FEATURES / Ireland’s literary scene 2024
Out of shame, into the light
Contemporary Irish fiction has become explosively popular, and its authors are feeding, in part, on the decline of the Catholic Church / By MARY KENNY
SURPRISE HAS BEEN expressed that there is only one Irish candidate for the Booker Prize this year. In 2023, Irish writers took both first and second place: Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song was the winner, and Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting was on the shortlist. This year Colin Barrett (Wild Houses) is the only Irish novelist to have reached the longlist.
Irish writers now have a huge presence on the English-speaking literary scene, and even a selective roll call of the names that have gathered awards and glowing reviews would be lengthy: Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Kevin Barry, Sebastian Barry, Donal Ryan, Claire Keegan, Emma Donoghue, Eimear McBride, Anna Burns, John Banville, Marian Keyes, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Joseph O’Connor, Meghan Nolan, Louise Kennedy, John Boyne, Nicole Flattery, Billy O’Callaghan …
And, obviously, Sally Rooney, whose new novel, Intermezzo, emerges later this month, an extract of which has promisingly appeared in The New Yorker. Rooney is now so famous and successful that she is rated a “celeb” by tabloid newspapers, and the title of her first book, Normal People, is tagged on to various screen thespians and their on-or-off love affairs. Why has this astonishing flowering of Irish literature – by which I mean fiction – occurred in our time? Some reasons are foundational: there has always been a storytelling tradition in Ireland. Every homestead turf fire once attracted the seanchaí – the storyteller – and in ancient clan courts the bard had pride of place.
Today, Ireland is a rich country (one recent survey put it as the second-wealthiest nation in the EU, after Luxembourg) which can provide the means to nurture writers. There is an Irish academy of the arts – Aosdána – which remits a stipend of €20,180 (£17,000) a year to the 250 creative writers and artists included in its hallowed membership. It can also provide bursaries for struggling writers.
There is also a generous tax arrangement for creative authors. The Arts Council is supportive to writers and publishers, and the acknowledgements in published books often express gratitude for Arts Council support. Grants and bursaries have also helped significant literary magazines, like The Stinging Fly, to flourish. Bookshops and libraries are busy. And Ireland has a highly educated population, most with a university degree (unlike in my youth, where a university education was a privileged exception).
So there is now a sufficiently leisured class to produce and consume literary works. There
PHOTO: ELEMENT PICTURES/BBC/HULU ORIGINALS
swearing is also a foundational Irish tradition, even if our more genteel elders once tried to suppress it as “common”; and if our suburban aunts were offended by the blasphemous use of “the holy name”, all the more reason for writers like Brendan Behan, even back in the day, to pepper his public utterances with “Jaysus!”
Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People
is also a perceptible openness to Irish writers among major London publishers: Hibernophilia is fashionable, perhaps as part of the anti-colonialist movement, and possibly, too, from post-Brexit appreciation that Ireland remains an enthused member of the EU.
Little remains of former reticence around sexuality. Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (which has remained in British bestseller lists all summer, and is a very good novel indeed) is especially graphically descriptive of male homosexual intercourse – arguably contextual, since it alludes to the freeing of a true self. Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren – much praised – is similarly specific about (heterosexual) sexuality, with some playful discursiveness about the shape of penises and the designs of dildos. Even the entertaining Marian Keyes, usually writing in a lighter, humorous vein, feels obliged to explore the territory of comparing the male member in My Favourite Mistake.
There has been, as everyone knows, a monu mental change in social values in Ireland over the past 40 years, and it is to be expected that there are concomitant changes in social and
And then there is another suggested factor: that the decline of the Catholic Church has freed up writers’ scope and even imagination. Literary censorship – which was lifted gradually during the 1960s, allowing for certain exceptions – was a restraint on writers, and readers. And while that was implemented by the state, it was reinforced by the influence and mentalité of Irish Catholicism (although care was taken always to include a Protestant on the censorship board, and literary censorship was not entirely absent elsewhere).
The young take as
unremarkable what previous
generations approached with a sense of boundary
sexual attitudes. Younger people take as unremarkable what previous generations – even mine, of the rebellious 1960s vintage – approached with a sense of boundary. Perhaps it’s significant that Colm Tóibín, regarded as the Irish laureate and rising 70, tends to produce fiction with more decorum. His engaging novel Long Island – again a bestseller all
BUT AS Kate McCusker wrote recently in The Guardian, “sloughing off the influence of the Catholic Church to legalise divorce, gay marriage and abortion” has had a liberating effect. “All of these things that were bottled up for years are coming out now,” she quoted a leading Dublin bookseller, Yvette Harte. “Irish people are coming out of shame and into the light.”
In my own reading of contemporary Irish fiction there certainly seems a discarding of inhibition, notably in the area of sexual prose descriptions, and especially in the use of sweary language. It’s striking how copiously the fword appears (not unusually accompanied by a religious allusion, such as “Effing Jesus Christ”), and not infrequently, also, in companionship with the c-word. In fairness,
summer – portrays a more innocent Irish town in the 1970s where courtships were expected to be a prelude to marriage, an affair had to be kept secret – and connection might depend on finding an available public telephone box (and the Catholic Church was a normal, communal presence). Restfully free from energetic anatomical details, Tóibín nevertheless skilfully implies the sacrifices of self that women often made for the sake of family and respectability.
The decline of the Irish Catholic Church may have liberated younger writers: it also gave them something to write about, usually negatively. Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time (longlisted for last year’s Booker) is a beautifully written, deeply depressing narrative whose central tragedy – among many other tragedies – is about the destructive outcome of a priestly rape on a little girl, many decades later. It is savage in its allusions to anything
4 | THE TABLET | 14 SEPTEMBER 2024
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