THEY say everyone has a book in them. Paddy Coyne dragged it out kicking and screaming.
Unemployment arrives at the door with plenty of baggage. Lots of us know it all too well these days. For the 35-year-old, Coyne, opportunity knocked too, however.
The north Tipperary man no longer filled his days on the floor at a factory. Instead he cracked open his laptop and wrote his first novel The Drinker with a Hurling Problem. When no-one would publish it, he did so himself.
The book, on the surface, is about someone who returns to the homeplace for one final lash at the junior title with the local club. It’s about a lot more besides, one suspects.
“I suppose I was trying to have a conversation with myself about why I played hurling and became so obsessive about it over the years,” Coyne — who played junior hurling, but ‘was never any good’ — tells me.
“It worked to an extent in that I got those feelings down on paper in a structured way. The story isn’t completely auto-biographical, but it certainly does reflect how I feel about hurling. An old axiom suggests that writers write about the one thing that bothers them so much they have no choice, but to write about it.
“One day I came across something that Maurice Mitchell had said in 1973 — ‘not enough young men and women arrived in university without ever having shipped a punch in the nose’. That really struck a chord with me and got me thinking about writing a book about the GAA. In Ireland now we have this excruciating problem whereby every man and his family seem to be run like a private company.
“Our sense of community is being diluted. And, I think the GAA matters more now because the old certainties of rural life no longer hold. That, I suppose, is the point I was trying to get across, that the GAA can still help a man to find a sense of himself.”
Having read the opening pages however this is no Fáilte Ireland, soft-focus clip through an idealised rural Ireland. Put it this way, if it’s ever adapted into a movie, Cillian Murphy rather than James Nesbitt will play the lead.
It’s a long way from the silver screen now admittedly. Coyne, the sound of slamming doors ringing still in his ears, took a punt and published it.
“I sent off a draft of the book to several mainstream publishers and was, as I expected to be honest, roundly rejected. I then turned my attention to self-publishing. I wrote the book for myself, as an exercise in self therapy if you like, so I was never banking on making a lot of money off it. But since I had written the damn thing I reckoned that I should try to make people aware of its existence.
“Self-publishing is easy enough and free which is always nice. With Amazon you can quite easily piece together a physical book and an eBook. It’s ridiculously easy to be honest. Once you have that accomplished the idea is to market it. I have not made much progress with that, but am hopeful that a couple of reviews, whether good or bad, might help it to get some traction in the market.”
And though the market may be crowded, Coyne — who devours sports book obsessively — isn’t impressed with those present. That perceived lack of quality in sports writing, on this side of the Atlantic particularly, prompted him to add another spine to a tower of books.
“I suppose I have been frustrated with the sports books I have read over the past few years. None have really come close to capturing what it is like for someone to play with a less than glamorous hurling team or with any hurling team for that matter. I don’t know if I have managed to capture it in the book, but at least I have given it a go. Some GAA books are fairly insulting efforts. A child could do a better job with a crayon.”
So now the cruel world can judge his effort too. Though he may not be in the parish if and when his tale of local rivalry and universal themes finds its audience.
“I’m not sure what I am going to do with myself now,” he answers when I enquire to his situation.
“Emigration is an obvious option. Personally, I don’t think I’m good enough a writer to make a living out of it, but I really enjoyed writing the book and might try something more mainstream next time round.”
* You can buy the eBook (€2.99) or a physical copy (€9.99). Both can be ordered off Amazon.com, search for ‘The Drinker with the Hurling Problem’.
* Email: adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
This column first apepared in the Irish Examiner ion October 14.
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