Illustration: Lara Harwood/Heartagency.com

A new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction

Dynamic, radical, often female … Irish fiction is flourishing. Gone is the conservative writing – all nostalgia and sexual repression – of the Celtic Tiger years. The writers of the new wave are original and bold

Justine Jordan

Saturday 17 October 2015

“Money kills the imagination,” says the narrator of Claire Kilroy’s 2012 novel The Devil I Know, a fiendishly good satire of the moment the Irish boom went bust. “It makes us want the same thing.” The book is set in 2016 and takes the form of one man’s testimony to a tribunal intended to uncover the sleaze and short-termism that enabled a giant property bubble to inflate in the years leading up to the global financial crash of 2008. In the autumn of 2015, we have not yet caught up with Kilroy’s future setting, but as the real-world aftershocks of the Celtic Tiger’s downfall continue, one Irish sector is booming: with the rise of a new wave of writers, from Paul Murray, Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan to first-time authors such as Eimear McBride, Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney and Colin Barrett, there is a palpable energy to Irish fiction.

Review

The best fiction of 2023

From Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, and a companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four – this year’s fiction highlights

Justine Jordan

Sat 9 Dec 2023 07.30 GMT

T

he book I’ve recommended most this year – and had the most enthusiastic feedback about, a whopping 656 pages later – is without doubt Paul Murray’s Booker-shortlisted tragicomedy, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton). This story of an Irish family’s tribulations told from four points of view combines freewheeling hilarity with savage irony, surprise reveals and generations-deep sadness; it offers the immersive pleasures that perhaps only a fat family saga can bring. It lost out on the night to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, a harrowing portrait of a totalitarian Ireland with an urgent message for a world of rising political violence.

There was another long-awaited return to fiction from 2013’s Booker winner Eleanor Catton. In Birnam Wood (Granta), idealistic guerrilla gardeners in New Zealand run up against a ruthless billionaire. This is a propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis, apocalyptic thinking and political ideology, and as stylishly written as you’d expect. Zadie Smith also took on a new genre with her first historical novel, The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton), which sets a gently comic portrait of 19th-century literary London, and a real-life trial which stirred up passionate emotions around class and identity, against harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. It expertly links Jamaican and British history, and offers a timely, quizzical reflection of our current age of globalisation and hypocrisy. Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s Tremor (Faber) is deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism, using autofiction for a subtle and up-to-the-minute study of how ideas around art, value and trauma are inflected by historical knowledge.

Sebastian Barry’s beautiful, nightmarish Old God’s Time (Faber) also digs back into the past, to show how trauma remains an open wound. A retired Irish policeman’s apparently calm life is torpedoed by historical experiences of abuse within the Catholic church: this raw and hugely moving novel is shot through with the force of familial love and mourning. There was more brilliant Irish writing about family in Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor (Faber), unbearably tense yet blackly comic dispatches from the early days of motherhood, and Anne Enright’s The Wren, the Wren (Jonathan Cape). This supple portrait of mothers and daughters, exploring the hangover of the patriarchal past in the shape of the famous poet who wrote about and abandoned them, may be her best book yet.

Deborah Levy delves into the deepest patterns of family connection and self-invention in August Blue (Hamish Hamilton), the riddling, elegant tale of a globe-trotting concert pianist whose subconscious is catching up with her. Formal ambition is elsewhere on display in Benjamin Myers’s Goldsmiths winner Cuddy (Bloomsbury), a visionary epic which covers a millennium of English history and employs poetry and prose, playscript and pastiche to trace the story of St Cuthbert, the building of Durham Cathedral and the contemporary northern landscape. Justin Torres won the National Book award in the US for the dreamlike and innovative Blackouts (Granta), which chops up historical texts and uses images and absence to construct a shadow history of queer desire and erasure. And I loved Kate Briggs’s debut fiction The Long Form (Fitzcarraldo), a quietly radical reinvention of the domestic novel in which a woman and her baby spend their day reading, thinking, feeding, napping – being. It’s full to the brim with fertile ideas about time, literature, care, and how we live within the form of our days.

Other notable debuts include Jacqueline Crooks’s hypnotic journey into the dub reggae scene, Fire Rush (Cape), charting a young Black woman’s experience of music, danger and racist policing in the 1980s. Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (4th Estate) follows young Vietnamese refugees to Thatcher’s Britain with great heart and delicacy. Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane (Picador), the slim story of a girl dedicating herself to squash after her mother’s death, blossoms in the spaces between words and the silences between characters: a masterclass in restraint. For Thy Great Pain HaveMercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie (Bloomsbury) is another tiny marvel, tenderly illuminating the inner lives of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.

Two first novels drew on the crime genre: Kala by Colin Walsh (Atlantic), a tale of bright-burning teenage friendship and slow-fade adult disappointment in a small Irish town, is a page-turner to rival Tana French. And No One Dies Yet by Kobby Ben Ben (Europa) places a trio of gay Americans looking for their ancestral roots in Ghana against a string of murders, for a playful and daringly executed expose of history, diaspora and the exploitation of African voices.

Short stories to look out for include Camilla Grudova’s impressively weird vignettes in The Coiled Serpent (Atlantic), Laura Jean McKay’s sharp speculations in Gunflower (Scribe), and another virtuoso collection from Tessa Hadley, whose After the Funeral (Cape) identifies moments of psychological change to thrilling effect. Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s Innards (Atlantic), chronicles of Soweto under and after apartheid, forcefully uncovers a corrosive history.

It was a great year for historical novels of all stripes. AK Blakemore’s followup to The Manningtree Witches, The Glutton (Granta), takes a tall story from the annals of revolutionary France – a man who ate everything, from buttons to babies – and spins an irresistible picaresque of social upheaval and individual appetite. This is a book joyously in love with language, in all its possibilities. Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann) follows an English servant girl on the run from a plague-hit early American colony: it’s both a gripping survival story, and a subtle allegory for the centuries to come.

Two energetic and hugely enjoyable books shook up the historical novel. Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz (Faber) portrays a noirish murder investigation in an alternative 1920s America, in which Native Americans play equal part; and The Ghost Theatre by Mat Osman (Bloomsbury) is a gleeful romp through the playhouses and back alleys of a twisted version of Elizabethan London.

Salman Rushdie spins a magical realist saga of medieval India in Victory City(Cape), his first fiction to be published since the attack against him in 2022. Meanwhile Tom Crewe’s The New Life (Chatto), about gay pioneers in 1890s London, has extraordinary physical presence, exploring bodies as well as minds; and Adam Mars-Jones writes 1970s England meticulously back into existence in the latest instalment of his witty and humane series about one man’s life and thoughts, Caret (Faber).

Contemporary Britain is the focus of Diana Evans’s lyrical and excoriating A House for Alice (Chatto), which sets one woman’s desire to return to the Nigeria of her youth against the backdrop of the Grenfell tragedy. Eliza Clark’s Penance (Faber), about the murder of a teenager by her peers, and the true-crime vultures who follow in its wake, is a disturbing and fiendishly clever portrait of Brexit Britain and online communities: how the longing for identity can be weaponised and twisted into dangerous new shapes.

In Julia (Granta), her companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Sandra Newman revisits a vision of England’s future that has receded into the past. By mirroring Orwell’s plot from the female perspective, she burrows deeper into the structures and effects of totalitarianism in an ingenious novel that thoughtfully complicates the original.

An unmissable rediscovery from 1973, Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke (Daunt), turns a cold eye on the family dysfunction of the English upper class. Through scalpel-sharp prose and bitter comedy it lays bare the darkest human impulses, but if you’d prefer sunnier Christmas reading, turn instead to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (Cape). In the tale of six astronauts circling the Earth, Harvey beautifully evokes the wonder and fragility of our planet and its inhabitants. An uplifting book, in every sense.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray / Quotes

 

David Lynch
Photo by Josh Telles

My hero: David Lych by Paul Murray

'He's violent and original, but most of all he's brave'

Paul Murray

14 August 2010

I

was 15 when Twin Peaks, David Lynch's surreal murder-mystery-soap-opera, first aired on TV. Until then, I'd found the suburbs of Dublin where I grew up almost terminally boring. They were art-proof; there was nothing interesting you could say about them – or so I thought. Lynch's dreamlike vision of suburbia uncovered the violence, mystery and dark magic of a world that I, in my naivety, had dismissed. Spectral white horses appeared in living rooms, detectives practised Zen; in the bravura opening sequence of one episode, a terrifying journey down a network of fibrous tunnels was revealed to be a close-up of an ordinary ceiling tile. Everything held an unknowable secret; for me, that was an invaluable lesson.

Paul Murray / ‘Can I bring my switch?’/ A family holiday throws up existential questions

 

 Illustration: Mark Long

‘Can I bring my switch?’: A family holiday throws up existential questions

When Booker-longlisted author Paul Murray took his 10-year old son on a trip of a lifetime to New York, he wasn’t expecting the Nintendo store to be the highlight

Once upon a life / Paul Murray

Paul Murray

Saturday 5 August 2023

Last year I spent four months teaching in Boston with my wife and son. It was amazing to immerse ourselves in another culture. It was also amazing, as a freelancer, to get holiday pay, and I wanted to take full advantage of it. When I was growing up in Ireland, my family would spend two weeks every summer in a caravan near Skibbereen. Rain-lashed, defiantly entertainment-free, these trips had no clear objective other than to make us appreciate not being on holiday. They made the world seem smaller, somehow, as if a door had been flung open to reveal a dingy cupboard.

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

The list is out … The Booker longlist 2023. Photograph: The Booker prize

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

This article is more than 3 months old

The personal meets the political in a list that includes dystopia and SF as well as little-known debuts
 Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Justine Jordan
Tuesday 1 August 2023

Those accustomed to complaining about the number of American writers nominated for the Booker prize since the widening of eligibility in 2014 will get a pleasant surprise this year: the sector that leads is Irish writers – and people called Paul. That’s not the only surprise; the judges have chosen to spotlight some little-known debuts in the place of major novels. While it feels reductive to read the longlist in terms of what’s not included, many will have expected to see Zadie Smith’s September novel The Fraud, and Tom Crewe’s acclaimed debut The New Life, among others.

The presence of four Irish writers, meanwhile, is far from surprising (and that’s without the inclusion of Anne Enright’s fine forthcoming novel The Wren, The Wren, or Claire Kilroy’s scorching tale of new motherhood, Soldier Sailor). Sebastian Barry is a veteran author who pushes himself with each new book, and Old God’s Time is a devastating, dreamlike study of the lifetime repercussions of historic childhood abuse in Catholic institutions. Paul Murray, loved for 2010’s tragicomic Skippy Dies, writes the novel of his career with The Bee Sting, which uncovers a family’s slow-burning secrets against a backdrop of climate anxiety – in terms of pure page-turning pleasure, this is probably the most enjoyable novel on the list. Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat explores the meaning of community and outsiderdom through one boy’s story, while Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, scheduled for September, is a chilling study of Ireland becoming a fascist state.