`It is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent," James Joyce confided to a friend. Unhampered by an imposing classical tradition, fiction in Ireland was free to fantasise, experiment, mix its genres, make it up as it went along. It is no accident that in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the country produced two of the greatest anti-novels of all time, flouting the sedate protocols of English literary realism.
Irish writers were never as convinced as their English counterparts that there was some inherent merit in reflecting the world as it is. Indeed, looking at the impoverished backwater they were doomed to live in, one can see their point. From Swift's Gulliver's Travels to Patrick McCabe's Mondo Desperado!, it is non-existent worlds which enthral the Irish imagination, realms of extravagant fantasy which can be played off against the small-town tedium of the actual. A literature which includes such spiritual extravaganzas as Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer, Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Samuel Beckett's Molloy and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman can hardly be accused of slavishly mimicking Trollope and Thackeray.
Irish fiction never bothered its head too much about well-rounded characters, narrative continuities or integrated endings, which is one reason why it shone so brilliantly at the short story. Such things reflected a more stable, leisurely, traditionalist society than Irish writing had at its command. As Colm Toibin points out in his perceptive introduction to this book, it is a literature full of displacement and dislocation, whose story-lines, unlike those of Dickens or George Eliot, tend not to culminate in domestic harmony. From Goldsmith to Roddy Doyle, it is strewn with dysfunctional families and littered with absent, mad, angry or silent fathers. It shows no overriding interest in psychological subtlety, or in the English suburban fetish of `'personal relationships". As Elizabeth Bowen observed, the Irish novel is "sexless". Instead, it is satiric, surreal, Gothic, grotesque, didactic, theatrical; and in all this, of course, it owes much to writing in the Irish language. As a body of literature, it is as likely to send language out on a spree as to bend it to the task of mirroring the world. From Swift to Beckett, Irish fiction returns almost obsessively to the tragic or ironic tension between dingy reality and high-minded ideals. If adultery is the abiding theme of English rather than Irish letters, it is not because the Irish are more virtuous, but because their writers are more publicly-minded.
The Monty Python team once staged a TV game show in which competitors had thirty seconds to summarise the plot of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, first in a bathing costume and then in evening dress. Colm Toibin has just over one thousand pages in which to distil the essence of Irish fiction, and executes this ludicrous assignment remarkably well. One wonders quite what a reader is supposed to do with ten pages of Lady Morgan, four of Peadar O'Donnell, two of Anne Enright and so on, but for pathological dippers and skimmers the volume is hard to beat.
STERNE is rightly considered an Irish writer, as he was not by the Field Day anthology, and the English will be dismayed to be reminded that one of their dismally few proletarian authors, Robert Tressell, was actually Irish, too. (Though if Tressell goes in, the fascinating Patrick McGill, who actually was a tramp rather than, like George Orwell, just playing at one, is unaccountably left out). Iris Murdoch, who was proud of her honorary degree from Trinity, is another unexpected guest.
The unjustly ignored Emily Lawless is represented by an extract from her magnificent novel Hurrish, and the impressive 18th century novelist Frances Sheridan is granted her two ha'pence worth. Kate O'Brien and Francis Stuart get somewhat short shrift, but Gerald Griffin's important novel, The Collegians, is given a reasonable airing.
If the anthology has one major flaw, it lies in its bias towards contemporary Irish writers. About a third of the volume is devoted to living (or, in some cases, semi-living) authors, which is perhaps pressing the post-modern aversion to Dead White Males a little too far. Julia O'Faolain may have her moments, but is she really worth more column inches than an historic figure like John Banim? Is it really judicious to allow Dermot Bolger as much space as Oscar Wilde, or to allot Joseph O'Connor as much room as Frank O'Connor? Isn't it mildly embarrassing for Robert McLiam Wilson to find himself with a higher word-count than Oliver Goldsmith? Some contemporary names could have been offloaded to do fuller justice to, say, George Moore, a major Irish writer whom the English still rank among their minor aesthetes. Austin Clarke's opulent fictions, astonishingly, are left out altogether, as are weighty works by Shan Bullock, George Birmingham, Brinsley McNamara and Eimar O'Duffy.
But all anthologists are caught on the hop between the claims of literary quality and the demands of historical completeness. In general, The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction is an astute selection from an impossibly rich body of work, and nobody could be downcast to find it stuffed in their Christmas stocking.
Terry Eagleton, Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, has just published Scholars and Rebels in 19th Century Ireland (Basil Blackwell).