The immortality game

It is probably the most fundamental question that any writer must honestly answer:

Why do you write?

The featured image was my instant answer last month on Twitter to an Irish Times account.

Well, if I intended to have a headstone, that observation might make the cut.

For the avoidance of doubt, my three Gaeilgeoirí have their instructions as to where my ashes will be scattered ‘neath an Irish sky.

The day after that quiet ceremony, you, dear reader, can still do what my friend and comrade Danny Morrison did recently.

You can read his review of Native Shore here.

Full disclosure, we’ve known each other for over forty years, and he honoured me by attending the launch of my debut novel, The Squad, in Dublin in 2018.

What Danny did when he read Native Shore was to journey into a world that I created.

Anyone who does that in the future will have a conversation with the consciousness that created those characters and put them into various situations.

In the current moral panic over AI, what I leave behind me will be an entirely human creation.

Writing is, by its very nature, a solitary, isolating experience.

Consequently, members of my introverted craft do need to get feedback.

The book review is one such way.

I was very grateful that the folks at Bella Caledonia came through with a review last month.

However, I noted that they did so without ever mentioning the central character in the novel, Gerry O’Donnell.

The comments below the Bella Caledonia review comprised people interested in the Scottish constitutional question and others who had actually read the book.

I found it interesting that the latter were all Irish, and I personally know them.

Felicity McCall and Stephen O’Hanlon assisted with the manuscript, and I acknowledged my debt to them in the book itself.

This comment also struck me as being particularly perceptive.

I especially liked the characterisation of Gerry O’Donnell as “a sort of  IRA George Smiley”.

Danny had no such reticence in framing his review around the world of the central character and the Republican struggle here.

“Into this maelstrom is drawn ex-IRA intelligence officer, Gerry O’Donnell, who is on a break from Donegal, ‘honeymooning’ with his Colombian wife in the Highlands when the crisis unfolds. He quickly assesses the situation and concludes that the SNLA represents a false flag operation, organised, as of old, by the same British Intelligence service whose machinations in Ireland he had played a prominent role in defeating. Using his old skillsets, he gets involved out of solidarity with the right of a small nation to be free and teams up, to his own surprise, with a former branch man who is being set-up as a patsy by the authorities, not unlike the scenario that befell the late John Stalker.

“Times have changed and in place of IRA active service personnel O’Donnell mobilises a Fifth Estate of cyber warriors, involving several nationals, to defeat and expose the Brits.”

You can order Native Shore directly from the publisher here.

If you’re in Glasgow then the sound folk at Calton Books have copies, as have Waterstones.