Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987 - 2007

Liam Harte

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444336207, 9781444336191
• eBook ISBN: 9781118502235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007 is the authoritative guide to some of the most inventive and challenging fiction to emerge from Ireland in the last 25 years. Meticulously researched, it presents detailed interpretations of novels by some of Ireland's most eminent writers.

• This is the first text-focused critical survey of the Irish novel from 1987 to 2007, providing detailed readings of 11 seminal Irish novels
• A timely and much needed text in a largely uncharted critical field
• Provides detailed interpretations of individual novels by some of the country's most critically celebrated writers, including Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe, John McGahern, Edna O'Brien and Colm Tóibín
• Investigates the ways in which Irish novels have sought to deal with and reflect a changing Ireland
• The fruit of many years reading, teaching and research on the subject by a leading and highly respected academic in the field

Chapter 1

In the Family Way: Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy (1987–1991)

I

If, as has been claimed, the origins of contemporary Irish drama can be traced to September 28, 1964, the date Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! premiered at Dublin's Gate Theatre,1 then one might legitimately nominate March 27, 1987, as the inaugurating moment of contemporary Irish fiction, if by “contemporary” we mean writing that is “characterised by an increasing sense of democratisation, of challenges, from previously marginalised constituencies, to the values and judgements that historically had governed the formation of the literary canon.”2 On that date, a twenty-eight-year-old Dublin schoolteacher named Roddy Doyle published The Commitments, a debut novel that vibrates with the exuberance, enterprise, and humanity of characters previously unheard in Irish fiction: disaffected youths from the impoverished working-class suburbs of 1980s Dublin. Unlike Friel two decades earlier, Doyle could not count on the backing of a major Irish cultural institution to promote his work nor did he have a successful literary apprenticeship behind him. On the contrary, his first novelistic attempt, the unpropitiously titled Your Granny is a Hunger Striker, written during the early 1980s, failed to attract the interest of a single publisher.3 Determined to avoid this fate for his second novel, and in keeping with the entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself ethic of the book's protagonists, Doyle and his friend, John Sutton, decided to bypass the publishing establishment and issue The Commitments under their own imprint, King Farouk Publishing, a name supposedly inspired by Dublin rhyming slang for “book.” This nod of allegiance to the urban demotic was reinforced by a short but combative manifesto in which the patrimony of the contemporary Irish novelist was unceremoniously jettisoned. As an exercise in symbolic patricide, it is stingingly pithy:

King Farouk is a new company and will be publishing fiction by young Irish writers. King Farouk stories will be popular and direct. King Farouk novels will definitely NOT explore any of the following well-chewed Irish themes: the provincial upbringing of the protagonist, often the author in disguise, in the fifties and sixties; the absence of love in the home, usually the fault of the father; the brutality of the Christian Brothers' education, or the more subtle brutality of the Holy nuns or the Jesuits; the suffocating influence of the Church; the smallness of provincial town life; and, of course, the various frustrations that torment sensitive young men growing up in provincial towns in the fifties and sixties. Too many ‘new’ Irish novelists seem to have used the pages of their books to help rid themselves of their neuroses. King Farouk authors will keep their neuroses to themselves. King Farouk stories will entertain. King Farouk fiction will be just that: fiction – made up, direct and funny.4

With this audacious statement of intent, Doyle self-consciously set his face against what he saw as the anachronistic realist fictions of an older generation of Irish novelists, collectively characterized as chroniclers of the miseries of a repressive Catholic ruralism and national traumas that were foreign to him and his generation. The corollary of such impatience with moribund tradition was a desire to recuperate for fiction the voices and values of a new, disregarded generation of urbanized and internationalized working-class youth, specifically those from Dublin's socioeconomically disadvantaged northside, who had little affinity for the traditional pieties or priorities of Catholic nationalist Irishness. This was a “hidden Ireland” that Doyle knew intimately, having been born in 1958 in the fledgling suburb of Kilbarrack and raised there during a defining period of social, economic, and physical transformation. Kilbarrack was one of those “frontier” sites that Fintan O'Toole would later identify as seedbeds of postnationalist forms of cultural identity, places that broke inherited molds and buffeted the preconceptions of the ruling elites:

New places have been born, places without history, without the accumulated resonances of centuries, places that prefigure the end of the fierce notion of Irishness that sustained the state for seventy years. Sex and drugs and rock 'n roll are more important in the new places than the old totems of Land, Nationality and Catholicism.5

As this suggests, for the children of these anonymous suburbs, cosmopolitan Anglo-American popular culture held far greater appeal than anything provincial Ireland had to offer, and it is the multivalent effects of these youngsters' absorption and appropriation of external cultural influences that much of Doyle's early fiction seeks to process. Although King Farouk Publishing passed quickly into obscurity, the iconoclastic spirit that informed Doyle's brash manifesto became the catalyst for the production of three of the most enduringly popular contemporary Irish novels, which established him as the country's preeminent comic novelist. That all three works went on to be successfully adapted for the screen by English directors Alan Parker (The Commitments, 1991) and Stephen Frears (The Snapper, 1993; The Van, 1996) meant that Doyle's vision of a working-class Dublin in transition became as internationally influential at the end of the twentieth century as James Joyce's searchingly realist Dubliners (1914) was at the beginning.

Doyle's own childhood memories of Kilbarrack reveal the structural and demographic shifts that underpinned the foundational changes O'Toole describes above. This was indeed frontier territory, where Dublin's metamorphosis from compact city to sprawling conurbation was visible in the raw:

When I was a kid it [Kilbarrack] was bang at the edge of the city. Quite literally, on my side of the road you were in Dublin 5 postal district, and then you crossed the road and you were in County Dublin – you'd left the city. The city limits were right down the middle of the street. There was a farm across the road from us. […] As I grew up, the city cooperations [sic] bought out the farms, and the private developers bought out the other farms, and it gradually grew more inner city.6

What Doyle is describing here are the local effects of the radical refashioning of the capital's urban infrastructure during the 1960s, which led to “the building of hundreds of modernist office blocks in the capital, the destruction of many of Dublin's Georgian houses, and the construction of vast, low-density suburbs around Dublin to cater to an expanding and industrializing economy.”7 This spate of urban renewal was driven by a new doctrine of economic modernization, the stimulus for which was a 1958 Department of Finance report, Economic Development, which called time on the protectionist policies of autarkic nationalism and accentuated the need for foreign direct investment to boost industrialization and entrepreneurship. This report formed the basis of the Programme for Economic Expansion (1959–1963) implemented by Taoiseach Seán Lemass when he came to power as head of the new Fianna Fáil government in 1959. The economic revival that followed, which saw the country's annual growth rate soar to 4% by 1963, not only raised many people's living standards and expectations but also set in train a protracted process of uneven modernization that would create a “new Irish reality [that] was ambiguous, transitional, increasingly urban or suburban, disturbingly at variance with the cultural aspirations of the revolutionaries who had given birth to the state.”8

While many parts of this society resisted the gospel of consumer capitalism and remained wedded to traditional values, the burgeoning cities began to show a more marked degree of openness to consumerist aspirations and international cultural influences, especially from Britain and America. As the decade progressed, evidence that the Republic was beginning a slow mutation into a less conservative, more outward-looking society took many forms, from the government's first (failed) application for membership of the European Economic Community in 1961, to the inauguration of a domestic television service (RTÉ) in 1962, to the relaxation of the literary censorship laws in 1967. In the education sphere, the introduction of free post-primary education in 1967 benefited many less well-off children, including Doyle himself, who went on to graduate with a degree in English and Geography from University College Dublin in 1979, after which he returned to Kilbarrack to teach in Greendale Community School until becoming a full-time writer in 1993, the year in which his fourth novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), won the Booker Prize.

The fruits of 1960s prosperity were not equitably apportioned, however, nor were the levers of social mobility within everyone's reach. From Doyle's own lower-middle-class perspective, it was the ambivalent allegiances and value systems of those in the buffer zone between classes that drew him in as he sought to express the contemporary realities of a modernizing society and the altered identities that were emerging therein:

For people of my generation there was a huge grey area between working and middle-class and a lot of us occupied that area. We benefited from free education and the rising standard of living in the sixties and the surplus cash. And though we might have been regarded as middle-class, one leg was firmly on the working-class side of things and it's that grey area that most of my work inhabits.9

The Kilbarrack to which Doyle returned after university provided a rich canvas in this regard, since its gray areas were becoming ever darker as the gap between the optimistic rhetoric of the 1960s and the stagnating realities of the recessionary 1980s widened. Not only were such economically blighted suburbs airbrushed from tourist-board images of Dublin, they also remained beyond the pale of literary representation. As O'Toole noted in 1992: “The great tradition of Irish writing is silent on the subject of the suburbs, so you can slip out from under its shadow. No one has ever mythologized this housing estate, this footbridge over the motorway, that video rental shop. It is, for the writer, virgin territory.”10 It was here that Doyle would find the material for his trilogy of novels about Barrytown, the fictional working-class neighborhood for which Kilbarrack was the template. Through the vehicle of the noisy, rambunctious Rabbitte family, Doyle sought to give “working-class people a voice and a vibrancy of life that's often missing in literary representation,”11 as he himself put it. In addition, he sought to challenge through the trilogy the long-standing hegemony of the rural over the urban in Irish culture. To Doyle, the view that “Dublin was a garrison town that wasn't quite Irish enough, the real Ireland was west of the Shannon and if you wanted to write, to paint or to create music that was the source to draw on,”12 needed to be emphatically debunked. But whereas many of his fellow “northside realists”13 marinaded their accounts of urban experience in anger, pessimism, and despair, Doyle chose to write about everyday life in corporation housing estates in a mode of comic social realism, influenced by his friend and dramatist, Paul Mercier, whom Doyle first met at UCD and who was a staffroom colleague at Greendale in the early 1980s. Seeing a rehearsal of Mercier's Wasters in November 1985 was a revelation and an inspiration to the novelist manqué:

It was fast and funny and wonderful but that wasn't it: for the first time in my life I saw characters I recognised, people I met every day, the language I heard every day. It was like watching an old cine-film; I could point out people I knew and remember them saying what they said. The way they dressed, walked, held their cans of lager – it was all very familiar.14

The spur to creativity was instantaneous and the evolution of what became the Barrytown trilogy organic. By June 1986 Doyle had completed The Commitments, which follows the exploits of Jimmy Rabbitte Jr as he attempts to build a band from scratch by appropriating and “Dublinising” the ethos, aesthetic and energy of African-American soul music. Keen to “continue the energy of the first book,” but also to write a “more intimate” family narrative,15 Doyle immediately began work on The Snapper (1990), in which the focus shifts to the wider Rabbitte family and the domestic and social dissension provoked by twenty-year-old Sharon's unplanned pregnancy, the result of drunken sex with the father of one of her best friends. The novel took three years to complete, in which time Doyle also wrote two plays, Brownbread and War, for Mercier's Passion Machine theatre company. The Van (1991), by contrast, was written “very quickly”16 in 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987–2007
• Chapter 1: In the Family Way: Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy (1987–1991)
• Chapter 2: House Arrest: John McGahern's Amongst Women (1990)
• Chapter 3: Malignant Shame: Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy (1992)
• Chapter 4: Uncertain Terms, Unstable Sands: Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing (1992)
• Chapter 5: Unbearable Proximities: William Trevor's Felicia's Journey (1994)
• Chapter 6: History's Hostages: Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation (1994)
• Chapter 7: Shadows in the Air: Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (1996)
• Chapter 8: The Politics of Pity: Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way (2005)
• Chapter 9: Mourning Remains Unresolved: Anne Enright's The Gathering (2007)
• Bibliography
• Index