Thirty years of solitude - Irish writing since 1977

One thing becomes clear when you cast your eye over homegrown fiction since 1977: Irish writers are loners.
While Cheever and Carver were trading shots and chasers in Iowa, Brett Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney and pals were snorting, carousing and chasing skirt in New York and LA, and the Children of Albion Rovers (Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner) were frequenting warehouse parties in Edinburgh and Glasgow, our lot maintained a cordial but discreet distance from each other.
The result being, there’s been no definable Irish literary movement during the past 30 years to speak of (discounting ‘chick-lit’, which, merits or demerits aside, is largely identified in terms of marketing rather than content), just a lot of outstanding work: the Roddy Doyle canon, including the Booker Prize-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, John McGahern’s Amongst Women, John Banville’s The Book Of Evidence and (another Booker winner) The Sea, Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Colm Toibin’s The Master, and Emer Martin’s Breakfast In Babylon to name but a few. Among our finest talents is Joseph O’Connor, author of 2002’s landmark, best-selling historical famine novel Star Of The Sea (and the just published Redemption Falls) – and, incidentally, a brother of that other enormously successful Irish artist Sinéad O’Connor. He is as good a man as any to walk us through three decades of the literary rosary...
“I think Dublin in 1977 had no sense of a literary past at all. It was before the era of writers’ festivals or authors’ readings. The place was so depressed that Joyce, Beckett and all of the greats seemed very distant indeed. I think Roddy Doyle’s book The Commitments changed a lot of that, because it was the first book written by someone of my generation that was set in a suburban Dublin. It was self-published, almost like the punk feeling of anybody could do it. But I don’t think anybody could do what Roddy did. The brevity of the book even, the machine-gun feel of it, was clearly not influenced by any of the novels you’d have been reading at school.
“I think Dermot Bolger’s book The Journey Home (1990) is a classic too, he was writing about a very hidden Ireland. The Church and Fianna Fail were still in charge, it was still slightly John McGahern land, but Dermot was writing about people smoking dope and listening to bands and living in squats. I think he was the first person to acknowledge that Dublin wasn’t like the literary version.
“The interesting thing about those 30 years is that the younger writers who emerged didn’t seem to be at all influenced by each other or earlier Irish writers. Neil Jordan was clearly influenced by Joyce, but people like Anne Enright were much more interested in Flannery O’Connor and the American southern gothic writers. It’s a noisy, disparate group.
“I think for writers of my age, there was the baleful influence of the magic realists in the 1980s. When I was in college you couldn’t walk into the Belfield bar without your copy of 100 Years Of Solitude under your arm. My own shameful earliest attempts at fiction definitely had the standard issue 15-page sentence and talking leopards. But then that whole group of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff came along, often writing about suburbia. Everything in Ireland was the city, the country or the small town, but there hadn’t been novels about suburbia, where most Irish people actually lived. It was their guilty secret. Also, the 1980s was quite an iconoclastic time, and what united all those radicals who were around – like Colm Toibin, or Hugo Hamilton, who wrote Headbanger (1996) and Sad Bastard (1998) – was the notion that you were writing against this set of received literary images, and I think it gave the work a lot of energy.
“John McGahern’s Amongst Women (1990) was probably the most important Irish novel of the late 20th century, both a culmination of everything McGahern had been doing, and also a book about that particular sort of Irish family bound together by a nexus of loyalties, only one of which is love. In some sense I think that family is every Irish family. It’s so recognisable and so truthful – it almost finished off the Irish family novel! I’m always struck by a scene at the end of it where the father is dead, and at the funeral two local hack politicians from conservative parties are seen in a corner of the graveyard, laughing together at this old disappointed revolutionary who’d been buried.
“Great writers sometimes know things that they don’t know; it somehow manages to be about both the end of the revolutionary past and the subsequent future of Ireland; in that, it almost anticipates the Celtic Tiger. As with Roddy Doyle and Pat McCabe, the local is everything, which was a fantastic lesson for younger writers like myself starting off at the time: the whole world is in front of you, you just have to have the eyes to see it.
“Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (1993) is a brilliant book, and what’s brilliant about it is he’s just made up this place where he lives – McCabeland! It has its own rules, and some of them are very strange. That stretches back to Flann O’Brien territory, a place where anything can happen, and usually does.
“To me, the Francie Brady character is like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Once you hear that narrator, you’re hooked, you remember that voice for the rest of your life. McCabe is out on his own with the strangeness and the absurdity, and also the poignancy. The first time they read it, people are always struck by the humour, but when you’re a little bit older and you read it, you see not just the darkness but the sadness of the book. He’s got a whole world in his head. I can think of a few writers who were emboldened by McCabe, even though their work isn’t like his, including Claire Keegan, whose second book has just come out now, Walk The Blue Fields.
“But what I never see in Ireland among the writers who are around now is that awful backstabbing bitchiness that used to be a feature: there’s quite a sort of collegial sense among most of them. Colm Toibin always refers to the Ballygowanisation of the Irish writer, it’s all very hard working, no all-night whiskey sessions anymore, they tend to be quite serious and work long hours.
“As for the ‘chick lit’ thing, I’m relaxed about it, I’m not the target audience, so I haven’t read the books, but I think someone like Cecilia Ahern is a national treasure. The fact that she could motivate herself at that age to work so hard and write her books and get her stuff in on time is phenomenal. I spent most of my 20s lying in bed!”

Redemption Falls by Joe O’Connor is published by Secker & Warburg.