Chris Flynn has worn many hats over the years – as publisher of the journal

Here, he chats with

Tell us how

The scary version is that I met someone like Billy a long time ago. He claimed to be on the run and I didn’t doubt it for a minute. He was hiding out not in Thailand but in the backpacker hostels of Canada. He told me some hair-raising stories and I watched in fascination as he fell under the spell of young people living in a world he had no conception of.

Growing up in the midst of a civil war in Northern Ireland I had seen a lot of young guys running with a bad crowd, and I don’t mean smoking ciggies behind the bike sheds. Somehow I always managed to stay out of trouble, more or less. There were plenty of stories about guys who had to leave the country under threat of death or prison, and who were hiding out in Asia or Australia under new identities.

I always wondered what life would be like for someone like that – committing the sort of acts that would scar most people for life yet having to go on somehow, to make a new start somewhere else, unable to ever go back to what they knew or even tell anyone what they had seen and done. It’s a story of reinvention, though not necessarily retribution or redemption. Well, maybe a wee bit of redemption. I like the idea that everyone, even someone like Billy, is capable of changing.

The novel is written entirely in a broad Irish patois. It’s a bold move but definitely works here. Why this voice and why this way?

This is where I get to tell you about how long and hard I worked on the drafting process. Are you asleep yet? The version of A Tiger in Eden that Text Publishing read and bought was the ninth draft, and the third time I had started the novel from scratch without referring to previous drafts. Nightmare. All eight previous drafts were written in third person and it just wasn’t working. It was stilted and not compelling.

Then I had a conversation with an editor who told me that as long as he loved the voice in a manuscript, he could forgive a lot of other indiscretions. That got me thinking that even though I knew Billy very well – I had written hundreds of thousands of words about his past and even his future up to middle age that no one now will ever see – I had never allowed his voice to be heard. I thought about a lot of the hard men I knew growing up, their tough-guy patois peppered with swearing and razor-sharp humour (a fairly hardcore version of what is commonly known as ‘the craic’) and decided to channel that.

It was a disturbing experience. I would write paragraphs in a stream of consciousness style then ‘perform’ them aloud in my scariest Belfast accent, crack up laughing then sit back down and clean up/edit what I had just written. It was a riotous, slightly terrifying draft to write – lots of pacing around the room, swearing. I’m surprised the neighbours didn’t call the cops. But finally it was working.

In his bid to escape both the police and his past, Billy finds himself drifting around Thailand’s many islands. These destinations are depicted both as paradises and as places of tourist-laden excess, racism and corruption. What was it about the heady cocktail of the backpacker trail that led you to choose it as a setting?

I liked the idea of inverting the traditional narrative of paradise being destroyed by a malign outside force, although Thailand is far from paradise in this book. Billy is in his element there at first because he sees that it’s not that different to what he’s used to but eventually he feels trapped by the sex tourism, the hidden agendas many tourists have in choosing to go to a place where they can indulge in things they would never do at home and the effect this has on the locals, who often become predatory. It’s the perfect place to hide out and lose yourself, but how long could anyone stand it?

A Tiger in Eden

Those are certainly famous 90s practitioners of ‘anti-traditional’ narratives, though there have been many since who have influenced me. DBC Pierre, China Miéville, Jennifer Egan and Nicholson Baker are more recent examples of writers I love who are willing to break the rules. If I merit a mention in the same paragraph as any of those, then I’m doing very well indeed.

You’ve worked for many years as an editor and publisher – of

It undeniably has, and not always in a positive way. Whilst writers must absolutely read as much as possible, I may have taken it a little far. I read 96 books in 2011 and 98 in 2010 (I know because I kept lists).

Half the time I would think, ‘this is a terrible book, what were the publisher/writer thinking? I could do so much better than this,’ and the other half I would think, ‘this is awesome, I could never write anything this good.’ And so every time you become galvanized into writing by what you perceive to be a crappy book, you get slammed back to earth by a really great one. The good thing about all this is that as long as you’re prepared to learn from the good ones what you should be trying to do and the bad ones about what you shouldn’t be doing, you’ll work something out.

Honestly there’s a million ways to write a book and it kind of annoys me when writers pontificate about how they did it as if they’ve climbed down into the Well of Souls with Indy and uncovered the Ark of the Covenant, and if you don’t listen to them then you’re doing it wrong. There’s room for thousands of different kinds of books in our lives, written in thousands of different ways. I think we forget that sometimes, as readers, writers, editors and publishers and need to step outside our comfort zones more.

Finally – I have to ask – the cover is simply stunning. What was your experience of the design process from a writer’s perspective? Does it reflect your vision of the book?

The first conversation my editor David Winter and I had after Text offered me a contract was about the cover. Given the Torpedo covers were all beautifully designed and illustrated, I didn’t want my first book to have corny stock photography (a muscly guy looking moody on a beach? No thanks). Straightaway we knew there was an opportunity for something unusual and striking, and with Text’s award-winning in-house designer W.H. Chong having read the manuscript very early on too we were well prepared to tackle this.

We looked at a lot of mid-90s covers and weren’t terribly impressed. I wanted something linked to Billy’s Loyalist tattoos, which also conveyed how he was a menacing character who was changing his opinions the longer he stayed in Thailand, isolated from his upbringing. I needn’t have worried. Chong knew just what to do and hand painted the image, complete with orange background to explain Billy’s Protestant beliefs. I like it so much I’m considering getting a tattoo, which will be my fifth, though I draw the line at having ‘NO SURRENDER’ across my chest.

A Tiger in Eden

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