People who live down below

A trained journalist himself, McCann must have known the mileage I could get from meeting him in a place with so resonant a name. After all, wasn't his last book, This Side of Brightness, all about the kind of mentally unstable people who make a life for themselves in the tunnels of the New York subway?

So when I get to St Dymphna's and overhear an Irish voice at the bar, I naturally assume this is my man. It is not, but I am more taken aback by the man's answer: ''Which Colum are you looking for?'' Apparently there are two Colums who frequent this bar, which, I begin to appreciate, is a haunt of every Irish exile in town. Though he lives some distance away, McCann is a local here. He comes for the craik, not the insanity.

Not that McCann is overly preoccupied by nationality. Brought up in Dublin, the 34-year-old has lived in Japan and Cape Cod, and now lives with his American wife and two young children in Manhattan. As well as This Side of Brightness (1998), he has written an award-winning short story collection, Fishing the Sloe-black River (1994), and a novel, Songdogs (1995). There was also a play called Flaherty's Window, which ran for six weeks Off-Broadway. He pays the bills writing film scripts, most recently one based on the life of Veronica Guerin, the Dublin crime correspondent on the Sunday Independent who was shot dead by a drug dealer in June 1996. It's being filmed by John MacKenzie, who directed Looking after Jo Jo and The Long Good Friday.

At the Edinburgh Book Festival, McCann will be reading from This Side of Brightness. It is a marvellous book, at once a twentieth-

century history of working-class America, a family saga beginning with the men who dug the first subway tunnels at great personal risk, and an equally vivid portrait of modern-day subterranean life.

Today, there are no fewer than 2000 people living in the 800 miles of tunnel; in the past, there have been up to 10 times as many. Though the book is fiction, it has the quality of fact, so precise its observation, so credible its wealth of detail. It's also beautifully written and at times, painfully sad.

His interest in underground life came after a chance conversation at a party with a sociologist who told him about the communities living under the city. McCann was gripped. ''I went down the next day,'' he says. ''I hung around above the tunnels at first.

''There's a sort of language in cigarette smoking. It's almost Promethean; someone will come up to you and ask for a cigarette and you'll give them fire. I used to talk for hours with these fellas. Eventually they took me down.''

Surprisingly, This Side of Brightness is the first novel to be set among this community. A non-

fiction book called The Mole

People by Jennifer Toth was published in 1993, but the tunnel-dwellers didn't approve, so McCann avoided it. Fortunately, they did like his book. ''The geography of the tunnel is all correct, but there was nothing that any of them could look at and say, 'That was me','' he says. ''So I was happy with their reaction.'' Five of them even turned up at one of his book readings and passed on a present for his first daughter.

Their approval is not surprising. McCann writes with great compassion, at the same time as showing how ordinary his characters are, how close any of us are to their situation. ''The problem of writing about homelessness or madness is that you can brutalise on one hand, and sentimentalise on the other,'' he says.

''I was attempting to find a middle ground where I could talk about how awful it is and yet talk about their dignity, too. When we see homeless people, we tend to locate them in their moment of homelessness, as if they've always been homeless and forever will be, rather than their passions, loves, hatreds, and neuroses. We forget that they have a history.''

The standard police acronym for the tunnel dwellers is MICA (mentally ill or chemically addicted), but McCann's view is more humanitarian. ''The most common denominator is that they are wounded. Something happened emotionally, physically, psychologically, and they're all carrying round these various wounds. To use an animal analogy, when a deer gets shot, it goes to the darkest place it can find to curl up into and die.''

With the novel long completed, he still returns, though not as frequently as he once did. ''It's like emigrating,'' he says. ''When you go back, there's fewer people to go back to. There's a shifting population. I still get phone calls at two or three in the morning: 'Listen, can you meet me tomorrow, and do you have $40 for this, that, or the other'.''

There are risks, of course, but McCann insists it's a question of knowing how to play safe. ''The tunnels are much less violent for a homeless person than the streets. It used to be that I'd always go down when I knew someone was there. I'd call at the gates, and someone would say, 'Come on down', and I'd spend a day or even a couple of days down there. But six months ago, I was bringing a photographer in, and the gates were locked and it looked like no-one was around. You have to go down this hole in the ground. You go feet first and slide down. I was stupid and I

didn't call. I was halfway down and I smelt something. It was the chemical smell you get from crack cocaine when it's burning. Right beside me was this fella and I

didn't know who he was.

He was a bit scared, too. He sat down beside me and started to put his hand on my knee. I was trying to remain calm at the same time as get out. Eventually I got out, but anything could have happened. But, in general, the people who are down there live down there, so they have a certain respect.''

n Colum McCann appears

at the Edinburgh

International Book Festival on August 17 and 18. Mark

Fisher flew to New York with the assistance of Icelandair (0171 388 5599).