'IN the past you had accomplished people and their genuine admirers; masters and disciples. Now you have celebrities and their stalkers." It was this phrase, something she says sprang unbidden to her mind, that inspired Elizabeth Wassell's latest novel, Dangerous Pity.

The phrase came to her as she was in a newsagents one day, confronted by a display of celebrity magazines: "It seemed so emblematic of the age. Some of the magazines are sedate, offering homage to these celebrities. Then you have this new kind too, where the celebrities are derided."

Her soft voice, with its faintest of American accents, is full of something like wonder. It is clear that Elizabeth, who is married to poet John Montague, with whom she lives in Nice and West Cork, leads a life that is far removed from the strident clamour of these magazines and their photos of celebrity cellulite and meltdowns. Yet their lives have not been untouched by the weird and awful distortions celebrity can impose.

Living in west Cork, the couple became associated with the Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder investigation because of their ties to Ian Bailey, a suspect in the case.

In France, Sophie was an influential and respected figure, married to the head of the French Academy of Cinema Arts, a man who was a close friend of Jacques Chirac and a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. She was, in fact, a celebrity, and that fact may very well have played a part in her murder -- it wouldn't be the first incidence where the natural barriers that exist between people have become fatally blurred by fame.

Some of the menace surrounding her murder, as well as the irritations and evils of modern celebrity generally, can be felt in Elizabeth's smart, stylish, sensitive and often funny novel. Dangerous Pity is the story of Sebastian Clare, a famous writer living in Nice, on the Cote d'Azur. His mother has just died and, as he struggles to absorb this fact, an ex-student, brash and belligerent Ursula, arrives on his doorstep, filled with raw insecurities, and the conviction that she is destined to be a great writer. She moves in with him, and begins to appropriate bits of his life, intruding her version of crass modernity onto a gentler kind of life, built around rather old-fashioned values and customs.

Ranged on Sebastian's side against the intrusions of Ursula's determination, are a collection of expat artists -- Antoine the Russian playwright; Katherine, a fragile, consumptive New Zealand novelist; Trudy and Alice, an energetic lesbian couple -- who, it gradually becomes clear, are the great artists of Nice's past; Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. These wraiths have been summoned, a kind of communion of artistic saints, to rout the interloper.

"The old-fashioned values and virtues that they harboured are being trampled on and tarnished in the age of the stalker, an age of coarsening sensibility," says Elizabeth. And so she has called them up, to try and assert their values over Ursula's. "I think," she says slowly, "in this age, people feel the desire to become artists and writers not for the love of art but to give their

lives meaning. It's a bowdlerisation. They're doing it not out of a real impulse to create but to see what's in it for them, and to be admired."

Desire for overnight success, the yearning for fame, a belief that proximity to celebrity will yield celebrity of its own, and a vaunting sense of

entitlement, these are all things that have mushroomed in recent years, generally with very negative effects. "It has to do with a tear in the social fabric," is Elizabeth's understanding. "There is so much narcissism, people encroaching on others, desiring to devour them and exploit them." It's the kind of intrusion that Elizabeth, a well-respected writer married to a very famous poet, has some experience of, perhaps most notably with Ian Bailey.

Bailey, who has been twice arrested for the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier by gardai and is currently the subject of an extradition bid by the French government, was for a time the couple's gardener, although he tried to become something more. After a year of working for them, Bailey showed his collected writings to Montague -- "scraps of songs and poem ballads", is how Montague described them in a piece he wrote for the New Yorker about the murder. "There was a glimmer of talent there, but it needed a level of discipline which he seemed unprepared to give." Montague felt, he says, "a vaguely paternal affection for Bailey back then," and Bailey would write little notes "To the Bard, John, and the Lady, Elizabeth". However, much changed when Bailey beat his partner, Jules, so badly that she was taken to hospital.

At first, Elizabeth and John believed Bailey was truly contrite and resolved to change his life. They let him come back to work as their gardener, although Bailey would "periodically interrupt his work to knock at the kitchen door and ask for a pot of tea. We were reluctant to let him in because his requests struck us as an attempt to insinuate himself again into our house and lives." Gradually, they understood that he was filled with bitterness rather than contrition, and was making no attempt to stop drinking. Shortly afterwards, Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered, and Bailey became caught up in the appalling publicity of the case.

The influence of Ian Bailey -- of knowing him, of his personality -- is a delicate but definite presence through Dangerous Pity, which contains a character, Clive, who manifests some of Bailey's less appealing characteristics.

"He's a little bit like Ian Bailey, although Bailey isn't the only model for Clive," Elizabeth agrees. "I did feel in Ian Bailey an arrogance, that sense of entitlement -- 'it's my time now! Look at me now!' He would come to the house ostensibly for tea but really just to make his pronouncements and assert himself, and foster a relationship. It didn't have anything to do with a connection with other people, just him insisting on himself.

"I felt that he is very arrogant, he doesn't seem to recognise the difference between notoriety and fame; attention is all good. That came out during his libel action -- the barrister was reading passages from his diary, which were rather dark, and he seemed very chuffed. As if the people gathered had come to attend a poetry reading."

Dangerous Pity has, of course, a life far beyond Bailey and the du Plantier murder. It is a fully realised work of fiction in itself, and yet threads and themes left over from that time, can still be felt.

At the heart of all this, there is a brutal and unsolved murder, a killer who hasn't been caught. Since the murder -- the first in that part of west Cork since Michael Collins was shot in Beal na Blath -- the idyllic community of artists and locals has changed. "There is still no resolution," says Elizabeth. "The house is still empty, almost a sullen, sombre presence." And this is a sadness for her, because Elizabeth's arrival in the area, in 1993, "was a fulfilment of many dreams. My cup was really full. I had met the love of my life, I was living in a part of the world I loved, I found west Cork so beautiful."

Elizabeth Wassell was born in New York, the child of psychoanalyst parents. And yes, that's a hard thing to be. "Even though my mother was a loving mother, I did feel at times as though I was being labelled. It felt reductive. But it might have helped to make me a writer, because I wanted to speak with my own voice, to find myself."

The scrutiny made the young Elizabeth into "a kind of dreamy, bookish, pixie type. I was always a little bit elfin and eccentric." This, she says wryly, she has "come to live with" although it was hard as a child. "Sometimes other children find you a bit fey and peculiar, not being good at games."

In any case, hers was what she describes as "a vagabond life. It was a bohemian family, my parents were sort of mutinous types. They had disdain for ordinary values, didn't care about things, so we weren't terrible prosperous, though we were comfortable. All the money was poured into travel. They would save up and take us off to Europe for long periods of time. We had family in England so we could live there, and my father was an intrepid driver, so we found ourselves driving along remote roads and finding slumberous villages. It was amazing."

And perfect for Elizabeth, who "didn't really take to America, even as a child. I was a Europhile from very early on, through love of the literature. I always had the feeling that the return to America was an exile, even though it was ostensibly my home. And that voyage across the Atlantic to Europe felt like a homecoming."

After studying English and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Elizabeth lived in New York, where she met Montague at a poetry reading she hadn't particularly wanted to attend. "I had a friend, Walter Mosely, the mystery writer, who rang me up and asked, 'Would you come and help serve the drinks because we have a poetry reading tonight?' Elizabeth sighed and asked who was reading. The name John Montague meant nothing to her -- "I knew nothing then about modern Irish poets, nor did I care" -- but she agreed to help. "There I was with the bottles behind a table, and John walked in. I didn't know who he was, but I felt a shock. It sounds so sentimental to say it. I felt something, a frisson, a feeling of recognition, of knowing him inside myself. It was a strange, uncanny knowledge. I knew he belonged to my heart."

She was, she laughs, in a good position -- "I had the drink; I just kept replenishing his flacon." Did he feel the same? "You'd have to ask him, but I think so. He was definitely drawn to me, and rang me up, and it grew. That was 1992." One year later they moved to west Cork. Regardless of the 28-year age-gap -- Elizabeth was 35 when they met, John 63 -- they are visibly, luminously, happy together.

As well as a meditation on modern celebrity and a subtle exploration of the invidiousness of pity, Dangerous Pity is a kind of poem to Nice, where the couple live roughly half the year and which is, Elizabeth says, "the real main character". And yet she is quick to dispel any notion of a glitzy, Riviera-type lifestyle. "I feel like I have to reassure people, they imagine that we have this sumptuous, opulent life on the Cote d'Azur. Really it's a very simple, frugal life. We have a very small flat on the top of a house. We'll be at work all day, then the light will begin to deepen outside, the 'hour of the aperitif', that ripening golden light of Nice. We'll walk out and go to our local bohemian cafe and have a drink. And that becomes the social part of the day, because writing is very solitary, we're intent on our separate labours."

Part of what she loves about France is that they are "a pleasure-loving people. They love to eat, and drink, and make love, in that order. You eat, and talk about food, and drink, but not too much, then go home and make love."

The twin pillars of love and art are what support this world, in which endeavour is far more important than reward, where art is its own goal and not a step to celebrity. No wonder she can say with great simplicity, "It's such a happy life, we're both flourishing."

Dangerous Pity, Elizabeth Wassell, Liberties Press, €12.99, www.LibertiesPress.com.

- Emily Hourican

Originally published in