John Fanning

Irish author, podcaster, writer of novels.

Article in Writing.ie

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Here’s a brief article I wrote for writing.ie about how I was inspired to write Ezekiel.

john fanning writing.ie Irish novelist

The idea for my most recent novel, Ezekiel, was inspired by a very close French friend. We were in a café in Montpellier. In passing, I realized I’d never asked her about her father. I knew about her mother, but not her father. She started to explain how her father walked back from a gulag after surviving a concentration camp and a POW camp. He survived by pretending to be a nurse, and by playing music at the Nazi orgies. She was the first child born after his return. I sat in awe, criticizing myself inside for having never asked her about her father’s life before. We’d known each other for nearly a decade at the time.

I was shocked yet again by this recurring idea – we think we know a person’s story only to find out we have no idea who the person sitting in front of us is.

I told her someone needs to tell his story, thinking she should write a memoir. That was when she said, “You should write it.”

“I don’t write non-fiction,” I said.

“Write it as a novel then.”

Silence. I stared out the window at the people and cars floating by, perplexed. What do I know about concentration camps? Where do I get off writing a story about Jews? I’m Irish. Then I thought of Leopold Bloom and it sounded even more bizarre. This was a story set in the south of France, in Provence? I grew up near Dublin. What the hell did I know about Provence?

I looked back at her. She was smiling. “But I haven’t written anything in three years.”

I’d stopped writing when our little girl was born. I wasn’t going to stay up all hours any more, writing, like I’d done after our boys were born. I used to stay in work after my magazine job was finished to write my novels. I’d get home to Brooklyn at ten and eleven o’clock at night, only to start the whole process again the next day. Of course, this was madness. Writing after a day of work was a battle in ever diminishing returns, never mind the fact I hardly got to see my family.

“It’ll be a good book, John.”

“But I’ve never written an historical novel. I know nothing about the Holocaust.”

When I got back to our house a couple of hours later there was a slim book waiting for me in the post box, Time for Outrage by Stephane Hessel. It’s a book by a French concentration camp survivor and Resistance fighter. He also happened to be, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the people who crafted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I’d ordered it months before and it’d never arrived. And here it was. Defiance to totalitarianism, spiritual abnegation, predatory capitalism. The two stories became one. All of a sudden my friend’s father had become a resistance fighter like Hessel. Instead of a nurse he became a homeopath.

I started ordering more books, too many books, reading about the Holocaust, histories, memoirs, first-person accounts. In the car waiting for writers and artists at the airport. Before I got out of bed. When I went to bed. On our holiday to see family in Florida I stayed in our room with a history over a thousand pages long while everyone else was getting ice cream or swimming or laughing outside. I’d be shaking my head from side to side on the beach, in the living room, in bed, muttering things like, “How could they?” “Monsters.” “How could the church have helped them?”

Many years on, Ezekiel is out in the world. And still, the question circles around in my head, where do I get off, an Irishman, writing a story about a Holocaust survivor from the south of France? I suppose a better question to ask now is who am I going to get to translate it into French, so my friend can finally read it. She doesn’t speak a word of English.

Guernica – Literary Interview about Ezekiel

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Here’s a link to a long interview I gave to Guernica magazine, which just went live on their site.

literary review interview guernica novel ezekiel

I’m very happy and grateful to be included in the magazine, as I’ve always loved the way their content speaks to arts and politics, not just one or the other. It means they get to the questions, not ideas alone.

I also really enjoyed answering the questions the interviewer, Amanda Dennis, asked me as they helped me question and articulate my feelings on my novel Ezekiel.

Here’ a bit of what they had to say about my book before the questions and answers:

Fanning’s debut novel, Ezekiel, which is full of [such] questions, particularly about the role of the contemporary writer vis-à-vis various social institutions and cultural norms. The book’s way of questioning grows out of Fanning’s encounter with the history of the Languedoc region, especially its history of resistance, both spiritual and political.

Ezekiel’s protagonist, Ezekiel Yusuf Moran, comes of age in Provence in the 1920’s and 30’s. His full name combines Arabic, Jewish, and Irish influences, communicating his position at the crossroads of cultures. In some ways, Ezekiel is a man from nowhere, and his sense of displacement is accentuated by his rejection of French nationalism and his taking up the mantle of the résistants during WWII. But the bulk of the novel takes place in the aftermath of war, and the warm-hearted book plays with the conventions of epic, as Ezekiel crosses postwar Europe, before traveling on to Scotland and Ireland, Mecca and India, in search of the sort of spiritual independence most threatened by (and threatening to) totalitarian regimes. In scope, the novel reaches beyond the 20th century, through its engagement with the ancient Judaic, mystical sect of the Essenes (into which Ezekiel’s father initiates him) and through its portrayal of a disenchantment and political frustration that feel all too timely.

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