Five Questions -- Jason Johnson

JASON JOHNSON'S novels focus on people facing extreme situations over short periods of time.

His latest is ALOYSIUS TEMPO (2015), the tale of an unkempt, maverick assassin recruited by the Irish government. It's published by Liberties Press, Dublin.

Previous works:

WOUNDLICKER (2005) - a serial killer's confession - set in Northern Ireland.

ALINA (2006) - the hunt for a vanished sex worker - set in Romania.

SINKER (2014) - where drinking alcohol is a professional sport - set in Majorca. (SINKER extract available for free in 'HERE'S THE STORY' - Download from this page)

The Irish Independent describes blackly comic SINKER as "a lean, nasty, tripped-out shocker... a cracking book, a jolt to the senses like a line of flaming shots."

ALINA, says US author and critic Frank Sennett, "delivers a climax as harrowing as one might hope to find in contemporary crime fiction."

And WOUNDLICKER is "dark and gritty", says The Sunday Times.

Jason's from Enniskillen and lives in Belfast.

Gerard: I've only just finished Aloysius Tempo and I feel like there's a hell of a lot of potential for further adventures featuring this protagonist. Maybe because he seems better built to handle his self-destructive nature than your previous characters. Any chance of a sequel?

Jason: I think so. I’m hoping to write another one next year. Ideally I will write four or five adventures for Aloysius.

In each he will lose a body part or two and become a few percentage points more insane and haunted. Basically, he’s spiraling downwards, deconstructing himself. Chapter by chapter he’ll grow weaker yet more dangerous and end up being ground into the dust. This book, I hope, has teed that up.

Next year I plan to write the second installment, to send him to join ISIS on effectively a suicide mission for Ireland just on the cusp of the state’s centenary.

As a character he is going to move further beyond living and operating within established moral frameworks, so Syria seems like a good place for him to be next time around.

Gerard: Nationalism was very much a theme in the first book. Looks like that'll be the case for the future instalments too. Is this your way of wrestling with your own national identity?

Jason: You know, it probably is. My roots are Irish, English, Scottish, Maori, Protestant, Catholic and atheist. Anyone who wants to insult me has a lot of material to work with. A few of my characters have been mongrels in the Northern Ireland sense of the word, so you’re probably right.

The thing I wanted to touch on in the novel was patriotism, which is at the heart of a lot of our gut reactions here. Patriotism can be intoxicating, joyful, positive, negative, childish and laughable all at the same time, and it’s always around.

Aloysius grew up hating Irish society – the Troubles, the church, the ethos – so he’s a bit stuck when he gets asked if he will kill for his country, yet he can’t help seeing some nobility in it.

The book explains how he isn’t sure who his father was, that Aloysius was born to a woman who had been with both a ruthless member of the IRA and a ruthless UDR soldier.

That lack of clarity, lack of category in Irish terms, interests me. It suggests betrayal may mean something different to him than it does to the rest of us. It hopefully creates unexpected friction or unexpected ease in some of his decisions.

Aloysius’ journey basically involves him falling in love with the modern, smart, reinvigorated Ireland to which he is being introduced, but he may stop in with a mistress along the way.

Gerard: So you yourself are hard to classify. What about your writing? To me, Aloysius Tempo is a terrific black-comedic thriller. Your previous novels (Woundlicker, Alina and Sinker), while all quite different animals, contain crime elements of varying degrees, though they might not be found in the crime fiction section at a local bookshop. Do you consider your work literary fiction, crime fiction, comedy or some sort of mongrel?

Jason: Some sort of mongrel. It's about trying to cram relatively big ideas into the heads of people who don't always want them.

I always find I’m trying to write the thoughts of characters who realise they are discovering truths.

For some reason they first seem to end up finding some purity outside of themselves – great works of art, people of beauty, people who possess or who have achieved great things – and I bounce them off that. That helps give them something to compare themselves too, and generally helps them realise how far they have to go in their journey. If there’s literary lingering in my novels, that’s the only sort of thing the characters linger on.

That sounds so wanky that it may, in some small way, suggest the hue of literary fiction. But that would be unfair to the majority of the text which is, more or less, the written equivalent of dropping characters down lift shafts and seeing what happens.

There is always crime, which may suggest some hybrid of crime fiction, but I do think if I called myself a crime writer then crime writers would whisper that I didn’t really understand the genre. The same goes if I called myself a writer of literary fiction.

What I know for sure is I’m never going to write a great novel in the grand sense of the word, but hopefully I am going to entertain.

The stories are usually a bit dark, with a bit of a laugh, with some dirt and violence and hopefully a few off-road plot points. I try to be brave when I write and usually urge myself forward when I hear the voice of the self-censor in my head. I deal with the resulting shame and cringing after the book is published.

All I really want is for my books to shove people a wee bit.

Gerard: Through your four novels you've created a fascinating universe. Do you think Aloysius could ever run into Woundlicker's Fletcher Fee on a future adventure, or do you see your other titles as quite separate?

Jason: Only a writer who knows the craic could ask that question. You too, Gerard, must have entertained the idea of having characters from different novels impact on each other. (Yup! gb)

It’s fun to think about it, to see if you can come up with a plot to reanimate and connect unconnected characters you’ve enjoyed writing before.

But it would be too indulgent at the seriously low level I’m on as a writer. It would likely bypass just about anybody who read it and probably fall flat.

Characters are created at specific times with a specific job to do, so I don’t think it’s a road I’d go down. I’ve plenty of other scumbags and fools I want to write about without bringing any back.

Gerard: Any plans for a reprint of Woundlicker and Alina? Loved those books and I think more people should have the opportunity to read them.

Jason: That’s very kind of you, and no. I think they’re effectively goners, arriving just before the e-book thing did. Neither sold very many so making an argument for reissue would probably fall at the first hurdle.

Anyway, that was then and this is now.

Woundlicker was very local and set during the horrible birthing pains of the peace process. It’s far out of sync with today.

I did once look into the idea of Woundlicker as a one-man stage show, with a real Mercedes Benz on the stage (it’s set in a Merc), but no theatre people were interested.

And when I think back to Alina I think only of it being some kind of half-arsed, mis-developed statement about the cruelty of pleasure when rich meets poor or some such bollocks, so I hope it’s unavailable forever.

It’s all about looking ahead.

Jason Johnson is published by Liberties Press, a house that had the good sense to sign a band of particularly talented Northern Irish writers that includes Tara West, Jan Carson, Kelly Creighton, Bethany Dawson, Moyra Donaldson and Jason himself. Keep 'er lit, lads!

You can follow Jason on Twitter, and if you're lucky, he might even be your friend on Facebook.

A Wee Review -- SINKER by Jason Johnson

The Irish News published my review of SINKER in yesterday's edition (11/09/14), in a slightly shorter form. Here's the full version of the review for anybody who missed it:

Sinker is the novel that will remind you of the silly things you’ve done when drunk, or avoided by abstaining. Because that’s what this novel is about. Getting wasted. Except in Sinker’s world, getting wasted isn’t always a waste of time. Jason Johnson has created a sport called sink – there’s even a Wikipedia-type section at the start that covers the rules and public perception – and to tell the story, Johnson employs professional sinker Baker Forley, Derry’s great ginger hope in the so-called sport, and the new kid on the block in the world circuit.

The plot is straightforward enough, but is stuffed with more surprises than you’ll find in an end-of-session kebab. Forley is supposed to drink, drink, drink; stay upright and keep his eye on the ball. He certainly shouldn’t waste time looking at a rich sheikh’s wife during his big shot at the world title in Mallorca. But of course he does look at a rich sheikh’s wife. Ogles her, in fact. And everything goes crazy, in a good, old fashioned, “wait ‘til ye hear what happened!” sort of way.

There is a sense of enthusiasm about this book that is contradictory to the lack of enthusiasm displayed by the enigmatic Baker Forley. It may be the comedic aspect of it, because Johnson’s humour, though blacker than a well settled Guinness, is laugh out loud funny in places. That’s actual laughter out loud, not internet-lol; two very different things. Or possibly the enthusiasm is channelled through the larger than life supporting cast. Ratface the sink talent manager, Nap the jolly and deadly bodyguard, and Sheikh Alam who lives in a Gaudi designed house with a Dali designed garden. Yeah. That much larger than life. And there’s a twist of femme fatale in there too. Either way, a character that responds to a death threat with the immortal words, “Aye, right,” is hardly the most dramatic.

But then, maybe that’s the point. Perhaps the only way Johnson can imagine a person succeeding in a sport that literally kills you physically and mentally has to have his head in the right – or wrong – place.

Is Forley a two-dimensional lump of drunk or is he actually a zen master? The line, delivered by Forley as narrator, “If it’s not competition, it can only be addiction,” when describing the motivations of a wannabe sinker, points to the latter lifestyle choice. And these nuggets of drinker’s wisdom are scattered throughout the text. There is a depth of understanding displayed not only of the chaos of alcohol, with more emphasis put on the downside of the drug rather than the upside, that is coupled with the ups and downs of abstinence. Interestingly, Forley only drinks when competing. He’s not a social drinker. This creates a madcap balancing act that lends the novel a point of interest to drinkers and non-drinkers alike. Look down your nose at the antics of Forley and his fellow sinkers or grin as you remember past embarrassments or moments of messy glory; whatever works. But Sinker deserves to be read.

Gerard Brennan

Jason Johnson Returns!

In 2008 I discovered Jason Johnson. CSNI was a thing back then, so of course I reviewed both of his novels and tracked the fella down to ask him to take part in a Q&A. You can see some Johnson related content here. In the following years I saw Jason Johnson's name appear as a byline in some newspaper articles (I vividly remember him writing about a man who climbed the departed Belfast Wheel at Belfast City Hall), but I wanted more of his fiction.

Well, guess what! He's back with a new novel according to this Culture Northern Ireland article. And I am very much looking forward to reading SINKER when I get my hands on a copy. And I must revisit ALINA in the near future, His use of POV in that novel was highly innovative when compared to the books I'd been reading previously (and especially in comparison to what a lot of creative writing websites and/or workshops considered to be bible in their articles about POV).

Good to see you back, Mr Johnson. And I'll join you in downplaying the Irvine Welsh references in the future (which I did mention in that Q&A in 2008 - soz).