Madam, – The recent spate of complaints about the reluctance of Irish fiction writers to bear witness to contemporary life in our native land prompted me to take five minutes off from my busy post-Celtic Tiger day and pay a visit to my bookshelves.
There, to my great surprise, I found these recent novels, all dealing in whole or in part with modern Ireland in its various manifestations – pre-Celtic Tiger, Celtic Tiger, post-Celtic Tiger: Nuala O'Faolain, Almost There; Mary Rose Callaghan, Billy Come Home; Lia Mills, Nothing Simple; Catherine Dunne, Set In Stone; Jennifer Johnston, Truth or Fiction; Claire Kilroy, Only the Names Have Been Changed.Several of my own books, which modesty prevents me from naming, could be added to the list.
And that's just novels. The short stories of recent years have dealt even more directly with contemporary Ireland, eg Evelyn Conlon, Telling; Mary O'Donnell, Storm Over Belfast; Caroline Walsh, ed. Arrows in Flight. Innumerable Faber anthologies, Phoenix anthologies and other anthologies, edited by David Marcus, Dermot Bolger, etc, are growling with stories firmly located in contemporary Ireland. There are hundreds in my living room – a Celtic Tiger literary jungle.
I didn’t bother to look at the shelves where I keep the books as Gaeilge, which of course don’t count at all at all, when we are talking through our thick Celtic Tiger hat.
Or my books by men (which I put on the bottom shelf. In a cage in the corner beside the histories of the Famine.) Oh! Maybe that’s what the fuss is about? Not enough men – famous men – have written fiction dealing with contemporary Ireland? Well then. But of course. Good fiction about contemporary Ireland does not exist. QED. – Yours,
Madam, – With respect, I think Desmond Fennell (March 9th) overstates his case. Authors such as David Park and Gary Mitchell have written with immense power and eloquence about contemporary Northern Ireland. And there have been many fictional writings set during the recently departed years of prosperity in the Republic. The work of Gerard Donovan, Chris Binchy, Kevin Barry and Claire Kilroy comes to mind, as does Roddy Doyle's collection The Deporteesand numerous other books.
But perhaps one reason why even more such narratives have not yet appeared is that many Irish people suspected uneasily – and correctly, as it turned out – that the unfolding boom was itself an entirely invented story, with the Celtic Tiger its main fictional character. It’s hard to write valuable fiction about jumping out of an airplane if you’re unsure whether the object strapped so firmly to your back is a parachute or a grand piano.
Now that the era is over, there will be more novels and plays about it. There has long been a time-lag where fiction is concerned, since novelists, like everyone else, occasionally need time to have passed in order to see what has actually happened.
Otherwise, their images can be illusory and valueless: mirrors held up to mirrors.
Take the Irish Famine, for example. Really, we have only one truly important novel about that cataclysm written while it was going on: William Carleton's The Black Prophet.And in Britain, how many lastingly significant novels about the Thatcherite epoch were published while Mrs Thatcher and her government were in power? Hardly any. As for those few of us who wrote novels about the recession in late 1980s Ireland, I can think of one Irish novelist who wishes he had waited a year or two longer before setting down his efforts at capturing the zeitgeist in fiction, for his early books would have been a lot better and less embarrassing had he done so. But sin scéil eile, alas. – Yours, etc,