The stories in Mr Saunders’ collections ‘Civil War In Bad Decline’, ‘Pastoralia’ and ‘In Persusasion Nation’ apply the surrealist and satirical sensibilities of Heller or Vonnegut to 21st century concerns such as mass media, consumerist propaganda and corporate drug pushing. The ‘kid’s book’ he’s referring to is his new novella ‘The Brief And Frightening Reign Of Phil’, less a bedtime story than an ‘Animal Farm’-like allegorical nightmare that describes the rise and fall of a despot – the titular Phil – who stages a coup and takes power of the fictional territory of Outer Horner and sets about ‘dismantling’ and displacing the denizens of the neighbouring Inner Horner.

“The plan was to write a kids’ book where all the characters were abstract shapes,” Mr Saunders explains, “but it just wasn’t working, so I started just goofing around with the language to try to make it a little more edgy, and maybe the first four pages blurted out where there’s this guy Phil. And I got to that point where I was writing a kid’s book, it’s in a kid’s book tone, but now there was a genocide in it, so I decided, ‘Let’s just go ahead and see what happens.’ So I think a lot of that Trojan horse effect was inadvertent; I didn’t really mean for it to turn into what it did.”

Unlikely as it may seem, the book tackles many of the subjects that also crop up in ‘An Ordinary Man’: language used as a tool for the dehumanisation of a minority; the horror of former friends and neighbours turning on each other; the futility of too many people trying to reach accordance before acting against injustice.

“I was always trying to rotate the object of the set,” says Mr Saunders. “If I started thinking too much about Rwanda, I’d start thinking about Palestine and Israel, and if that got too heavy I’d think about Nazi Germany. Somehow the parts kind of fell into place pretty naturally. I knew enough history so that when I needed a mechanism I could find it. The hope was that it wouldn’t be a straight line allegory for anything, more like a summing up of a certain human tendency, if that makes sense.”

The character of Phil, like many despots, starts out as a rather pathetic human being with a chip on his shoulder who then stumbles to prominence through a window in history and politics when his focused rage and ambition start to seem postively magnetic compared to the dithering and ineffectual idiots in power.

“That was true in the States too,” Mr Saunders says. “It’s true for the (Bush) administration and it’s also true for the Islamists. There’s some kind of core rage. If you think of it, fear and aggression are kind of the same thing, it’s like hunger and eating. You feel fear, so you aggress. I think that happens personally and internationally. I was kind of thinking of Hitler at first, the failed artist thing, but it’s funny ’cos you write something like that and afterwards you can conceptualise it, but while it’s going on you’re just trying to make it work.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.