Colum McCann Q&A

Can you tell us about the meaning of the title? 

Literally, an apeirogon is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. It’s a weird word, I know. And difficult to approach at first. But I loved it because it suggested something wild and expansive that folded on over into itself, and within the infinity there are always places to land. I wanted to suggest that we are all part of this story of Abir and Smadar. What happens to them must matter to us because it affects us. We are there, we are involved, we are complicit. The idea that this shape – and this novel –  had an infinite number of sides was attractive to me because I knew this wasn’t a two-sided situation, that it wasn’t balanced, and I wanted the reader to experience that for herself. The title throws us off for a moment. It disrupts us a little. We have to step out of our realm of comfort. It’s like my hero Michael Ondaatje who says in In The Skin of a Lion: ‘Trust me, this will take time, but there is order here, very faint, very human.’

Which authors have influenced your own writing? 

It’s such a difficult question because there are so many. I panic because I think I might leave someone out. But a quick story perhaps?  My father was a goalkeeper for Charlton Athletic way back in the 1950s. Years later he wrote a series of football books for children. We were living in Dublin at that stage. He would go out to the writing room which doubled as a coal shed, and I would hear the click-clack of the typewriter late into the night. One year my national school teacher, Mr Kells, decided to read aloud one of the books, Goals for Glory. I remember when he read the last chapter that the whole class erupted in cheers and I sat there, eight years old, thinking how odd it was that the cheer had really emanated from my father’s head. It changed my relationship with the music coming from that shed. Years later I heard Joyce’s line about literature recreating life out of life, and I thought back to those early days.    

What is your favourite Booker Prize-winning novel? 

So many of them again. One of my best pals in this world is Marlon James and I was so happy when he won the Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings. A brilliant book, a whole world. That took the oxygen from the air when I read it. And of course True History of the Kelly Gang, by my friend and colleague Peter Carey. It’s is an adjectivally-great novel. And I can’t let John Berger’s G slip from my mind. That was all the way back in 1972. It’s nice to think of this distance because it reminds of one of John’s sayings that life is constantly unfinished.