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Trinity parent to feel like that. One day someone will do a thesis on the meaning of Trinity in Paul Murray novels. Why does he keep returning his characters to the campus? The simplest explanation is that he had a wonderful time there: 'I came here in 1993 to study English and Philosophy, straight from attending Blackrock College and living in the suburbs. In Trinity, you can get away from all that: you’re in the middle of the city, surrounded by different kinds of people. Campus life was brilliantly chaotic – the clubbing scene was taking off in Dublin and my friends, David O’Doherty and Ben Jackson, were running the Jazz Society and would bring incredible musicians to the Buttery. It was a time of great creativity and disorder. I put on a play in the Beckett Theatre, a very anarchic experience. It was about two drama students, one of whom falls in love and channels Morrissey to help him get the girl. That doesn’t work – no surprises! The play was a hit, improbably enough.' If being an arts student was exhilarating, being an arts graduate was terrifying: ‘As far as the jobs market is concerned, you have nothing to offer as an arts graduate, at least you didn’t in 1997. I got a job in a banking centre in Cabinteely. Eight hours in an underground bunker feeding cheques into a machine so sensitive that it would malfunction if you left in a staple or a turned-down corner. I’d be in there till 2am some nights and I felt like I was being bludgeoned. I had no social life cause I worked so late so I would go home and start writing and that’s how I got into the creative writing course in East Anglia.’ He had also applied to the Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity, but didn’t get in. The Oscar Wilde Centre is probably kicking itself, but taking himself out of Dublin and Trinity worked. His tutor in East Anglia was Ali Smith, who was ‘a genius’, and the novel he wrote became An Evening of Long Goodbyes and launched his career. Looking back, he can see now, though not at the time, that ‘coming out of college without a trajectory is actually the beauty of an arts degree.’ This fluidity is what links the conditions of student and recent graduate. In three of his four books, the characters are adolescents or students. In The Bee Sting , Dickie and Imelda are parents but in their memories, they are constantly returning to their own late teens and early twenties. (And Dickie, like Charles Hytholoday, isn’t a graduate but a college drop- out which seems to suspend his development). What is it that fascinates Murray about this period of life?
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‘So much of adult life is dissembling. Younger people are more open to experience, more protean. In adulthood, you make different mistakes which tend to be less dramatic. Your vulnerabilities stay the same but are more heavily concealed.’ Or to quote Dickie, in his last year of college: ‘He felt powerful, that is, he felt light, and in charge, and free, and expansive: he felt the future – which for so long he’d thought of as immutable – he felt the future amorphous, ethereal, waiting for him to decide its shape.’ As Rooney Writer Fellow, Murray gets to be back on campus experiencing something of that free, expansive, amorphous student culture: ‘I don’t have to do anything specific. I come in and work in my office and I attend meetings and events. There are 35 PhD students connected to the Long Room Hub and every Wednesday there is a coffee morning in which two of them from different disciplines present their research. It might be on ‘dark tourism’, or on papyrus rolls in the Chester Beatty, or on sharia law, or cybercrime. Every time I hear a presentation, I'm struck by just how rich it is. These are really talented people, and so dedicated. When it was my turn, I spoke about the Metaverse, which I'd written an article about for New York Magazine . I found it daunting. I’m used to doing presentations but not in front of such an expert audience.’ Murray is helping to convene a symposium in the Long Room Hub on what it means to be a 21st century individual. ‘It will be fluid. We’ll invite people with different kinds of expertise - neurology, psychology, literature - to participate in a conversation, maybe a round table discussion with an invited audience.’ He isn’t planning on confronting dissembling adult life any time soon. He is currently working on a Young Adult (YA) novel which he is testing out on his 12-year-old son. ‘He says he wants to be paid.’ It is set in a fantasy world and will be shorter than his other novels. ‘With YA, it can’t be more than 80,000 words.’ He doesn’t think he writes best as a ‘minimalist’ – ‘for me, things get interesting when it’s maximalist and different elements spark off each other’ – so, as with Skippy Dies , he will probably end up writing far more than he uses. He will not be ‘cosseting’ his teen readers. His model, as ever, is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow : ‘I think kids enjoy encounters that adults are trying to keep them away from.’
