Dermot Bolger runs his eye over the shortlisted books for the Novel of the Year award

19-Apr-2009

IT might be argued that this is a difficult time for Irish fiction, with sales of books shrinking, with advances and long-term contracts drying up, with famous lists vaporising as the major publishing conglomerates rationalise and consolidate and make editors redundant. However, there again, it might be argued that this is a difficult time for everyone in every walk of life and that, in terms of quality, Irish fiction has always survived — and generally thrived — during times of social change and difficulty. The lack of footfall through major book stores may tell one story about the financial state of publishing, but the four books on the current shortlist for the Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year prize tell their own story about the robust state and intellectual vigour of Irish fiction at present. They seem remarkable for their divergence of themes and styles and yet the consistent quality of writing displayed by four of our most interesting authors. The best known of the four novels is Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (Faber) based around Roseanne McNulty. Largely unnoticed by anyone, and having never caused harm to anyone, Roseanne's life has spanned an entire century. She is the oldest patient in a mental hospital about to be closed down, with patients being released into the care of their families. The problem is that Roseanne appears to have no family. Nobody seems to remember her, or why she was admitted sixty years before. In the secret memoir that she writes, we see the Civil War in Sligo with its atrocities and the white-washing of history afterwards as a collective amnesia allowed respectable society to sweep untidy bits of history from sight. When Roseanne's in-laws decide, soon after her marriage, that she is unsuitable, they connive to write Roseanne out of history. Divorce is a dirty word, and therewith Roseanne is firstly banished to a hut (while the marriage is annulled) and then to the asylum where she spends sixty years. Roseanne is an unquenchable soul who suffers great hurt but refuses to be made bitter, no matter what wrongs a narrow society inflicts on her. This is another remarkable chapter in the ongoing continuing saga of how Barry has crafted a secret history of his own family and — by extension — of every family ever written out of the narrative of Irish history. Roseanne's memoir may be fictional, but somebody who truly reinvented the genre of the Irish memoir is Hugo Hamilton, whose two remarkable memoirs, The Speckled People and The Sailor in the Wardrobe, opened up his work to a new readership unaware of his previous fine novels. What made these memoirs so spellbinding was the heart-breaking innocence of the child narrator who relayed moments of great violence without fully understanding them, so that we saw the world through a wounded prism in which the child struggled to create a true identity for himself. Hamilton's welcome return to fiction with Disguise (Fourth Estate) reflects many of these same themes while recounting the search by its hero, Gregor Liedmann, to establish a true version of his own past. It moves between a nightmarish evocation of the bombing of Berlin in 1945 when Gregor is two years old to the quietude of an orchard in 2008 as Gregor sits with his ex-wife and his son and tries to sift between the real and imagined versions of his past. Because in 1945 Gregor became quite literally a “changeling” when plucked from a refugee train to replace another boy his own age who was killed in those bombings. He grows up belonging to one German family while conscious always that he is actually someone else, that he possesses a second identity, the truth of which he both seeks and evades as the novel brings us through his life as a musician in Berlin and elsewhere. Disguise is a tautly-written meditation of real and invented identity, and the construction — by a scarred individual and a scarred society — of myths to survive by. It is a novel about displacement and replacement. If one theme in Disguise is the sense of a Germany strained to be liberated from the aftermath of catastrophic events, then Northern Ireland is one society trying to decide between whether it is better to forget the past or discover all its uncomfortable truths. Calls are frequently made for a truth commission, but as the truth is generally a highly selective and subjective business, no such body has ever been formed. David Park is a Northern novelist who has always stood slightly apart from his contemporaries with a clear-headed prose that leaves no room for false notes, nostalgia or self-serving mythologies. Park invents his own commission in his most ambitious and achieved novel, The Truth Commissioner (Bloomsbury). It brings together four seemingly diverse male figures: the truth commissioner himself, an upper-class Englishman who when not presiding over what he sees as the parading of wounds from “a rather pathetic and primitive tribal war, seeks solace in adultery and prostitution; a former IRA leader who now finds himself a government minister; a lonely retired policeman who fills his days with charitable works and hillwalking; and a minor paramilitary figure who emerges from hiding in the hope of a new life with his pregnant lover. All are linked by awkward truths about the disappearance of a teenage boy. As befits such a humane writer, The Truth Commissioner is a shrewdly uncomfortable novel by a writer yet to receive the acclaim that previous books deserve. If The Truth Commissioner is set in the aftermath of a human catastrophe that unfolded in slow motion over 30 \[jchambers\]thirty years, then Joseph O'Neill's brilliantly written Netherland is informed by the aftermath of a catastrophe that occurred out of nowhere in the blink of an eye. Many other novels have been set in New York post 9/11, but there is an immediacy within O'Neill's book that makes it a stunning exploration of the American dream through a very European sensibility. At times, the language is hypnotic and hallucinatory in its depiction of a Dutch bank trader adrift in the Chelsea Hotel after his wife takes their child back to London after the terror attack forces them to vacate their New York home. O'Neill's unlikely vehicle for this new slant on the American dream is the minuscule world of cricket as played in New York, where the emotionally stranded trader finds himself the only white man on a cricket team playing in a bumpy park on Staten Island and becomes drawn into the dreams of a cricket obsessive and entrepreneur, Chuck Ramkissoon, whose body winds up in a New York canal. As both a hymn to an unlikely American sport and a compulsive murder mystery, Netherland is a fascinating read. This shortlist shows that Irish fiction remains in rude health, especially when you consider the others novels that could so deservedly have been there, from Carlo Gebler's A Good Day for a Dog, (Lagan Press, €11.99), a compelling account of a career criminal with his own peculiar version of morality, to Peter Cunningham's intriguing The Silence and The Sea, the latest of a rich succession of novels that have quietly reinvented his native Waterford. Chris Binchy and Kevin Power both produced disturbingly powerful accounts of the dark side of the Celtic Tiger, while William King in Leaving Ardglass charted how Irish subbies greasing palms in trenches in London in 1961 became millionaire builders who wound up before the tribunals. John Boyne continued to expand his remarkable imaginative universe with the compelling Mutiny on the Bounty, while Noelle Harrison added to her growing reputation with I Remember. This 2009 will be a tough year in publishing, with fewer books sold and publishers less likely to take risks on new voices, but more than ever there is a need for writers to map these unchartered times. We will await with interest what directions and stories are thrown up by the economic catastrophe with which Irish people are now contending.

Courtesy of the Sunday Independent.