In The Map of Tenderness, William Wall's third and latest novel, the narrator's mother suffers from a fatal, hereditary, and extremely debilitating illness. Giving the character such a condition was no whimsical choice on the part of the author. In some ways, Wall was looking for a parallel to his own situation, an objective correlative.

At the age of 12, around the same time as he started writing, he was diagnosed with Still's disease, a kind of rheumatoid arthritis. It's not fatal or hereditary, but for Wall, not a day passes without pain.

He was in hospital for the Inter Cert and could not hand write the Leaving Cert. He has been on steroids for most of his adult life and has just undergone a protracted course of chemotherapy in an attempt to dampen the disease. ("Couldn't take a feckin' drink for three years.")

Yet despite the discomfort, the immobility and the side effects from drugs, he continues to teach English to fifth and sixth years, and to write prolifically. As well as three novels under his belt, he has a book of poems, numerous short stories and a trilogy for children, written for his two sons. In the past, steroids had him awake at all hours. Sometimes, he would start writing at 4am.

Wall neither dwells on Still's nor avoids talking about it. When he does discuss the disease, he does so calmly and factually, without self-pity or disingenuous stoicism. He's not a martyr. "All my joints are shagged, basically. I've got two plastic hips. I can't turn my neck properly. I can't bend my wrist properly."

He's not a moan. "There are thousands and thousands of people in Ireland alone who have this, and tens of thousands who have different levels of arthritis who go through this all the time. It's not that unusual, really."

He counts himself lucky that his parents, delighted he wanted to write, bought him a typewriter when he was 14. Typing kept his fingers mobile. He knows people who got Still's at 12 and can't use their hands.

He grew up in a house full of books. His parents, largely self-educated, never went beyond primary school. "My mother was forever quoting Shakespeare at me. My father was forever quoting Goldsmith. He knew a song or a poem for every place you'd ever visit in Ireland."

In person, Wall is relatively upbeat. But his novels are bleak and sad, populated by characters who were dam-aged as children. He writes, as he believes all writers do, out of his own experience, from the point of view of someone who is familiar with pain. "If you total up all the people who have a long-term illness, the people who've suffered a recent bereavement, the people who've got a psychological disorder, the people who are in famine or war or whatever," he says, "what percentage of the world is in a state of suffering at any given moment in time? It must be 80 per cent.

"For me the world really is a dark place. I have a great life. I'm a very happy person, but for me the archetypal description of the world is King Lear."

Alice Falling, his first novel, is about a woman who was sexually abused and finds no solace in her marriage to an older man. "I think Alice Falling was a very angry book," he says.

"It's about the abuse of power. Most people focus on the child abuse element of it, but really everyone in the book is an abuser. They all have power or they're powerless and abused. I think now if I were to write Alice, it wouldn't be so angry."

Minding Children centred on a dangerously disturbed teenager. Wall is surprised more people don't find parts of the book funny. "I intended it to be a kind of a gothic horror story. There must be 10 or 15 references to Hitchcock."

He wrote "a good third" of the book in hospital under the influence of high dosages of steroids, painkillers and morning and evening temperatures of 102 to 103 degrees -- another symptom of Still's. "Some of the more bizarre scenes come from that."

He considers himself a lapsed poet. "I've just fallen out of the faith, essentially." But his fiction has echoes of his former vocation. His imagery is carefully layered, his metaphors understated. He is a highly evocative writer, a subtle, skilful storyteller who explores human fallibility and fragility against the backdrop of a changing Ireland.

The Map of Tenderness represents a slight move away from his vision of the world as King Lear.

Though the tone of the book is melancholy, Joe, the central character, ultimately finds redemption in his love for his girlfriend, Suzie, and in his relationship with his father.

Joe is a writer, ostracised by his mother for drawing on some of her idiosyncrasies in his debut novel. Ironically, Wall put a lot of his own family into this book. But the plot is not autobiographical. His parents died before Alice Falling was published.

"It's a very accurate portrait of my father," says Wall. "It's not a good portrait of my mother. I wanted her to be a much warmer character, a much more loving character, but it just wouldn't pan out for me. So I'll have to pay homage to her at a future stage. Just to balance the books.

"My father is bang on. He was a fisherman. A champion fisherman actually. I caught my first fish in exactly the way it's described in the book. He took me out one night . . . He was that kind of a commonsensical character with an awful lot of subdued warmth in him."

His next book, which for superstitious reasons he will not discuss at length, is set partly in Ireland and partly in Italy, and concentrates, like The Map of Tenderness, on the theme of family.

"I'm very interested in the way families self-destruct. It kind of happened to our family when our parents died. We all went our different ways, kind of disintegrated and we're kind of coming back together again now.

"I'm fascinated by what holds families together and what drives them apart. The saying `blood is thicker than water', it's not the answer. It's much more complex than that."

These days Wall teaches part time (a "gentleman's occupation") and no longer coaches the debating team, an extracurricular activity for years.

He writes from 6.30am to 11am then goes to the secondary school in Cork where he has worked pretty much since graduation.

He loves teaching, he says, loves the interaction with the kids. "One of the problems is I don't think you ever mature. There's always a bit of a kid in you as a result."

I wonder if his pupils read his books. "One guy had read Minding Children," says Wall. "He came up and said `I didn't understand that book at all. What was it about anyway?'€"

He laughs at the memory, laughs even harder when the photographer tells him he photographed Borges in the very same spot years ago.

He copes with the limelight, looking into the lens of the camera with faint amusement and a touch of embarrassment. He is exceptionally grounded, has a refreshing, keenly developed sense of perspective.

Being a published novelist, an increasingly successful published novelist, has not gone to his head in the slightest. Chances are it never will.