Colum McCann: 'How does a Russian dancer enter the life of a kid in Dublin?'

A contented Irish writer in America, Colum McCann was inspired by the career of a much more troubled exile: Rudolf Nureyev. Julie Wheelwright met him in New York

Everywhere in New York, it seems, there are people hungry to reveal their most extraordinary moments to anyone who will listen. Whether it's the lift operator on the subway or the beggars hitting you up for spare change or the waitress in your coffee shop, everyone here has a story. No wonder, then, that a Dublin writer with a drawerful of literary prizes in an era when to be Irish is deeply cool would choose to make his home here. Colum McCann is the Irish author of Fishing the Sloe Black River, This Side of Brightness and Everything in this Country Must whose latest novel Dancer, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) is based on the life of a quintessential New Yorker – the emigré Soviet dancer, Rudolf Nureyev.

When we met in Brooklyn Heights in that brief frenzy before Christmas, McCann explains that he longed for a broader fictional canvas after writing an intimate novel about the impact of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Everything in this Country Must. "I wanted the big borders moving everywhere and nowhere at the same time," he tells me over a Chinese vegetarian lunch, waving his chop sticks like a conductor. "I wanted to roam in a literary and imaginative sense." He was captivated by the image of Nureyev, making his first public performance at the age of five, dancing for the dying Russian soldiers home from the Eastern Front.

McCann, who had never seen a ballet performed before he began writing Dancer, was intrigued by Nureyev's status as the world's first international superstar, and by the untraceable impact his genius had on a generation. An Irish friend's infatuation with Nureyev was, for him, a brilliant illustration of how the dancer's power transcended every possible barrier of culture or understanding.

His friend, Jimmy, fell in love one night when his drunken father brought home a television set. Frustrated that he couldn't get reception, he battered his children and went to bed. "Later on, Jimmy plugged the television in on an extension cord and carried it around the room and the very first image that came on was Nureyev dancing," says McCann. "I thought wow, this is gorgeous, how does a Russian dancer enter the life of a seven-year-old working-class kid in Dublin?" Although the image never made it into the novel, it moved McCann to read about Nureyev.

Determined to avoid writing a pseudo-biography, McCann says he sought instead to fill in the quiet moments and dark corners of Nureyev's life that history has ignored. "My book had to come from an imaginative space," he says. "I didn't want to become diseased with facts about his life." He read voraciously about everything from Soviet economics to the Second World War to Russian poetry, flicked through photo books from the years when Nureyev's star was rising, and interviewed dozens of gay men. The result is a dazzling story about the bullied schoolboy shot from a forgotten corner of a Soviet republic, who becomes a principal dancer with the Kirov ballet in Moscow, then defects to the West in 1961, and turns into an international star.

Nureyev, says McCann, could and did demand whatever he wanted, earning his reputation as an enfant terrible who slapped his dancing partners on stage and snubbed journalists. During his first season in Paris in 1961, the stage was littered with a shop's worth of women's underpants, 100 franc notes, dozens of erotic photographs, hotel keys, a gold-plated rose, a fur coat and hundreds of flowers.

Reviews were ecstatic; his presence was electric, a seemingly effortless transformation of human genius into pure bodily form. "The magic of dance is something purely accidental," McCann's fictionalised dance teacher Sasha writes to his pupil. "The irony of this is that you have to work harder than anyone else for that accident to occur." McCann says that Nureyev lived out other people's dreams through dance that captured "a hunger turned human".

He was a man of breathtaking contradictions, a serious dancer who seemed to risk everything on a whim. A bisexual with a legendary sex drive, during the 15-minute interval between performances on stage he would often grab his overcoat and head off to the local toilets for a shag. "I think he did it because he could, because it was fun, it was a gesture of saying, 'I am in control of the world and I can do whatever I want'," says McCann, whose gay interviewees remember seeing Nureyev in the bathhouses and clubs around New York in the Seventies and Eighties. Eventually, Nureyev developed Aids, the disease that led to his death in 1994.

He danced on far too long, says McCann, refusing to accept that he was no longer in his prime or that classical ballet had moved on. Performing enabled him to keep at bay his terrible grief for what he had been forced to leave when he defected.

Ironically, Russia's most famous capitalist – the superstar as famous as the Beatles, who danced with Margot Fonteyn and boogied with film stars – could do anything except see his mother. He was only once given a 48-hour visa to travel back to his family in Ufa, in a forgotten republic. When he finally reached his mother's bedside, the world's most recognisable man was unknowable to her.

"We forget that Nureyev left people behind and he was still living for them," says McCann. "When we go into the traditional biography, it leaves out all those people who were haunted by him, or delighted by him, or still in fear of him."

McCann has created a cast of fictional characters: a teacher and her daughter, a Chilean friend, a sister, and many others whose lives were touched by Nureyev. All recognise his genius but not all can quite forgive him for leaving them to the brutal inquiries of the KGB and the deprivations of Soviet stagnation. As an Irish writer, McCann says the notion of exile is the dot that connects each of his books, whether his fiction explores the homeless living in the New York subway or people like Nureyev, struggling to get back home.

Despite McCann's obvious love for New York (he later takes me on a walk over Brooklyn Bridge, one of his favourite places in the city), his stories often hinge on his identity as an Irishman among foreigners. When he was recently co-directing a low-budget film in Harlem with Frank McCourt as one of his actors, he used his thickest Irish accent to talk a local cop into laying on a few props. When he was in St Petersburg two summers ago, stumbling upon an Irish pub on the way home from the Kirov also proved a stroke of luck. At The Shamrock, he drank a bad Guinness and befriended a Russian dancer who ended up giving McCann a tour backstage, where the company laughed themselves sick at his attempt to pirouette.

Ireland might be McCann's spiritual home, that place from which everything else flows, but he has become part of the New York narrative. As he sips our now-cold jasmine tea, he reflects that with his third child expected this year, a wife to whom he has been married for more than a decade and a new novel, he is blessed.

Biopgraphy

Dancer is Colum McCann's fourth book and continues his trend towards fictional subjects removed from his childhood in Dublin. He was born there in 1965; his father was features editor on a local newspaper, and a writer of non-fiction books. McCann left Ireland when he was 21 to cycle around Canada, the US and Mexico. He married Allison, an American school teacher, in 1992, and together they went to live in Japan. He is the author of Fishing the Sloe Black River, a book of short stories, two novels (Song Dogs and This Side of Brightness) and Everything in This Country Must, a novella with two short stories. Dancer is published next week by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Colum McCann has won, among a clutch of literary prizes, the Impac Prize, the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award and (last year) the Grace Kelly Memorial Literary Award. He has lived with his wife in New York since 1994; they have two children.