Study of the Irish novel falls between two stools
NEITHER wholly damnable nor entirely successful, George O’Brien’s study of the Irish novel is problematic. Too scattershot for a scholarly audience, too academic for a general readership, this book is fated for university libraries, where its frequent flashes of insight about the last half century will be mined for quotes by the undergraduates of the next.
That is not to say that O’Brien, an emeritus professor at Washington’s Georgetown University, does not know his material.
The problem is the opposite: his knowledge of post-war and contemporary Irish fiction is too broad to fit within his structural constraints: three-to-four page essays on 51 novels from 1960 to 2010.
Lacking the page-count to engage with the material, these gobbets stand at odds with the book’s aim of assessing the Irish novel as a “discursive space”.
The reader is seldom drawn into conversation with the author because, typically, he begins each essay with a summary of the novel, before moving full throttle into critical assessment. In theory, there is nothing wrong with this, but a concentrated burst of analysis bears as much resemblance to pleasurable reading as the thick paste of meat stock does to a warm, rejuvenating mug of Bovril.
It is difficult to see anyone but an institution buying this book, not simply because academic texts are overpriced — one of the more obvious ‘cancers’ afflicting this corner of the publishing industry — but also because of its specificity.
A student of, say, Edna O’Brien or Aidan Higgins will find four pages of insightful, occasionally provocative analysis of one key work, but will run these through the photocopier and be on their way.
The Irish Novel is not something anyone will sit down and read whole. Neither is it a reference volume, its author rightly uninterested in producing “a hierarchy of ‘greatest’ works”.
No, what this most closely resembles is an especially erudite blog that has strayed into the print-and-paper universe.
O’Brien walks a fine line between so-called “academese” and the level of discourse most readers will find interesting or useful.
While this is far from the worst example of jargon-based literary criticism, the lack of a thematic through-line hampers the cohesion of the individual essays. This is demonstrative, supporting O’Brien’s thesis that there is no one “specific notion of tradition that the novel, or any other literary form, should maintain”.
But the diversity of approaches to authors as varied as Francis Stuart, Julia O’Faolain, and Glenn Patterson leaves one thinking this volume should have been called The Irish Novels, plural, a work framed by the “difficulties presented by the contemporary Irish novel to canon formation”.
Nevertheless, O’Brien identifies trends. These range from the obvious — the body’s use as “important imaginative territory” — to the more surprising, such as the relevance of love in recent Irish fiction.
However, what really marks out the Irish novel as different, from the 1960s on, is the manner in which home, in all its connotations, is “no longer a viable site of continuity and inheritance”.
But the brevity of the essays makes it difficult to involve the reader and so the standout aspects of The Irish Novel become those clipped, quotable riffs on breaks with tradition: Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (2010) is the “un-Harry Potter”; Michael Farrell’s Thy Tears Might Cease (1963) is essentially “a story of Parnellite sexual rebellion”; JG Farrell’s Troubles (1970) is a tale of “the terminal, the violent, the deliquescent, and the delinquent”.
Elsewhere, there are curious omissions. O’Brien expresses disappointment in the formal developments of the Irish novel, for showing “little interest in replicating, much less adding to, the innovations that earned the modernism of Joyce and Beckett its international eminence”, yet he overlooks fiction which does exactly this. The most glaring oversight is Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma (2005), arguably the only interesting Irish novel of the 21st Century.
A work rooted at the intersection of the self, media, technology, and politics, Notes from a Coma is neglected in favour of Sebastian Barry’s offensively dull and chronically overrated Booker-bait A Long, Long Way.
Of course, to fill these columns with examples of excluded novelists (Neil Jordan, anyone?) would be to review a book O’Brien has not written.
Of those books he discusses, his choices are frequently commendable, displaying real feeling for the most interesting — and so most frequently overlooked — works of big name writers.
For instance, forgoing mighty candidates like The Book of Evidence (1989) or The Untouchable (1997), O’Brien concentrates on the 1980s John Banville, presenting Kepler (1981) as an exemplar of the Wexford-man’s great biographical novels and their “pronounced reservations regarding the potential for the meaning of the historical scenarios that are their pretext”.
Equally, in representing “the most significant Irish novelist of his generation”, John McGahern, O’Brien makes the brave choice of selecting The Pornographer (1979), that curious story of Dublin’s “terminally tiresome post-war intellectual life” which is “probably McGahern’s least popular novel”.
O’Brien may envision his audience, like that of James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969), to be the “sensitive, fair-minded common reader”, an artefact of “enlightened citizenship”, yet, like the majority of academic literary criticism, The Irish Novel is really just for those who have already read the books in question.
More precisely, it is for the third-level student. The general reader, who, at the contemporary end of the scale, has only read Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín, is unlikely to get their money’s worth.
True, they may encounter the work of authors with whom they are unfamiliar, Mary Morrissy, Timothy O’Grady, or — as one goes further back — Sam Hanna Bell or Anthony C West, but the lurching quality of O’Brien’s study is far from introductory in nature.
Moreover, the often meritorious book-a-year approach fares poorly here against the thematic arrangement and contextual essays of, to give two examples, the John Wilson Foster-edited Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006) or the Brian Shaffer-edited Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945-2000 (2005).
By contrast, The Irish Novel only partially succeeds in setting out to “participate in, and reflect upon, the idea of change as it relates to the contemporary Irish novel”.
Despite many valuable observations, the evident love of the material fuelling O’Brien’s essays is lost in the book’s unremitting rush of critical analysis. Consequently, The Irish Novel provides the reader, specialist or not, with no time to reflect upon, or to absorb, O’Brien’s observations within the wider situation of Irish literature and culture.
It is not so much a failure as a missed opportunity.
* Dr Val Nolan lectures on Irish literature at NUI Galway. He will address November’s NEICN conference in Sunderland on the subject of John McGahern’s unproduced screenplays.
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