Credit: Jany Monroy Trujillo
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Tim MacGabhann: From Kilkenny to Mexico City Having published his second novel in two years in July 2020, Kilkenny native Tim MacGabhann has a carved a niche for himself as a writer of well-crafted literary thrillers set in Latin America with both Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere. He speaks to Odrán Waldron about Mexico, the transition from journalism to fiction and the “pornographic” consumption of violence from his adopted homeland. Now settled in Mexico City, having first moved there in the mid-2010s and returned to Europe for a year spent attaining an MA in the University of East Anglia, MacGabhann recalls what it was that had drawn him to the country in the first place. Having spoken previously about how an encyclopaedia in his grandparents’ house had imprinted the image of Mexican murals upon his young brain, MacGabhann traces the timeline between his first viewing of those pictures and the eventual, inevitable move. “I had a really misspent adolescence; I studied quite hard and went to the gym a lot. I used to just sit down reading the paper after the gym before going back to study and any time there was anything in the news about Mexico, I would just hoover it up from the age of about 15,” he
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says. “The Calderón period, the ‘drug war’, kicked off when I was 17. I remember seeing photos of people my age navigating heavy army presences on their walk to school and that jarring feeling of an intensely militarised setting. The soldiers looked like the lads from [Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 futuristic satire of fascism] Starship Troopers, they looked like they were from the future. It looked like the future of war, the persecution of civilians in totally normal settings for somewhat accidental reasons. It was such a jarring thing to see this place, that I had idealised as a safe haven in my head, so threatened. It felt like a personal insult even though I had no skin in the game.” MacGabhann was further immersed in the Mexican culture that was becoming a constant in his life as a child when
visiting an aunt with Mexican family with his parents, who had lived in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Visiting Redondo Beach, Long Beach and Downtown Los Angeles, noted for its similarities to Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, he recalls his impressions: “I remember walking around with my cousins and aunts and uncles and felt really close and embraced, quite warm sitting there on the beach and seeing Chicano culture unrolling across the sand. It felt like a version of Ireland somehow; the family stuff was a bit happier looking, without that John McGahern twistedness that we have at home. It felt a bit freer, like an alternative. It was so interesting to see things that were so different from your own culture but filled with similarities.” The young MacGabhann who idealised Mexico grew up and moved on to Trinity
