"The only place we can be certain violence has a place is in art" – Oisín Fagan
The Irish author of Eden's Shore on David Lynch, slavery narratives, and why "the only place we can be certain violence has a place is in art"
Today I want to share the most compelling interview that I’ve conducted to date. I ordered Irish author Oisín Fagan’s Eden’s Shore (John Murray Press, 2025) after reading a review in the Guardian Saturday magazine and messaged him the night I finished reading it to request an interview, to satisfy my curiosity about what kind of a writer could simultaneously write with such surgical precision and bloody-minded obstinacy.
This is an interview that deserves to travel far beyond my usual subscribers so please do share it with anyone who loves literature and believes that artworks of substance still have a place in the world.
“The only place we can be certain violence has a place is in art”: An interview with Eden’s Shore author Oisín Fagan
Oisín Fagan’s Eden’s Shore is simultaneously one of the most brilliant and frustrating novels I’ve ever read. Set in a late-18th-century Spanish colony in Latin America, it follows an idealist Irishman who boards what he believes is a ship to establish a utopian commune in Brazil, only to discover it’s a slaving vessel. As mutiny erupts, chaos reigns. Pirates, soldiers, slaves and colonists converge from around the world, speaking in fragmented, broken languages, all vying for dominion. Fagan’s control over language is astonishing, reaching heights of beauty alongside unbridled hilarity and depraved violence.
When I reached out to Oisín, I told him frankly that Eden’s Shore contained some of the best fiction I’ve ever read, pages I wanted to underline and memorise, but also segments where fifteen new characters seemed to arrive at once, all at cross purposes, making me want to throw the book at the wall. Tellingly, I always returned to it. “I am a bit of a bastard when I write,” he admitted. “I do enjoy fucking with people, just a little bit.”
The genesis of Eden’s Shore
To kick the conversation off, where did Eden’s Shore come from?
Eden’s Shore is very much a book that evolved. When I first sat down, Eden’s Shore wasn’t all there. There was a kind of sense of knowing about the ship, the feel of the ship, what it felt like to be on a seaborne vessel without an engine, deep within this wooden space. Then quite quickly, the character Angel starts hearing noises. And honestly, at that point, I just knew he heard noises. I asked myself, is this a ghost story? And then I quickly knew it wasn’t a ghost story. It became a story about capitalism, colonialism, slavery.
It evolved and evolved and I kept getting to places with characters and thinking that was the end of the story, then adding more. Soon into writing the second section, I realized I was doing something much bigger than I had expected. There was a feeling of ‘oh no’, because I had so much more that had to happen.
I’ve always been interested in that era (the late 1700s), around the French Revolution, and in Latin America, but I never thought I’d be someone who would write a book like this. It’s a dream come true to have written Eden’s Shore, but it was really a lot of work. Usually with books, I know the ending, middle, beginning, and you’re fleshing out different parts. But with Eden’s Shore, it did feel like I had to write ten novels to arrive at that one finished novel.
David Lynch’s influence on Oisín Fagan’s fiction
That’s part of the reason I reached out to you. I read Eden’s Shore and thought that this isn’t commerce. This is art. Nobody would write a book like Eden’s Shore thinking this is going to translate well to television. The best comparison I can make is to someone like David Lynch, who worked in a commercial medium like film, but everything he made was clearly art first and foremost.
David Lynch is an artist who’s very important to me. He’s one where the stories are built outward from feelings, or rooms, or moments. Watching his work again after he died, it became very clear to me that most of his movies, with the exception of maybe Elephant Man and The Straight Story, they’re just collections of scenes. Collections of incredible scenes, maybe 50 or 60 great scenes, and there’s no arc of energy increasing towards a payoff. His films don’t work like that.
He’s not following some screenwriting template where the characters are going someplace, they arrive someplace and then it closes. Storytelling doesn’t have to be that way at all, especially if you’re interested in delivering a different type of truth.
This happened quite naturally to me with Eden’s Shore. There is a straightforward story happening, but it’s happening slightly out of view. This is a thing to do with perspective and how we pay attention. For the five years I was writing Eden’s Shore I was very distrustful of straightforward narratives. I was uncomfortable with how secure people were in what they were saying in stories.
Language as chaos in Eden’s Shore
The way you handle dialogue in Eden’s Shore fascinated and at times confounded me. Characters slip between languages constantly and misunderstand each other. What motivated you to write in that way?
I am a bit of a bastard when I write. I do enjoy fucking with people, just a little bit. Not in a cruel way, but things are not always the way you want them to be.
With the dialogue, I’d never seen it done that there was a plot device that wasn’t understood because of someone’s language. When people talk about issues of translation, they’re usually talking about academic definitions, like the choice between two forms of poetry or verb tenses. But if you’ve ever been in a car that’s broken down and you’re trying to change a tire with two people who don’t understand each other, it’s simultaneously hilarious, terrifying, and very difficult.
Writing the first part of Eden’s Shore, once they get into the colony and you’re doing the historical research you’re like, my god, there were all these people from so many different parts of the world, coming together.
It was a great pleasure to write that dialogue. I would feel an affection towards a character because they spoke incorrectly and couldn’t convey their reactions. You could say that the way into some of these characters was through the mistakes they made.
I find it one of the most touching things as an English language teacher. People are really trying to express their character and you can tell what their character is, but when they’re speaking in a second or third language, the information that comes out verbally is not ideal for conveying that character. I hope that some of the things said in Eden’s Shore are a better reflection of what life is like than dialogue in novels often is.
Violence and beauty in literature
Eden’s Shore is a very violent book but also very beautiful in places. What do you see as the relationship between violence and beauty in your writing?
About the violence, that’s probably a question for my psychoanalyst. I don’t really want to look too much into that. I don’t have a psychoanalyst, which might be why I’m able to write all my books. But writers don’t really have moral responsibility. I think it’s quite embarrassing when writers think they do have a moral responsibility, when they think they can set the world to rights. I also think it’s more or less a lie.
Because of the subject and time period of Eden’s Shore, there were things I needed to depict and when you look at a moment in time closely, there is a reality to the situation. The situation of slavery was one of immense violence, an astonishing violence. Compared to the research that I conducted into those slave ships, the violence isn’t a lot toned down, but I definitely did not give voice to all the violence taking place there.
To me, there’s beauty in the world, and there’s violence in the world. Those are facts. Eden’s Shore became a story about intensity. I spent years writing it because I wanted to capture the intensity of what it is to be alive.
Why writers have no moral responsibility
When you say that writers don’t have a moral responsibility, that’s something I feel keenly. In my view, an artist’s only responsibility is to make great art. To self-censor before someone else has a chance to engage with the thing you’ve created feels incredibly self-defeating.
I’m astonished that so many writers have bought into it. With a lot of stories published in recent years, it’s like they already knew what the answer was going to be before they sat down to write it. That, to me, is not art. Art is the invention and the unknown.
You have literally no power as a writer. All you have is the ability to connect with another individual, and even then, in a way that you can’t really understand. Trying to educate your reader, telling them that something was wrong or how they should feel, at that point all the energy is sucked out of the room.
The idea of art is basically under attack. The main problem is that people just don’t care. That’s the main one, they have too many things competing for their time to think about it. They consume it and they are tired and they immediately want to turn it into something else rather than sit with it and let it grow. It has to turn into an opinion, a tweet, a judgement. Another huge problem is that people are treating art as if it were reality rather than something that comes from reality and then they expect reality to function like narrative art. This is a pretty basic and huge category error. But, a smaller problem, and one that is my concern is that art is under attack from artists themselves, who are drawing straight lines between their life and their art, or their art and contemporary media events.
It is very obvious to me that transgression will always exist and must always exist. Really, the only place where we can definitely be certain it belongs is in art. We know the struggles artists have had throughout the centuries with censorship, not only in writing about power and violence, but also sex. Things like Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, these deep psychological studies of mental illness, are great gifts of mankind and they do involve darkness and transgression.
I totally understand people who don’t want to be exposed to violence in art. I don’t want people being accidentally exposed to violence in literature. I have no reason to want to offend people. But the idea that it has no place in literature is bizarre to me. The only place we can be certain violence has a place is in art. Everywhere else, it’s up for debate.
Becoming a writer as religious calling
What motivated you to become a writer?
I definitely wanted to write from a very young age. When I was 10 or 12, I loved reading so much. I couldn’t believe how much I loved it. I wanted to be a writer and it was a dream that was almost too big for me.
Writing was always there. In so far as I have an identity, reading was the identity for most of my life. To be a part of that broader conversation in literature, it was the most exciting thing. It’s my religion. It’s what is the deepest thing in me.
The more you write and the better you get at writing, the more you are unable to hide who you are, in a very deep way. It became this form of exploration of the world and myself.
From novels to film: future collaborations
Would you ever work in film or another medium?
I would love to work in film. I’d love to write screenplays. If I got some things in order, even directing would be very exciting for me. But novels, they take a long time. The time you give them is intense, years and years and hours and hours. Novels are capacious. They can eat everything. If you have a film idea or a visual idea, the novel can eat them. It’s like a huge omnivore.
I met a screenwriter once who had sold 26 screenplays and not one of them had ever gone into development. Seeing that that could happen, it scared me shitless, but I feel a bit differently now. I’m more interested in playing that kind of game. I did get to write Eden’s Shore and Nobber. I feel like I’ve been able to express myself, what I felt inside. I become more interested in collaboration as I grow older.
The magic beyond understanding
We’re nearly out of time, but I wondered if you had any final thoughts about the creative process and what drives the creation of a book like Eden’s Shore?
What’s magical about art, Freud said about dreams, there’s always two or three things that relate to the person’s life and then there’s a fourth point that spirals into infinity and has no relation to anything. That’s kind of like with a book, you can map a lot of stuff onto the character, the person, the research, narrative forms, whatever, but there’s always a point that it becomes beyond understanding. Sometimes you’re writing a story and you ask yourself, what the fuck is this? As a reader, you get that as well. It’s never known. There’s always a bit that spirals off into something else. Which is the great excitement of it.
Eden’s Shore was first published by John Murray Press, 10 April 2025.
Thanks for reading. I’m P M Buchan, a former comic-book writer and lover of horror and dark art. I’ve written monthly columns and comic strips for Starburst and SCREAM: The Horror Magazine. I’ve collaborated with award-winning artists including John Pearson, Martin Simmonds and Ben Templesmith, and have been interviewed by Kerrang! and Rue Morgue. My work has been reviewed by Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fortean Times and Times Literary Supplement. I’ve collaborated with bands including Megadeth and Harley Poe, and written for clients including Lionsgate and Heavy Metal Magazine.