CULTURE SHOCK Eighteen years after it was first published, Dermot Bolger's raw, dystopian portrait of 1980s Ireland is enthusiastically reviewed in the US. It's a cheering, if disorientating, recognition of this powerful novel, writes Fintan O'Toole.
THE COVER OF the New York Times Book Reviewis to literature in the US what the cover of Rolling Stoneis, or was, to rock bands. The decision to put a review of a book there is the ultimate recognition by what might be called the literary establishment of the author's importance. So when last Sunday's edition led with the headline New Dubliners, the natural assumption was that we were about to read a review of a book about the Celtic Tiger or about the new immigrant communities who have settled in Dublin over the last decade. What we got instead was a highly intelligent and enthusiastic review by Terrence Rafferty of Dermot Bolger's splendid 1990 novel, The Journey Home.
For those of us who have long admired the book's fierce assault on the pieties of 1980s Ireland, its entry at this stage into the accepted canon of contemporary novels is both cheering and disorienting. No one deserves the recognition more than Bolger does, and The Journey Homeis probably his best work to date. But it is rather odd that it is only 18 years after he first published it, and long after the world it describes has largely ceased to exist, that the book has become acceptable to American publishers and editors. And even odder that its view of Dublin 20 years ago is now being assimilated as a view of the "new Dublin".
Back in 1990, The Journey Homegot good reviews in London, mixed ones in Dublin, and none at all in New York. Stateside, there was nothing to review. Though published by the Penguin group in the UK and Ireland, it failed to stir any interest among American publishers. And it is not hard to see why. Its dystopian vision of Ireland was not what Americans wanted to read. Ireland then was still a place for Americans to connect with the past.
It was not, as it is in Bolger's novel, a displaced terrain of scruffy working-class suburbs and dull clerical jobs, ruled over by the Plunkett brothers, grandsons of a revolutionary hero, one a property developer and businessman, the other a junior minister. It did not have heroin epidemics or organised crime or strange sexual obsessions.
Back in 1990, when Bolger put this world between covers, his publishers felt the need to half-apologise for its lack of "Irishness". The blurb on the original edition says that it "portrays an Ireland that will surprise and shock many readers, Irish and non-Irish." Many of those non-Irish readers, especially in the US, didn't go to Irish novels to be shocked. The decision by American publishers to turn down The Journey Home, while showing poor taste, probably showed good commercial sense.
As usually happens, the revisiting of that decision nearly two decades on was sparked by an essentially accidental conjunction. The novelist Colm Tóibín, who was teaching at the University of Austin in Texas, was told by Jim Magnusson, who runs the university's Michener Centre for writing, that they were interested in publishing a series of novels that had been turned down by New York publishers. Tóibín mentioned Bolger's book, and the novel's raw and unabated power did the rest.
But the prominence of the book since publication in the US suggests that something else is at work too. The image of Ireland has changed. What seemed outlandishly discordant in 1990 now looks like contemporary realism. The corruption that seeps like rising damp from the Plunkett brothers (embodiments of the world of Charles Haughey and Ray Burke) seemed to some an exaggeration. Now it seems a tactful understatement. The news has caught up with Bolger's visionary courage and, albeit late in the day, that news has spread as far as New York. The sheen of innocence has finally gone off Ireland and the layers of nastiness and anger that Bolger exposed can be accepted as an Irish reality.
Rafferty asks in his review "What ever happened to the Old Sod, the homeland cherished in the romantic imaginations of Irish emigrants to the United States?" and answers, via his reading of the novel, that "That Ireland, perennially emerald green in the mists of memory, is dead and gone . . ." The irony of course is that it has been gone a long time, and the "new reality" that is replacing it in the US it is not the Irish reality of 2008. In some ways, The Journey Home, lying across the vast gulf of the 1990s, is like a book from another era. Rural Ireland is a close memory for its young characters in a way it would not be now. The Irish, not the Poles or Latvians, are the migrant workers - one of the major characters, Shay, comes and goes to Germany and Holland in search of work and happiness. The pervading air of decrepitude - "ruins, empty lots" - is of its time, not ours. The culminating vision of a future Ireland emptied of its people so that it can become a theme park for rich foreigners is not one that would be imagined now, with a growing population and inward migration.
None of this matters much for the book itself. The best novels both evoke their time and transcend it, and The Journey Home captures the 1980s in a potent narrative that retains its force long after them. But it is odd that accepted Irish "reality" continues to lag so far behind the actual state of the place.