Cork author Tadhg Coakley honoured with GAA Museum Book Club choice

EARLIER this week, Cork writer Tadhg Coakley penned an article examining the dearth of Irish sporting fiction but modesty prevented him from mentioning his own debut novel, The First Sunday in September.

The 2018 offering met with acclaim and it has been chosen as the GAA Museum Book Club’s choice for October – available online from the Museum throughout the month at a discounted price of €12.

Coakley is naturally delighted to have been included.

“I was very honoured that the book was chosen,” he says.

“It’s a lovely feeling that visitors to Croke Park have the opportunity to buy the book there, in the stadium around which the novel hinges.

“Three years after its publication it also brings new readers to the book, from all over Ireland and abroad, which is great. It’s also brilliant to be following in the footsteps of such amazing writers as Mary White, Christy O’Connor, Dave Hannigan, Michael Foley and Paul Rouse. And I’m sure that great books will feature in the GAA Museum Book Club in the future and it’s lovely to be part of such a fantastic initiative.

“I actually took a tour of the GAA Museum and Croke Park when I was researching the book since I wanted to follow the footsteps of one character who leaves the All-Ireland Final early as she walks around the back of the stadium alone while the match is still on. I also wanted a scene in a dressing room and another in the tunnel where the buses bring the players in and out and I wanted to visualise those locations accurately.”

More a series of short stories – some interweaving – than a full novel, the book takes place on the day of an All-Ireland final between Cork and Clare. When I interviewed Coakley just after its publication, he revealed that he was keen not to pigeon-hole it.

“The hurling doesn’t feature that much in the book,” he said, “it’s not a whole book of, ‘Okay, it’s a pass to him, over the bar and we’re losing by a point.’

“I knew, even when I wrote the first story, which was originally a stand-alone called The All-Ireland, that if I wrote about the match it would be clichéd. Match reports are great because they’re real but if you did that, it would be very hackneyed and it wouldn’t work.

“I knew after maybe 10 of the stories that I was writing one book rather than a lot of stories. I had to thread them or braid them together and I spent a lot of the editing doing that.

“I changed endings of some, I brought in characters and moved them around and I wanted a kind of linearity and flow.

“In a way, it becomes a kind of before, during and after of the match and they’re the three parts of the day when you do go to a game.

“I was very lucky with [editor] Noel Ring. He’s from Tralee and he’s also a writer himself. He did his MA on Frank O’Connor so he knew the short-story form.”

And now, looking back from a remove of three years, what changes would he make, if any?

“This sounds funny but the first change I’d make is that Cork would lose in the book,” he says.

“Not to make it more realistic – as some non-Cork friends suggested – but that the subject of loss is always more interesting in fiction, and non-fiction, too.

“The origin story of the book is ‘Dúchas’, where a man watches his son playing in an All-Ireland hurling final and they are estranged because he gave his son up for adoption as a baby. 

So I wanted a situation where he felt he was the only Cork person in Croke Park who could not congratulate his son if Cork won. And then I was stuck with Cork winning, but in retrospect, I could have worked around that.

“Several people also told me that the whole book should have been based around that family – mother, father and son – and their life stories, focusing on the adoption theme. That’s something I might consider in the future, if I do return to sports fiction.

“Another option is to pick a different match – for example a club rather than inter-county match – and build another book around that. I think there’s a great novel waiting to be written about a small GAA club who reach a county final against the odds one summer – a summer in which several lives are changed, revolving around the team’s exploits and climaxing at the moment of the final.

“There’s something special and intimate about a small town or village and how people interact in that environment. The Swedish writer Fredrik Backman does that brilliantly in his 2016 novel The Scandal, about a small-town hockey team.”