Jamie O’Connell — ‘Living a double life is a sure way to mess yourself up’ – Independent.ie

When Jamie O’Connell flew into Dubai, it felt like simultaneously going forwards and backwards in time.

As soon as I landed, it felt not so much like travelling 7,000km east, but going 100 years into the future,” he recalls. “You’re landing into a place that feels like the Fifth Element.”

On one level, he was dazzled by the emirate’s glamour. On another, its economic divisions and moral murkiness made him think of Victorian London.

“Immediately, I knew I’d have to write something about this place,” he says. The result is his debut novel, Diving for Pearls.

O’Connell, who is from north Cork, travelled to Dubai to see friends several times in the 2010s. They were among the stream of emigrants drawn there to make a living, notably the Irish after the last financial crash.

“You’re looking around Ireland in 2010 and nothing is happening, and in some ways, Dubai is like a sparkling gem, literally an oasis in the desert for people to make something of their lives,” O’Connell says. “I can’t ever get away from the fact that Dubai offered a sort of refuge to many friends of mine.”

For all that, it reminded him “in a strange way” of the world of Charles Dickens’ novels.

“London was the cutting-edge city in the world at that time, and it also had this class system of the super-wealthy and the super-poor,” he says. “It was also a city that had a kind of complex relationship with morality.”

In homage to Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, which opens with a body being discovered in the Thames, the diverse characters in Diving for Pearls are drawn together after a young local woman’s body is found floating in the Dubai marina.

Another literary inspiration was Colum McCann, whose Let the Great World Spin was a “massive influence” on Diving for Pearls.

“You see the lattice of a city being seen from all these different angles,” O’Connell says of McCann’s 2009 novel. “And I remember thinking, ‘to do this city [Dubai] some justice, I need to do roughly the same’.”

Set in Ireland and Dubai, Diving for Pearls focuses on six people trying to chase dreams, find new lives or shed past selves. It is ambitious in scope, featuring a broad range of characters.

Like the population of Dubai, they live in wildly differing circumstances. There’s Tahir, a taxi driver who works hard to send money home to his family in Pakistan. Gete is the Ethiopian maid of an Irish family. That family is headed by Siobhan and her husband Martin, who have made the best of what Dubai has to offer. Siobhan is attempting to convince her brother Trevor of the opportunities there.

Back in Ireland, we meet Aasim, a moneyed gay Emirati who is studying in Dublin with his partner. The character is drawn in part on O’Connell’s experience.

“I’m no expert on what it’s like to live within a Muslim family, but I do know what it’s like to live in a religious family where you are gay,” says the novelist, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness.

“I met young, gay foreign men who lived and studied in Dublin back when I was studying in 2009, and we talked about their experiences versus mine. I understood the freedom they finally had to go to gay bars and live their lives. I think the self-hatred that is imposed on you as a gay man coming out of a strict religious environment like that is universal.”

O’Connell left the Jehovah’s Witnesses in his early 20s when he told his parents he was gay. “It led to a break with my parents at the time, and with the wider community,” he says.

The religion is not dissimilar to Catholicism in its attitude to issues such as sex outside marriage, he adds. “It was quite conservative, more in the kind of American southern states way,” he adds. “And as a gay man, there wasn’t a huge space found for someone like me.”

Living a double life, he says, “destroys your brain”. “It’s the surest way to mess yourself up and damage your own psyche because you’re lying to everyone. You’re half of yourself to everybody.”

Childhood ambition

O’Connell knew he wanted to write since childhood. “I have a million unpublished words, sitting in a box over there,” he laughs, pointing to a corner of the room during our Zoom call. “I saw an interview with Maeve Binchy when I was about 11, and it just sort of sparked something in me. I used to work away on a family computer in the house that no one used but myself. And I fell in love with writing at that point and spent the last 20-odd years figuring it out.”

He is no stranger to the book world: his last job was as a key account manager at Penguin, which owns the Doubleday imprint that is publishing Diving for Pearls. By working in the trade before being published himself, he is following in the footsteps of such illustrious authors as Toni Morrison, Ted Hughes, Stephen King and TS Eliot.

It wasn’t a simple case of handing over a manuscript to his old bosses and firing up the presses, O’Connell is keen to stress. The book was 10 years in the making and “took a while to find its place in the world”.

“Because I’d worked in publishing and sat in various publishing meetings, I understood that [not getting published] wasn’t an attack on me personally,” he says. “It can really feel personal sometimes, so that was a great lesson to learn. It’s not about you — it’s the market. There are so many reasons why books don’t get published. To anyone trying to get a book published, I’d say take a deep breath and your time will come.”

After finishing an master’s in creative writing at University College Dublin — where he now teaches the same subject — O’Connell was signed by the literary super-agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor. Again, there were some hard yards at the beginning.

“I first contacted her about 10 years ago with a novel and she wrote back saying: ‘You know, this isn’t working, but there’s definitely something there,’” he says. “So I kept working on the novel and we’d email every six months or so, and then finally, when I wrote the book and worked hard on that voice, she finally wrote back saying: ‘We’re ready to go. I’m ready to sign you.’”

Now living in Kenmare, O’Connell has rebuilt bridges with some family members, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness community in Cork.

He hopes to continue teaching creative writing to up-and-coming authors. His second novel is percolating in his mind, based on one character telling a story over a few decades. O’Connell’s appetite for a challenge and sense of scope remain intact.

“Hopefully it’ll work,” he says. “I don’t worry too much about that because I just love the process of sitting down and writing a character. I’ve learned that two things make me happy: one is feeling connected to the people in my life, and the other is creativity. That’s all I seem to need.”

‘Diving for Pearls’ by Jamie O’Connell is out on June 3 from Doubleday Ireland (€15.99) and will be launched in a digital event with Sophie White and West Cork Literary Festival. Visit westcorkmusic.ie for details.

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