Oisín Fagan on the writing of Eden’s Shore: Where it all falls into place. You sit down and you write and it’s just all there . . .
Shortly after I learned japa meditation in September, 2018, I felt my blood moving inside my chest in a manner that I felt to be commensurate with the ocean. When I opened my eyes I wrote the first scene of Eden’s Shore, now deleted, in which a drunken, young man named Angel Kelly plays cards aboard a wooden ship, surrounded by noises that neither he nor I then understood.
The story went on, but before I could settle into the stability of a style something cruel happened and I put the book down in astonishment, not willing to go any further. It was clearly an ending, and it had arrived so early. While writing must be true, the writing life is full of self-deception. I pretended to myself I had written a horror disguised as a sentimental journey, a brief allegorical novella such as Sheridan Le Fanu might have written had he read Borges, but deception only really gets going once you believe yourself to have become undeceived, and after a few weeks I was back at the manuscript every day, realising that what I had was not an ending but a beginning.
Six months later, on a beach in Ayamonte, I was sitting in the sand with my head between my knees, watching ferries and trawlers cross the Guadiana River to Portugal, and a naked woman walked by carrying her baby in a low sling, and the whole second half of the novel occurred to me then and there, including nearly word for word the last episode, though I wouldn’t write it down for another three years.
This is perhaps the most beautiful part of writing, the sense of destiny that accrues around a growing manuscript, but believing yourself to be an agent of fate can have occasionally embarrassing consequences. This reached its melodramatic – rather than dramatic – climax, March 16, 2022. I had three episodes left to write in Eden’s Shore and though I had the energy and focus to complete them in a few days, I was hoping to slow down so as to savour the playing out of what, at this late stage, had become inevitable.
That day I felt strange. I had a craving for cigarettes and alcohol, not so usual for me when I’m enjoying writing. It was a sunny day, and I sat outside, not wanting to read anything, definitely not wanting to think about my own book. I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to work out either, but I was full of restless energy. Gooseflesh rose up on my arms and neck though it wasn’t so cold. I felt good, unburdened.
I went to bed early and woke up at midnight, drenched in sweat, my spine stiff as granite and my back muscles in agony, unable to breathe properly.
Of course, I thought, I am dying. I could never survive this book. I would finish it and then die.
I limped to the kitchen and lay down on the floor, balanced the laptop on my belly and found that I could move my fingers so long as I didn’t move my arms of neck. Then I wrote, without interruption or hesitation, the end of Eden’s Shore. Around four in the morning, I sent my poor agent the manuscript and went back to bed, my life complete.
It was perfect. Dead at 30. Dead with a full head of hair. Unwrinkled, unbowed. Dead after spending my whole adult life writing. Dying action: writing the end of Eden’s Shore, the best thing I ever wrote. Such final words. So dead, in fact, that I wouldn’t even have to edit the book. Who would dare badger the word count down now? Who would dare ask me to omit well-written but seemingly irrelevant descriptions of shadows, trees, sunsets? Who would dare ask me what was the point of all these characters? Nobody. Death has its privileges. Everything I had written would be seen in the clarifying, generous light of my timely demise. What a gift for marketing.
Anyway, I woke up the next morning, the same way, my God, I’ve been waking up every morning since, and the book’s only coming out now, after another three years. The COVID thing I had lasted about ten days, its annoying aftereffects another two months. Something or other recrudesces now and again, but we’re none of us what we were. Worse than this, when I recovered I found I had fallen out of the spell of Eden’s Shore. It was – has been – like inhabiting a different type of time, spacious days where nothing really happens. Of course things happen, but it doesn’t really feel like they do, and not saying that if the book had come out earlier it would be any different. Several hundred two-star online reviews have had to wait a little longer to be born; otherwise the universe remains unchanged.
For me, it is purely a personal matter: how to return to the realm of necessity, to feel something is fated as it is worked out. This is where I feel I most belong, where time has a process and an outcome. Where each moment matters and everything seems a mirror of everything else. Where it all falls into place. You sit down and you write and it’s just all there.
How to return? Who knows. You can’t get back by the same route.
(c) Oisín Fagan
About Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan:
At the close of the eighteenth century, Angel Kelly, an Irishman, sets sail from Liverpool aboard the Atlas with the intention of creating a Utopian commune in Brazil. But when a mutiny takes place on the ship, he finds himself stranded upon the coast of an unnamed Spanish colony in Latin America. In the aftermath, Kelly becomes unwittingly caught up in a series of crises culminating in displacement, rebellion and a deadly game of cat-and-mouse between empires.
Set in an era of global upheaval, Eden’s Shore is an epic and intricate tale of greed, revenge and love. Populated by a vivid and rich cast of revolutionaries and pirates, capitalists and aristocrats, sailors and soldiers, slaves and spies, this is a work of staggering ambition and wondrous imagination.
‘Visceral, propulsive, kinetic ‘ Colin Walsh, author of Kala
‘Wild, dark and free-wheeling’ Ferdia Lennon, author of Glorious Exploits
Order your copy of Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan online here.
And read an earlier article from 2016 written by Oisín for Writing.ie online here.
