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Paralysed author stars again with novel London - It has taken him 11 painstaking years. But Christy Nolan, the paralysed author whose triumphant autobiography won the 1987 Whitbread Prize, has finally completed his first novel. Set in his native Ireland, 'The Banyan Tree' is an epic 120,000-word work to be published next June by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, which paid what is believed to be a six-figure sum for the British rights. Ion Trewin, the managing director of Weidenfeld, who met Christy for the first time last week, said: "The book is extraordinary - a wonderful story, beautifully told. It is Joycean in its quality. When you think of Christy's disabilities it is an even more remarkable work. But the novel is a tremendous piece of writing by any standards." Wheelchair-bound Christy, 33, who lives with his parents in Dublin, has been mute and paralysed since his brain was starved of oxygen for two hours at birth. Yet he has managed to write with the aid of a rod, or unicorn stick, attached to a head-band which lets him slowly tap out words on a typewriter. His collection of poems, 'Dam-Burst of Dreams', was published when he was just 14 and he went on to make history when he won one of Britain's top literary awards, the Whitbread prize. The award-winning autobiography, 'Under the Eye of the Clock', movingly describes his life, friends, parents and his triumphant battle to study at Trinity College, Dublin. Christy has used the same labour-intensive technique to write 'The Banyan Tree', a multi-generational story of a family that begins in the twenties and goes through to the eighties. At one point, displeased with the direction the plot was taking, he discarded 35 pages of text. This would irritate any author, but for Christy it represented nine months' work. He is, however, a perfectionist. "My mind is just like a spin-dryer at full speed; my thoughts fly around my skull while millions of beautiful words cascade down into my lap", he said. "Images gunfire across my consciousness. Try, then, to imagine how frustrating it is to give expression to that avalanche in efforts of one great nod after another". Christy's mother, Bernadette, says that the completion of the novel had been her son's goal for the past decade, but at one point she had tried to get him to abandon the project. "When he was 6 years into it, I got fed up and said to him "Please stop. This is ridiculous, Christy. We're none of us having any kind of life," she said. "I told him that no one would criticize him for not finishing the book, that at least he had tried, but suggested that he should give up. "I will never forget the look he gave me. I could see that he was horrified that I should even suggest giving up. He was hurt and shocked. It was just one look but it told me everything I needed to know." Christy had worked on the book every day for the past 11 years, she said. "Sometimes he'd go at it from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. At other times he would start, then shake his head when the inspiration wasn't coming." Christy was six when his mother was told by a doctor that he had the brain of a baby. But a subsequent test found that his IQ was verging on that of a genius. In the years that followed Mrs. Nolan and her husband, Joe, did all they could to stimulate the mind of their handicapped son. And Christy has never been idle. In 1989, two years after winning the Whitbread Prize, he co-wrote 'Torchlight and Laser Beam', a play, and formed the company, Heliotrope, to take the production to the Edinburgh Festival. by Jo Knowsley The Daily Telegraph published in the Ottawa Citizen 30 September 1998 janet paterson - 51/10 - almonte/ontario/canada http://www.newcountry.nu/pd/members/janet/ [log in to unmask]