In 1982, wealthy socialite Malcolm Macarthur shocked Ireland with a brutal double murder. 40 years later, he's finally breaking his silence in a new book. Author Mark O'Connell explains what it was like to receive 'the dark gift' of Macarthur's story
of the case just came out. The hunger to hear more about the case is still there. It’s never far from the cultural conversation. This has to do with the combination of political scandal and the extraordinary figure of Macarthur himself, but the difficulty has been getting him to talk. My book is different in that Macarthur himself is present on the page. And there's an engagement with him as a person, which has never happened before.
You mentioned John Banville, the Booker Prize-winning author who wrote a Macarthur-like character in his critically acclaimed novel,Fiction is absolutely at the centre of the book. I couldn't have written about this case had I not done a Ph.D. on the novels of John Banville. That former life is crucial to the book itself, and to my desire to write it in the first place.
I talk about being a prospector at one point in the book, which is a self-revealing metaphor. It captures this sense of guilt about the process of extracting Macarthur’s story, as well as telling the story of people who were murdered. It's sort of like panning. You're sitting at the river and panning for nuggets of gold. You spend a long time sifting out the mud and the silt, but the gold is there.pointed a gun at her and told her to get into a car.
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