Cerebral palsy meant that the Irish writer Christopher Nolan, who has died aged 43, could neither speak nor control his hands. His parents and elder sister, however, helped him – when he was 11 – with an ingenious typing system, and the words bubbling in his mind were uncorked. He soon had enough material for a first book, Dam-Burst of Dreams (1981). At the age of 15 he was highly praised by the Tennyson scholar Christopher Ricks and the Milton scholar John Carey, who called the book “a jubilant, lawless debut” in which Nolan had “plummeted into language like an avalanche, as if it were his one escape route from death – which, of course, it was”.
Nolan gave the rest of his life to writing. In Under the Eye of the Clock (1987) he described his own life; another 10 years’ effort brought a substantial saga, The Banyan Tree (1999), drawing on some of his family’s history as small-time farmers. His father Joseph partly worked as a psychiatric nurse and on the land in Mullingar, County Westmeath, where Nolan was born.
He had been awkwardly positioned in the womb; efforts to adjust this caused a loss of vital oxygen. Although his brain was damaged, Nolan would not remain the perpetual infant that one doctor dismayingly predicted. As Nolan later wrote, he composed poems in his mind at three. He thought his father at heart a storyteller and wrote of farm life that “everything emanates from the kindly kitchen” run by his mother Bernadette, who realised in 1971 that they needed to move into Dublin for his sake.
After attending the Central Remedial Clinic school, he went to Mount Temple comprehensive. Other pupils, assuming he could not understand them, sneered, and one boy let the air out of his wheelchair’s tyres. The teacher asked Nolan to indicate the suspect by a nod. She then improvised a classroom trial; when the jury could not agree, the miscreant settled matters by getting a pump – and a friendship was born. Nolan’s charm was “accept me for what I am and I’ll accept you for what you’re accepted as”. He took part in as much school life as possible, even appearing in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
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