The writing game, in Gothic style

Neil Jordan is best known in the United States as the writer and/or director of "The Crying Game," "Mona Lisa," and "Interview With the Vampire." In his native Ireland, where he published his first book at 25, he is also known as a fiction writer. It's been 10 years between the release of his previous book, "Sunrise With Sea Monster," and this fall's "Shade," but Jordan considers himself a working author.

Although Jordan says "Shade" was influenced by the Irish Gothic tradition, moviegoers may recognize the film-noir device in which the story is narrated by a corpse. "I know exactly when I died" is the novel's provocative first sentence. We learn that Nina, a middle-aged actress, has returned to her childhood home at the mouth of the Boyne River, north of Dublin. She becomes the victim of a disturbed childhood friend, who murders her and leaves her body in a septic tank near the tributary. She is an unusual ghost, able to haunt her childhood self and merge with the mythical landscape of the river.

Jordan spoke from his home in Dublin.

Q: You took off two years of filming to work on "Shade." Is time the biggest obstacle between you and writing fiction?

A: Yeah. I think it's most people's. I can't do two things at once. It's different to write a novel. It's a different kind of beast.

Q: Had the story been percolating in your head for a while?

A: I had this image of a woman who had been haunted by her own ghost. I had this idea that as a child she had imaginary friends. The idea that when she dies she sees herself as a child and the child sees her. She was her own ghost -- the act of haunting her own self.

Q: It's not a coincidence that "Shade" takes place at the mouth of a river?

A: There's this idea that her body is out to sea and her self is stuck in the tidal sludge. . . . I set it around this river [the Boyne]; it has quite a rich landscape in terms of historical lore. . . . I knew the landscape very well. I was born in 1950, so I had [Nina] die the year I was born. It was very interesting to tell a ghost story.

Q: Why did you use a dead woman as a narrator? Was the appeal for you the connection to films such as "Sunset Boulevard" or "American Beauty"?

A: I suppose so. It's also a Gothic device. I was really writing a Gothic novel -- a huge house, a haunted presence in the house, it's the classic Irish Gothic novel [such as Joseph] Sheridan Le Fanu's "Uncle Silas." . . . [With a corpse as narrator] you get the opportunity to distill multiple points of view.

Q: Why do you feel drawn toward Gothic horror?

A: I don't really. I suppose I've made some movies -- "The Company of Wolves," "Interview With the Vampire" -- that were in the same territory, dealing with death and fairy tales. I wouldn't consider myself . . . a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe. But there's a play by Yeats, "Purgatory," that was quite an influence. It's very difficult. I think it's a very great work. I was thinking of this -- the idea of recurrence.

Q: In telling Nina's story, did you in particular want to write a character who acts first in silent films and then in talkies?

A: No, I didn't think of that. I just thought she was a theater actress. . . . I thought she might have been in some bad movies. The early movies in Britain, they were all [shot] in glass houses. They would take down the walls and shoot through the glass. I . . . placed her in this environment. . . . I was writing about the hatred she felt for the filmmaking process.

Q: I read that you discovered George Bernard Shaw by mistake. You saw "Man and Superman" on a shelf and thought it was related to the comic books. Is that true?

A: That's true.

Q: You give Shaw a fascinating walk-on in "Shade." He's not only himself, he's a godlike figure, the dreamer, as it were, of the world. Is that how you see him, as a source of Irish creativity?

A: Actually I do love Shaw and Wilde because -- you talk about the Irish sense of gloom and death and you don't find that in Shaw and Wilde. They both wrote effervescent comedies. . . . They were both great at coming up with these popular entertainments.

Q: Do you want to film "Shade"?

A: I'm not sure. Maybe. Initially, I thought I didn't.. . . I have no idea how I would film my own books. I would probably get quite confused.

Robin Dougherty, a writer and critic, lives in Washington, D.C. She can be reached at inkrd@aol.com.