The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow, Danny Denton’s mightily impressive debut novel, is a rollicking tale full of heart, daring, and endless rain. Set in a dystopian Ireland – think the blinky neon of Blade Runner, soundtracked by Tom Waits, and narrated by Luke Kelly – the story follows the Kid in Yellow as he seeks to snatch his and T’s “babba” from the beguiling Earlie King. Of course, it doesn’t go to plan and soon the Earlie boys – the King’s rowdy gang – are on the chase and the Kid is on the run.
Reading the book, I was constantly impressed by how vibrant this derelict world was, and how boldly Denton played with voice and text and form, but, mostly, I was hooked by the unashamedly tender characters and their mad, savage story.
Your book is centred on the 13-year old kid, so I want to bring you back to your own teens. Were you a reader?
As a child, I did nothing but read and play sport. My memories are all going up and down to the library or going up and down to the GAA field. Then in my teens, I did anything but read. In fact, outside of school stuff, I don’t think I read a book from age 13 to 17. I spent my teens playing sport, trying to look cool, listening to music, playing Final Fantasy games and watching crap TV. Then, from age 18 onwards, I fell back into books as if in a fever. I read The Dark Tower series and that blew my mind. Then it was Hemingway and Atwood and Iain Banks and all sorts else.
And did your writing begin in earnest then?
I went to China for a year after the Leaving Cert, to teach, and it was there I started writing. It was a journal basically. I worked hard at it but showed it to no-one. Very few people spoke fluent English where I was living, and so writing seemed like a form of telepathy. When I came back from China and started Arts in UCC, I had proper aspirations as a writer. I wrote some scenes – ironically, about an impending flood, witnessed by brothers – that I thought could be the makings of a fantasy novel. My own Dark Tower series. Then in third year I wrote a short story about Japanese kids playing in a street, but that playing kind of super-imposed on the Sino-Japanese war. It was very bad, very melodramatic, but I finished something. Then I got into the MA in Writing in Galway and writing started flooding out of me. Bad poems, bad stories, fragments of plays.
After the MA, you worked on a novel that didn’t work out. Can you tell me about those intervening years and how did you deal with that bumpy experience?
I would clarify that I spent five years working on a novel that did work. It wasn’t very good, and I’m now glad it wasn’t published. But it did work, and I think it was publishable. Publishing is subjective and market-driven, and whether a work gets published or not is not a measure of whether it is publishable. I started writing that novel in September 2008 and finished a draft of it in January 2009, and then spent years (until 2014, I guess) re-working it as it picked up scores of rejections by agents first, and then, once I got an agent, by publishers.
I lost confidence in myself as a writer and the work itself repeatedly. But I never stopped writing. This is the key. Whether you’re writing well or poorly, or editing well or poorly, if you never stop then hope returns in cycles. And you get better at it.
Did that first novel seep into The Earlie King?
None of that novel – sentence or scene-wise – made it in, but the spirit of it is similar. The big difference between the first rejected novel and the second accepted novel is that in the first novel I wrote to be published; I wrote what sounded like good literature to me. With the second novel, I abandoned that approach completely and wrote as the story and my interests in uncovering the story demanded. I wrote as if out of a wilderness, and it was much better craic.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the novel is how you evoke traditional Irish culture within this untraditional world. It’s not quite hamming it up, but you do twist the perceived notions of Irishness, or, and this is my own copyrighted, terrible term, the notion of the Paddy-Mythic: where Ireland is this land of green and Guinness. Was this a conscious idea you wanted to play with?
Yes, I wanted to saturate the novel in Irish culture to the level that it became comical. I thought, given that we are in a drenched country, I could drench the language and stress this Irishness. Turn it up to eleven and see what happens. So that was the idea behind the names and the shifting of institutions. St Vincent de Paul turns from a charity organisation into a vigilante, Vinny Depaul. In other areas, I was heavily influenced by early 1980s Ireland, because I thought that was a kind of dystopia itself: Kerry babies, postal strikes, drugs epidemics, moving statues. Putting all that in an alternative future makes it seem outlandish, but most of it is drawn from actual events.
Did the more experimental sections of the novel develop naturally alongside the more plot-driven parts, like the Kid in Yellow’s story?
They were born out of failure. When I began this novel, I started with a different point of view. The Kid in Yellow was telling the story, ninety years after it had happened. I wrote about eighty pages in this first-person style and it wasn’t working. I took a break and I began writing something else I had been thinking about: an office clerk going mad in his job and eventually becoming a data terrorist. But that too started running aground on me. I took a week off, and then, at a cold remove, I realised that both stories were about the exact same thing. I went back and started ten pages or so of the Kid in Yellow’s story but from a different perspective: that of a data terrorist who has found scraps of the Kid’s story.
From here, the whole thing picked up this massive momentum. I wanted this story to be pieced together long after it had occurred, I wanted a myth rather than a memoir. And if it was a myth, it would have to be told with different documents. So that’s when I started messing with play scenes and poetry and different testimonies. It’s a failed novel, it’s a failed play, it’s a thwarted memoir, and that’s how it began to feel right.
Your rainy Ireland felt to me like a such a cinematic world. Are you a visual writer? And for how long did this Ireland germinate in your head?
I don’t think of myself as a visual writer but I am fan of an essay by John McGahern called ‘The Image’, where he suggests how – and I’m paraphrasing here – the image is the language of the imagination, and if you’re a writer you have a religious urge to see through words. And say, if you think of memory, it’s very image based. If I think of my time in London, I think of images and they eventually become stories. In that sense I am interested in the visual. I did spend a lot of time building the world. I had the idea of an always-raining Ireland long before this story. I used to write scenes set in this drenched world and I’d ask myself, in what way would it be different to our Ireland? People would have to have sturdy rain gear, trains would be elevated from the ground, Connacht would be screwed.
I was building this world even before I found the Kid in Yellow. And once I had this initial world, it started to become more and more layered due to my own life. I spent a summer in Buenos Aires and witnessed utter poverty and that influenced my version of Dublin. I was learning Spanish, so I lashed some Spanish into the book. I was listening to Tom Waits, so I needed sailors heading to Singapore. You pull things from your own life, don’t you?
The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow is out now and published by Granta. Priced £12.99
Read an exclusive excerpt here
Words: John Patrick McHugh
Photos: Rachel Bradbury
Artwork Credit: Dan Stiles
