WITH HIS SOFTLY spoken, spare sentences and long pauses, it's easy to see why Neil Jordan has been labelled taciturn. Mention his success as a leading director of films such as The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire and Michael Collins, or his new novel, Shade, and the phone line goes quiet, before he replies: 'There's a large element of luck involved in writing and in filmmaking. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you don't.'
His answers warm to an almost conversational level (he even laughs) when asked why he returned to fiction a decade after his last novel, only to offer another of the gloomy genre-mixing stories that have typified his career.
'I don't know why I do that, but I do,' he says. 'Some day, I'll write about happiness. It's just harder because the one thing you can say about unhappiness, and tangled emotions and tangled desires is that they lead to great complexity. Simple happy and fully expressed ones just lead to simple happiness, I presume. I've never experienced quite that simple happiness.'
The structure of Shade is filmic, yet it's 'a very old-fashioned novel', says Jordan. Set on an estate in Ireland's Boyne Estuary, it opens with the murder by decapitation of Nina Hardy, a famous actress. The killer, George, is named at the outset. Nina's body is dumped in a septic tank, where her ghost looks back at her childhood. Born to well-to-do Anglo-Irish parents, Nina is an intensely lonely child who invents imaginary companions - until she meets Jane and George.
As family secrets come to light, Nina's half-brother Gregory becomes the fourth member of this gang, who grow up inseparable until the first world war. Shade crosses to the battle at Gallipoli and the nascent British silent film industry, as it charts its characters' painful passage to adulthood, their tragically misplaced affections and Nina's death.
Jordan says he wanted to write an old-fashioned Gothic novel. 'It came from the simple idea of a woman who was murdered. As a child she'd always been haunted by a ghost, and when she was murdered she became the ghost of her old self.