades later Cass’s friend, Elaine, noting that Front Arch is ‘actually a little arch set inside a big arch’. Dickie's and Cass's Trinity’s are very different – and yet, when he drops Cass off at Front Arch, Dickie feels ‘as if no time has elapsed at all – as if his own life were still there, continuing somehow untouched by the years in some eternally resonating present’. He is surely not the only
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