Harrison, Phil
WORK TITLE: The First Day
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Belfast
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2017138836 |
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2017138836 |
| HEADING: | Harrison, Phil (Novelist) |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Harrison, Phil |c (Novelist) |
| 370 | __ |e Belfast (Northern Ireland) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Fiction |a Motion pictures |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Authors |a Screenwriters |a Motion picture producers and directors |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a male |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Harrison, Phil. The first day, 2017: |b title page (Phil Harrison) book jacket flap (Phil Harrison’s first feature film, The Good Man, was released in 2012. An earlier short, Even Gods, won awards at the Belfast, Galway, and Cork Film Festivals in 2011, and was a finalist for the best short script at the 2012 Irish Sceenwriting Awards. The First Day is his debut novel. He lives in Belfast.) |
| 670 | __ |a IMDb, Oct. 25, 2017 |b (Phil Harrison, producer, director, and writer) |
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
- Home - Belfast, Northern Ireland.
CAREER
Screenwriter, producer, director, and author.
AVOCATIONS:Football (soccer), music.
AWARDS:Short Film Award, Cork Film Festival, 2011, for “Even Gods”; Short Film Award, Galway Film Festival, 2011, for “Even Gods”; Short Film Award, Belfast Film Festival, 2011, for “Even Gods.”
WRITINGS
- The First Day (novel), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston, MA), 2017
The Good Man (screenplay), 2014.
SIDELIGHTS
Prior to launching his writing career, Phil Harrison worked in the film industry, where he earned major acclaim. One of his works was nominated under the Irish Screenwriting Awards’ “best short script” category in the year 2012, and was granted prizes at the Cork Film Festival, Galway Film Festival, and Belfast Film Festival the year prior. Harrison has since ventured into the world of fiction. In the year 2010, he received a Michael McLaverty Short Story Award nomination for “They Must Be Sought Abroad,” one of his pieces of short fiction.
The First Day serves as Harrison’s introductory novel. In an interview featured on the Litro website, Harrison explained that the novel was partly informed by his own childhood experiences. He spent his youth residing in a community with deep religious roots, and used The First Day as a means of painting a portrait of the experiences and people he came across during that period of his life. On the Blog Critics website, Harrison told interviewer Adriana Delgado that the works of writer Samuel Beckett also influenced the book.
The First Day focuses on a protagonist by the name of Samuel Orr. At the start of the novel, Orr is living a simple, devout life as a preacher and family man. However, everything begins to change rapidly for him when he meets a woman by the name of Anna Stuart, who happens to be twelve years his junior. Orr finds himself engulfed in tumultuous feelings of attraction towards Anna, who reciprocates his affections and is especially drawn in by his viewpoint of the world. Alongside their physical interest in one another comes an equal attraction in terms of their minds and philosophies, as the two come to bond over their discussions about the world around them. The two continue to meet in secret until Anna conceives Orr’s child, forcing him to bring his actions out into the open. However, tragedy strikes Orr’s family soon after, leaving him a widower who must care for his sons alone. Philip, the oldest of Orr’s sons, is especially affected by the sudden change in his family. He becomes emotionally disturbed and enraged, and soon comes to point his aggression toward Anna and Orr’s new son, also called Samuel.
Years pass, and relationships between Anna, Samuel, and his family shift and decay. Anna and Orr separate after the birth of their son, and Anna is able to find love again elsewhere. Samuel has come to live with and care for his father during adulthood; he spends his days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is gainfully employed. One day he encounters the estranged Philip, who still harbors anger and resentment toward both the younger Samuel and their father. Philip is not finished with his campaign against the older and younger Samuels, who are still dealing in their own ways with what Philip did all those years ago. All of the men must come to grips with their situation and the scars that have been left behind, as well as try to find a way to move forward as best they can. One Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Harrison’s elegant prose and deeply felt characters create a novel with a fiercely beating heart.” In an issue of Booklist, Kathy Sexton expressed that “The First Day is an impressive debut.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented: “Harrison’s remarkable writing elevates a story that is all the more powerful for its eschewing of easy answers and resolution.” On the Irish Times Online, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne wrote: “It is a wonderful debut, as the blurbs say.” She also called the book “a fully engaging, well-written, very imaginative novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Kathy Sexton, review of The First Day, p. 44.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of The First Day.
Publishers Weekly, August 21, 2017, review of The First Day, p. 80.
ONLINE
Blog Critics, https://blogcritics.org/ (November 5, 2017), Adriana Delgado, “Interview: Phil Harrison, Author of ‘The First Day,’” author interview.
Bookreporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (April 27, 2018), author profile and summary of The First Day.
Bookseller, https://www.thebookseller.com/ (November 16, 2016), Katherine Cowdrey, “Fleet acquires filmmaker Harrison’s debut The First Day.”
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (July 8, 2017), Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, “The First Day review: an East Belfast story caught in a time warp.”
Litro, https://www.litro.co.uk/ (October 20, 2017), Camillus John, “Interview with Phil Harrison: Author of The First Day and Staunch Pats Fan,” author interview.
- The First Day - 2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, https://smile.amazon.com/First-Day-Phil-Harrison/dp/132884966X/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1523759782&sr=8-1&keywords=Harrison%2C+Phil
- The Bookseller - https://www.thebookseller.com/news/fleet-acquires-filmmaker-phil-harrisons-debut-first-day-431526
Fleet acquires filmmaker Harrison's debut The First Day
Published November 16, 2016 by Katherine CowdreyFleet has acquired a debut novel The First Day, introducing its author, filmmaker Phil Harrison, as a "major new voice".
Ursula Doyle, publisher of Fleet, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Nicola Barr at Greene and Heaton. Fleet will publish in hardback in summer 2017.
The First Day, set in 2012 between Belfast and New York, is described as "a short, intense, questioning novel about marriage, love, family and religion". It features Samuel Orr, a married pastor who meets Anna, a young Beckett scholar, and falls in love. They embark on a "passionate and intense" affair, with "violent and shocking consequences" that reverberate through the generations. His sons – from his marriage and his new relationship – briefly grow up together, until another "unthinkable act" changes the course of their lives again. It isn't until decades later, in New York, that the brothers must finally face each other.
Doyle said: "The First Day is a short, intense, questioning novel about marriage, love, family and religion. I am delighted to be publishing this brilliant novel on the Fleet list. Phil Harrison is a really exciting, major new voice."
Harrison is a filmmaker and lives in Belfast. His first feature, "The Good Man", starring Aidan Gillen, was released in 2014. His earlier short, "Even Gods", won the short film award at the Belfast, Galway and Cork Film Festivals in 2011, and was shortlisted for the best short script at the 2012 Irish Screenwriting Awards. His short story ‘They Must be Sought Abroad’ was shortlisted for the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award in 2010.
He commented: "It's a real delight to be working with Ursula Doyle, and Fleet – The First Day is a novel that's been a few years in the making – written (and set) in Belfast and New York – I'm looking forward to see it make its way into the world."
- Litro - https://www.litro.co.uk/2017/10/interview-phil-harrison-author-first-day-staunch-pats-fan/
Interview with Phil Harrison: Author of The First Day and Staunch Pats Fan
Camillus Johnby Camillus John
• 20th October 2017 • 1 Comment
Interview with Phil Harrison: Author of The First Day and Staunch Pats FanAs soon as I heard the bass bamboo flute coming in and echoing the opening trumpet statement of Sadhanipa, the second piece of music in Ravi Shankar & Philip Glass’s composition, Passages, I immediately thought of Phil Harrison’s debut novel, The First Day, which I’d reviewed in this organ quite recently.
This was a live BBC Proms 2017 performance of the album, Passages, originally recorded back in 1990, with Karen Kamensek as conductor, and Ravi Shankar’s daughter, Anoushka, on sitar. The composition is a delicate interweaving of Philip Glass’s American Minimalism with traditional Hindustani classical music. At first glance, and before hearing a single note, this appears to be a unlikely cultural hodgepodge slap-dashed onto coffee-stained manuscript sheets at half three in the middle of the night, but actually works astoundingly well. Like Phil Harrison’s character, Orr, when he ends up in New York in the second half of the novel. Who knew? In fact, after now listening to the composition in its entirety at this stage twice through con brio, left finger in the ear, I’m convinced Phil Harrison’s novel was inspired and pencilled accordingly from this beautifully profound piece of music. And vice versa.
Passages Track listing:
Offering
Sadhanipa
Channels and winds
Ragas in a Minor Scale
Meeting along the edge
Prashanti (peacefulness)The conductor, Karen Kamensek, has said that because there’s a ginormous meditative element as part of the Indian tradition and also a ginormous meditative element as part of the Minimalist tradition, in this composition, Passages, there’s a beginning meditation and an ending meditation. Both ginormous. And so too, Phil Harrison’s novel.
Anoushka Shankar has said that Passages ends on a really peaceful note after a lot of drama and dark moments. And so too, Phil Harrison’s novel. Prashanti (peacefulness), the final part of Passages, ends with the Vedic Prayer –
“Oh, Lord. Be benevolent to us. Drive the darkness away. Shed upon us the light of wisdom. Take the jealousy, envy, greed and anger from us, and fill our hearts with love and peace.”
*
Has the story behind this novel been around your head for any length of time screaming to get out?
I wouldn’t say the story as such, but certainly some of the ideas. How far can a person go while equally committed to both his faith and his desire? To what extent does faith and/or desire compromise autonomy?
Did you write many drafts of the novel?
I wrote a couple. The first one had a completely different second half. I liked it, but it didn’t really work – I had let the key characters drift too far from the primary concerns established at the beginning of the book. I threw out 35,000 words – that was a fun day – and started again.
Did you consider telling the story from another character’s perspective?
Not really, though it took a while to get the voice right, and – without giving too much away – the shift in perspective during the book. Even the question of address – not only who is speaking, but to whom, and why – was puzzling. I don’t think I really answered the latter question – but I think the unsettled question helped me get some energy in, which feels vital.
The structure of the novel in two parts and two locations is handled expertly. Your film, The Good Man, which is set in Belfast and Capetown, also uses this technique. Is this an important aspect of your work?
I like dislocation – I’ve spent much of my adult life moving from place to place, living in a few different countries (Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, the US). I prefer character to be revealed than described – putting people into scenarios and seeing what they do.
Did any real life experiences or people inspire this novel?
Not specific people; there were no models for characters. But I grew up in a small religious community not unlike Orr’s – and the various complications and frustrations and kindnesses of that have stayed with me long after I abandoned my faith. I wanted to take those people and that faith seriously, in all their generous, flawed humanity. So in many ways the book is rooted there.
What are the main themes that come up constantly in your writing (if any)?
I’m interested in how people hide from themselves and each other. There are almost no lengths to which people will not go to protect themselves from their own desire. I’m interested in just how possible it is to live as an individual – as Kierkegaard says, to stand on your own before God (or Sartre: before the emptiness of the universe). How possible is it to create your own meaning rather than hand over authority to someone else to do it for you? And what would that look like?
What do you want to achieve when you write? Entertain? Change the world? Write well? Something else? Take this in the context of what you said in a past interview, ‘[I] became increasingly interested in the role of creativity in protest and struggle: how people use photography, poetry, film, music to articulate ideas of identity which move away from and subvert those foisted on them.’
A great question. When I was younger I would have been very explicit about the political content of anything I wrote/created. I’m a progressive, a socialist – I want to see the world made fairer, injustices addressed. One of my favourite pieces of poetry is from Mary’s prayer in the Gospel of Luke: He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. But I’m increasingly sceptical of forcing characters into simple political positions, or using them as pawns to make a political point. I’m much more interested in taking characters’ internal lives seriously, with all the complexity and political confusion that entails. I guess that makes me a psychological realist – though as Freud pointed out, realism is a very wide term when it comes to the unconscious. Which pushes me further into the question of form: what way of combining words does justice to the messy human experience?
Are there any no-nos for you in your writing?
Using Comic Sans.
How has your background in film influenced this novel’s pace and structure? Any plans for a screenplay?
No doubt. As mentioned before, I am much more interested in having characters do things than in telling people what they are like – which you have to do in cinema. I’ll definitely write for film again.
Art plays a significant role in this novel (painting, poetry, etc.). A transformative role. It’s remarked in the novel to Sam when he’s working at The Met that painting died as an art form before he was born. Would you like to elaborate on this?
Art seems to me fundamental to the question above of how to be an individual. Art for me is distinct from entertainment; as a way to go deeper into the experience of life rather than distract ourselves. And painting, for me, holds a kind of anachronistic vigour – slow, patient, flat in a world of speed and short attention spans. Unfortunately I can’t paint for shit.
There are many references in the novel to classical music of a relatively more modernist period, in contrast to Sam’s interest in the old masters and the impressionist era. Is this significant?
I’m obsessed with the music Sam listens to: Arvo Pärt, Tavener, Gorecki. But I also love Mos Def, Four Tet, Fela. Bring it all on.
Would you consider yourself working class or middle class and is this relevant for you in your writing practice?
Ha. I was brought up working class, but went to good schools and now have a master’s degree. What does that make me? I’m not particularly interested in the answer to that – but my allegiances and commitments are to the excluded, the outsider, those on the margins.
Is your outlook on life hopeful or despondent or something else entirely?
It seems to me people tend to fall into one of three approaches to life and meaning: repressed (there is a meaning and I must find it – God, nationalism, whatever); tragic (there is no meaning and that’s fucking awful); or comic (there is no meaning – haha, let’s go make some). I go for the comic.
What’s the most influential piece of writing you’ve read?
Probably – quelle surprise – the bible. But also Annie Dillard, Freud, Kafka, and Shoot Magazine.
What’s the last fiction you’ve read?
I’m going to not be a dick and just talk about the last *good* fiction I read: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom.
Are you working on something new at the moment?
Halfway through a new novel, more or less.
I note that you’ve played football to a very high level and you’re a Liverpool fan. When will they win the Premiership?
When I win the Booker. Don’t hold your breath.
A friend (and fellow Pats fan) of mine is a staunch Ards fan (he’s originally from near the area but moved to Dublin a few years ago). That makes me an Ards fan too seeing as though I’ve no other football connections with Northern Ireland other than that. Quid pro quo. He’s a Pats fan. I’m an Ards fan. My question is this; if you don’t support a League of Ireland team already then would you consider making your team in the south, Pats? (He says chancing his arm).
Count me in. I want a scarf though.
Camillus John
Camillus John
Camillus John was bored and braised in Dublin, Ireland. He has had work published in The Stinging Fly, RTE Ten, Headstuff.org, The Lonely Crowd, Thoughtful Dog, Honest Ulsterman, The Cantabrigian, The Bogman’s Cannon, The Queen’s Head, Litro, Fictive Dream and other such organs of literature. He would also like to mention that Pat’s won the FAI cup in 2014 for the first time in 53 miserable years of not winning it. - Book Reporter - https://www.bookreporter.com/authors/phil-harrison
Biography
Phil HarrisonPhil Harrison's first feature film, The Good Man, was released in 2014. His earlier short, Even Gods, won the short film award at the Belfast, Galway and Cork Film Festivals in 2011, and was short-listed for the best short script at the 2012 Irish Screenwriting Awards. He lives in Belfast. THE FIRST DAY is his debut novel.
Photo Credit: © Tim Millen
Phil Harrison
Books by Phil Harrison
The First Day
by Phil Harrison - FictionOutside an east Belfast mission hall, pastor and family man Samuel Orr meets Anna, a young Beckett scholar. They embark on an intense, passionate affair, their connection fueled by their respective love of Christ and Beckett. When Anna falls pregnant, the affair is revealed. The repercussions are slow to emerge but inescapable, and the fallout when it finally comes is shocking, cruel and violent. Over 30 years later, their son Sam is in New York, living a steady, guarded life, his childhood and family safely abandoned. But the sins of the fathers are visited often on their children, and the past crashes into his life as violently as in his youth. He is forced to confront the fears he has kept close all these years.
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Harrison, Phil: THE FIRST DAY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Harrison, Phil THE FIRST DAY Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Adult Fiction) $23.00 10, 24 ISBN: 978-1-328-84966-3
Irish filmmaker Harrison's cerebral yet emotional first novel shows how a "brief moment of continuity between two lovers" can have stark and long-lasting consequences.In 2012 Belfast, deeply religious 38-year-old car mechanic-turned-preacher Samuel Orr, a happily married father of three young sons, falls into a passionate if unlikely affair with 26-year-old Anna Stuart, a Beckett scholar at Queen's University. Their sexual attraction burns with fervor, but Harrison also wants his readers to view the affair in philosophical terms with his references to Beckett and transgressive literary philosopher Georges Bataille. An academic intellectual with poetic leanings, Anna is drawn to the way Orr sees "no line between the sacred and the profane." When she becomes pregnant, Orr tells his wife straightforwardly about the affair while acknowledging that he doesn't know what he plans to do. He continues to see Anna yet remains stalwart in his faith in God and himself. Then Orr's wife dies--whether accidentally or on purpose is left unclear--when struck by a train. Orr's oldest son, 12-year-old Philip, begins to demonstrate a quiet fury against his father; Anna senses the boy embodies his father's sense of guilt. When Anna's baby, named Samuel after both Beckett and Orr, is almost a year old, Orr breaks off their relationship. Philip's rage against his father becomes psychological warfare that culminates in violence. Cut ahead 35 years to a near, non-science-fiction future. Philip has disappeared. Anna has become an accomplished poet and married an artist. Sam Orr works at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and has brought his father, Samuel, now a blind old man, from Ireland to live with him. One day Philip shows up at the museum, and the careful world Sam, a repressed gay man, has erected shatters. The three Orrs must face their capacity for faith, vengeance, and forgiveness as well as their bonds of family love. Despite the borderline pretentious discussions of philosophy and theology, Harrison's elegant prose and deeply felt characters create a novel with a fiercely beating heart.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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"Harrison, Phil: THE FIRST DAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364959/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=528311dd. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364959
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The First Day
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p44. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The First Day. By Phil Harrison. Oct. 2017. 224p. HMH, $23 (9781328849663).
Harrison's first novel is a quiet yet suspenseful look at the lasting repercussions of traumatic events. Part 1 begins in Belfast, where Samuel Orr is a married pastor with three children. He meets Anna, and the two share an intellectual attraction that leads to an intense affair resulting in pregnancy. After Orr confesses, his oldest son, Philip, begins a menacing campaign of revenge that results in an act of violence aimed at Anna and Orr's young son, Samuel, who trusts and loves Philip. Part 2, 35 years later, finds the younger Samuel in New York, still suffering the effects of Philip's betrayal though he hasn't seen him since. The past invades the present, however, and Samuel and Orr are once again the targets of Philip's long-simmering anger. The two parts are very different, shifting from meditative third-person narration to foreboding first- person narration, but Harrison's writing is lyrical and engaging throughout, and he does an excellent job of building tension. Despite minimally drawn secondary characters and a too-pat ending, The First Day is an impressive debut.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The First Day." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 44. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161554/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2eca1b12. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161554
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The First Day
Publishers Weekly.
264.34 (Aug. 21, 2017): p80. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The First Day
Phil Harrison. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23 (224p) ISBN 978-1-328-84966-3
Harrison's deeply disturbing, morally challenging first novel opens as Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher, falls headlong into a love affair with Anna, a young poet and student of Samuel Beckett. Orr is a man of profound faith and Anna is a thoughtful scholar. Each makes a worthy partner for the other, and together they contemplate the absurd, mysterious world around them. The first pages track the beginning of their affair and are an elegiac tribute to love, to "that brief moment of continuity between two lovers." But their transgressive love has tragic consequences. After Anna becomes pregnant, and Orr confesses to his wife and later to his congregation, knowledge of the affair will irrevocably change everyone involved. The book concentrates in particular on the suffering of Orr's oldest son, Philip, and of his half-brother, Samuel, the love child, "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children." A calculated and violent vengeance is meted out by Philip in the first half of the book, and terrifying, creepy aftershocks continue to reverberate in the lives of the grown-up Samuel and his enfeebled father, living together in New York City decades later. Harrison's remarkable writing elevates a story that is all the more powerful for its eschewing of easy answers and resolution. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The First Day." Publishers Weekly, 21 Aug. 2017, p. 80. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717272/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=781b7ae7. Accessed 14 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717272
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- The Irish Times
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-first-day-review-an-east-belfast-story-caught-in-a-time-warp-1.3142053
Word count: 855The First Day review: an East Belfast story caught in a time warp
Phil Harrison’s debut is a fully engaging, well-written, very imaginative novel
Phil Harrison’s book is a thoroughly readable, entertaining novel.Phil Harrison’s book is a thoroughly readable, entertaining novel.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Sat, Jul 8, 2017, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Jul 8, 2017, 06:00Book Title:
The First DayISBN-13:
978-0708898550Author:
Phil HarrisonPublisher:
FleetGuideline Price:
€12.99Samuel Orr is the pastor of a small mission hall in East Belfast. He is married, the father of three children. He falls in love with Anna, a 26-year-old Beckett scholar and poet, who lectures at Queen’s. They have an affair, she becomes pregnant. Various considerably less-predictable events occur as the novel unfolds and moves to its unpredictable but not unsatisfactory conclusion.
The story is set over a period of about 45 years. The main section, focusing on the affair, occurs between 2010 and 2016. Although dates are not mentioned, and the tone is not at all futuristic, the final section seems to be set about 2035. This final section is narrated in the first person by the person who, we discover, has actually been narrating the entire story until then, but in the third person – I don’t want to reveal who it is, since the revelation is one of the novel’s interesting surprise effects.
It’s a most unusual novel, which seems to be playing with our perspectives and assumptions about time. For instance, although it is set in more or less present day Belfast, the mood of that section seems very old fashioned. This may be the point: Samuel Orr, devoted to the Bible, is in a time warp. He is an emotional and moral extremist.
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Portrait of Philip IV (Valladolid, 1605-1665), King of Spain. Painting by Diego Velasquez (1599-1660)Painter to the King by Amy Sackville review – dense and rich and well worth readingThe relationship with Anna is conducted in utmost secrecy, until the moment when he decides to make a public announcement about it, with disastrous consequences. The early part of the novel is written in powerful poetic prose, and with the detailed analysis of emotion, the understanding of how body and mind interact, strongly reminiscent of DH Lawrence. Indeed I wondered if Anna were named after one of the main characters in that novel?
“The movement into motherhood, for Anna, was less like journeying into another country than like discovering in her own home a room she never knew existed, furnished already and comfortable. She noted that her senses changed, physically; her hearing became more acute, attuned to the sounds of her child’s cries and movements . . . As she grew accustomed to looking at him, the faces of others, of Orr himself, grew grotesque, ugly. They were outsized, the child’s face the new measure of everything.” (page 60)
Change of writingMuch more Lawrence than Beckett. The richness of the prose and the close analysis of feeling is not sustained for the entire novel. About half-way through, it becomes more of a thriller or mystery story than a deep psychological novel, and the writing changes correspondingly, becoming somewhat thinner.
However, it continues to engage. It’s a thoroughly readable, entertaining novel.
Some details challenge credibility and some readers may find this irritating. Anna’s stellar career – she has published her PhD by the time she is 26 – is taken completely for granted. During her maternity leave, she submits a number of papers to a conference in Barcelona. (Usually one is enough, even if you’re not on maternity leave.) The third section of the novel, in New York in 2036, is perhaps the most risky. The author has not bothered to depict the city as in any way different from right now. There are no attempts at futuristic fantasy. Instead everything is just as it is now – young Irish artistic types have residencies at small universities, people sit outside cafes drinking coffee and smoking. Sam even uses Facebook, and has a mobile phone. The author is to be commended for not bothering to invent gimmicks. In this case, by being realistic he is being unrealistic – Facebook won’t survive for 30 years, whatever about cafes and Irish artists, and New York. This refusal to engage with imagining a future as any different from now is, curiously, one of the novel’s most innovative aspects.
It is a wonderful debut, as the blurbs say. A fully engaging, well-written, very imaginative novel.
- Blog Critics
https://blogcritics.org/interview-phil-harrison-author-first-day/
Word count: 1370Interview: Phil Harrison, Author of ‘The First Day’
Adriana Delgado November 5, 2017 Comments Off on Interview: Phil Harrison, Author of ‘The First Day’ 53 Views
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Many novels have dealt with the subject of forbidden passions and love affairs that have disastrous consequences not only for the unruly lovers, but also for the people around them. In The First Day, Irish author Phil Harrison’s debut, the story not only depicts the beginning and eventual end of a relationship between Samuel Orr, a married pastor with children, and Anna Stuart, a young Beckett academic, but narrates the initial love between them as a poetic merge of the often antagonistic sides of philosophy and religion.
Despite the wide age gap between Orr and Anna, they are by no means intellectually mismatched. Theirs is a love affair not only of the body, but also of the mind. The scenes of heated lovemaking are paired off with profound discussions about God, faith and Samuel Beckett’s poetry.
Phil Harrison, author of ‘The First Day.’ Photo: Tim Millen
Harrison’s prose often recalls the style of other contemporary Irish fiction writers like Eimear McBride and Anne Enright, although stream of consciousness isn’t as much a dominant presence as the absence of quotation marks, a frequent enough literary device of Irish literature which reportedly doesn’t appeal to all. In The First Day, this narrative recourse is fitting in conveying to the reader the speed at which Orr and Anna fall in love, the acceleration of their relationship, Anna becoming pregnant with Orr’s child and the eventual aftermath.In the second part of the novel, it is Anna and Orr’s son Samuel who takes over the narrative, creating not only a time jump of a few decades, but also a change of narrative pace. The clear differentiation between Samuel’s life and that of his parents, a legacy that he both embraces and blatantly rejects, is a clear demonstration of Harrison’s talent as a writer.
In an email interview, I asked Phil Harrison about the initial ideas behind The First Day, his experience as a screenwriter, and his personal take on Samuel Beckett.
There’s an ode to Beckett throughout the novel, even in the main characters’ name. Why did Beckett in particular resonate with you as a kind of muse for this novel?
It seems to me people tend to fall into one of three approaches to life and meaning: repressed (there is a meaning and I must find it – God, nationalism, whatever); tragic (there is no meaning and that’s fucking awful); or comic (there is no meaning, “haha, let’s go make some”). I learned a lot from Beckett about the last two, but especially the latter, the necessity of finding joy, or even just humour, in darkness. The novel feels to me less about finding meaning than making it, or perhaps finding that you need to make it.
This is your first novel, but you’ve written screenplays previously. How is the process different?
Writing screenplays has definitely informed my prose. I am much more interested in having characters do things than in telling people what they are like, which you have to do in cinema. But the question of voice, who is speaking and to whom, and what are they not saying, etc., all of these are more interesting questions in a novel, and afford a writer more space to play with, and rope to hang himself.
There’s a duality between religious faith and atheism in the novel in the characters of Orr and Anna that mirrors Beckett’s own seeming beliefs in Christianity as mythology. Is Orr and Anna’s affair perhaps a conflagration of the two?
I like that reading. There is surely something of that going on in their relationship. I think God is less what you believe in than what you worship – and in that sense, whether there’s a presence in the sky somewhere or not, there are gods everywhere – everybody worships something, or gives their authority to something. Whatever else it is doing, the novel is exploring this idea of how authority works, of the gods people name and the ones they don’t.
Anna and Orr’s relationship sets off a series of events that not only affect their own lives but that of Orr’s children, particularly Philip and Samuel. Was their affair a catalyst for everything that happens later, or was it rather a consequence of Orr’s desire for Anna?
I don’t know that I could answer that any better than you. Contingency is everywhere – there’s no sense that things had to work out as they did, simply that one thing tends to follow another until you end up there and not here. Anna has as much agency as Orr, albeit with a quieter, less brazen effect. Again, there’s that open question of control – what do we do when we try to control our lives, and what happens when we realize we can’t? Do we call that failure, or something else? What else might we do with our lives, or our children’s lives, than try to control them?
All the characters in the novel are extremely complex, and in a way, difficult to understand completely. Which character was the most challenging for you personally?
I’m pleased to hear the characters described that way, knowable only up to a point. Sam was probably the most difficult to write. The story is in some sense about his negotiating his own autonomy, in the light of his memories and alongside the omnipresence of his father. He had to be articulate and yet also have limitations, both to what he knows and how he thinks about what he knows.
Would you say the novel is a statement on religion? Infidelity? Desire? Faith? Philosophy? Sin?
It’s all in there I’d say. I hope though it’s primarily a story about specific people negotiating their messy situations in their own idiosyncratic ways; the effectiveness of any considerations of any of the subjects you mention emerging from the characters themselves and their interactions. If there’s one question that keeps emerging for me in the narrative, and to which I keep returning: how do you be an individual?
The novel ends in not just an unexpected way but also thought provoking. Did you have it planned out from the start or did it change as you wrote?
I’d no idea at all how it was going to end until I arrived. The characters seemed to be moving in some direction I had to follow. This is absurd, of course, in that they did nothing I didn’t make them do. But it’s the weird paradox of writing, I guess. You can make up anything you want, but truth still somehow exists, insists on being heard.
Tell me a bit about your future projects. Is there another novel in the works, or screenplays?
I’m playing around with a few screenplay ideas, mostly collaboratively, which will be interesting. But my main focus is a new novel. I’m about halfway through, I think. Though I’m not sure how I’d even know that. The future is unwritten.
Tags author interview fiction Irish authors Phil Harrison The First day
About Adriana Delgado
Adriana Delgado is a freelance journalist, with published reviews on independent and foreign films in publications such as Cineaction magazine and on Artfilmfile.com. She also works as an Editorial News Assistant for the Palm Beach Daily News (A.K.A. The Shiny Sheet) and contributes with book reviews for the well-known publication, Library Journal.