For all the literary aura that clings to the Irish, we've always been better at talking than at creating stories, argues Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
Poetry and song have been, and remain, the central sources of story in Ireland. It seems to make sense, or is it merely a polite way of explaining the wayward evolution of the novel form in Ireland?
How come the Canadians, the Australians, the Africans and the Indian subcontinent grabbed the form over the past 50 years and ran with it - continually re-invigorating this thing called narrative - while the Irish, with few honourable exceptions, sauntered complacently. Irish novelists bypassed Joyce and apparently learnt little from Beckett, never mind Synge, content instead, most recently, with casting knowing glances at the urban experience, leaving the politics to the poets.
One might even nudge this little thesis further by adding, for all the literary aura that clings to Ireland and the Irish, here is a country that was always better at talking, at gossip, at reporting and recalling, than actually creating stories.
In Ireland, the invented story has always taken a secondary role to the given fact, that tasty street lore, the rumour, the local history and the lives that made it. How come no Irish writer has created a hell as precisely defined as that of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, or an incestuous society as repressed as Ireland?
And as the collective indignation rises, why not hazard a further suggestion: the Irish novel, still a minor player to the Irish short story crafted by O'Connor, O'Faolain, O'Flaherty, Lavin, Trevor and McGahern, has yet to shake off a historical reality - the lack of a 19th-century middle class, the audience that proved so vital to the emergence of the 19th- century English social novel, itself part entertainment, part polemic.
Ireland had no 19th-century middle class, nor did the US, and if one looks at the American South, comprising wealthy slave owners and poor white trash (never mind the slaves), a parallel of sorts is to be seen in 19th- century Ireland's society of ascendancy and peasant. Interestingly, it is the American South that has most brilliantly contributed to the US fiction tradition.
With such beliefs still dogging my understanding of what is at its loftiest a vain abstraction, at worst but most enjoyably, a meaningless parlour game, the mention of this latest search for the great Irish novel initially made me first wonder - what exactly constitutes a great novel? Moby Dick is a great novel but is it the first great American novel? Is it an American novel at all? Is it really the final and most exalted articulation of a Puritan tradition passing from England to the renegade, young New World? Henry James (in common with T.S. Eliot) was an honorary Englishman, so does the US novel begin with Mark Twain or Scott Fitzgerald?
Is there a great Irish novel? It is easy to ask, why is there no Irish War and Peace, but then any fair-minded reader should swiftly counter: there is no English or American War and Peace, any more than there is an English, or American, or Irish version of The Tin Drum.
Still, we have Francis Stuart's Black List Section H (1971) and Liam O'Flaherty's Famine - neither of which is artistically impressive but both are important books. This notion of the good versus the important is relevant. One need look no further than South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer for evidence that major writers can and do write important books that are not necessarily great art.
But as to the search for the great Irish novel, my first nominee was Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) - oral narrative, local tale, historical document, work of art and more than 200 years after its publication, a seminal great and important Irish novel, a novel that, most intriguingly, at a time when many people were probably wondering "what is 'Irish' and what does being Irish mean?", is Irish. To see it polled at 23, behind C.S.Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (12), Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn (15) and Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices (20) is disappointing - and not only because O'Brien's The Ante Room is a better novel.
As for Lewis - he was never the visionary nor the artist that his contemporary, the majestic Tolkien, was. It is bizarre to see Lewis ranked higher than Beckett, Brian Moore, William Trevor or Aidan Higgins with his virtuoso pistol shot, Langrishe, Go Down (1966), an obvious contender in any Great Irish Novel bun fight, but here ranked only 38th.
But there are more contentious choices. Eugene McCabe's Death and Nightingales (1992) is, page for page, not only a great novel and a great Irish novel, it is the missing link - it is our 19th-century social novel, both work of art and candid exploration of the most essential of human themes: the betrayal of love and the rage created by hurt.
Death and Nightingales examines a society. Set at the point where small town meets rural life, it is one of a handful of truly great Irish novels, yet it polled at a lowly number 34. Another fine and unsung Irish novel, James Stephens's elegiac polemic, The Charwoman's Daughter, came in at 35. Published in 1912, it provides a daring examination of male sexuality and female terror.
Any list of anything, be it great race horses or Olympic 1,500 metres champions, or films or books, is subject to subjective opinion. Lists are intended to make us nod in agreement or tear our hair, or better still, agree and disagree; bicker and protest and resort to pistols at dawn.
You would not have to be a betting man or woman to have predicted that top of our final list, no doubt thanks to national obligation as much as literary reputation, would be the immensely important and monolithically overrated Ulysses (1922), hotly pursued by Joyce's finest book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1966). It is something of a monopoly, considering Ulysses continues to owe more to the critics and the cultural industry than it ever did to loyal readers. But mythology and fanfare aside, the best of Joyce lies not in Ulysses but in the magic of one short story, 'The Dead'.
It is the same with John McGahern, our top-placed living writer courtesy of a powerful performance, Amongst Women (1990). That novel profoundly expresses the true anger of the Irish experience, whereas Joyce concentrates on milking the cynicism of that same experience in his comic if ultimately mean-minded odyssey. McGahern, who achieved a dramatic tone shift in That They May Face the Rising Sun, absent from the Novel Choice original 50, has written novels that are artistically conceived and also provide valid social document. Yet, despite the dark power of those novels, McGahern's genius resides in short stories such as 'The Country Funeral'.
One of the world's, never mind Irish literature's, pioneering great novels - the mad and magnificently preposterous The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760) trailed in far behind Ulysses, finishing a disappointing 18th. Tristram Shandy is an experimental book that blew apart the novel form in its infancy - a feat that took real genius and daring. Also, it thrives through the presence of Jonathan Swift, just as Laurence Sterne holds the key to the absurdist literary genesis that created a Beckett.
The relevance of any literary list is that it not only incites debate, it more importantly gets people reading. Any of these 50 books could be said to have had their say - some big, some small - in the shaping of Irish fiction. Carping aside about Joyce besting Beckett's Trilogy, the top 10 has several direct hits, such as the fourth place inclusion of Flann O'Brien's fabulous skit, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). Another triumph of taste - and the poll - is the acknowledgement of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), among the most moving and sophisticated of Irish novels and a major achievement of Victorian literature.
Wilde comes in marginally ahead of thetowering Jonathan Swift, Ireland's Goethe. Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726 and the earliest work featured in A Novel Choice, belongs more to the world than Ireland. There are many elements that make it a unique book, but the central one is that in direct counter to the notion of fiction both moral parable and instruction, is that our hero does not learn from his adventures. In common with Sterne and Bram Stoker's erotic, belated excursion into the Gothic, Dracula (1897), Gulliver's Travels does not wear its Irishness particularly obviously, which is interesting, because so much of fiction, especially Irish fiction, is shaped by social, cultural and historical signposts and points of reference.
Somerville and Ross, represented by their masterpiece, The Real Charlotte (1894), and placed 32nd, merit a higher placing - yet it is interesting to see the enduring presence of that most specific and evocative of Irish literary genres, the Big House novel.
Elizabeth Bowen, deservedly included for her finest book, The Last September (1929), leads a number of writers drawn to the analysis of class including Jennifer Johnston, Kate O'Brien (albeit analysis of the rising Catholic middle class as opposed to the Ascendancy Big House) Edgeworth, the deceptively versatile William Trevor, Molly Keane, Somerville and Ross, George Moore and William Carleton.
It is satisfying to see a European stylist such as John Banville included in the top 10 as the second most highly ranked living Irish novelist, with the Book of Evidence (1988) in 9th place. But Birchwood (1973) in 42nd position, which is both funny and moving, offers a wonderfully fresh variation on the Big House theme. It is among his best novels, while Mefisto (1985), arguably his finest, did not make the original 50.
So what determines our choices? Is it cultural conditioning? Ulysses is an important book, a big book, a difficult book, we studied it at university - therefore it is great, it must be great. Yet Irish writers have avoided the Joycean. Flann O'Brien, with two books in the top 10, has a wider appeal to readers and has also had a more direct influence on Irish writers. What determines the presence of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (1960), ranked 13th, is it its enduring defiance, or is it nostalgia? Read Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) in 16th place, one of the most impressive first novels yet written, and wonder at the subtle summing up of a life, of life itself.
Many reasons determine our response to a novel: the narrative voice, the mood, the setting, the social or historical context, the passion or simply the story. The search for the definitive great Irish novel continues, but as this list confirms, there are quite a few glorious pretenders, such as Sam Hanna Bell's magnificent December Bride (1950) and of course, Tristram Shandy and At Swim-Two-Birds.