Best Irish books? Normal People and The Spinning Heart among choices by Joe Duffy and others
Joe Duffy and Lisa McInerney.
While Cork’s favourite son, Frank O’Connor, is the greatest short story writer Ireland has ever produced, Dublin’s Sean O’Casey has been sadly ignored in modern Irish literature. He was only mentioned in connection with the wonderful new Museum of Literature Ireland when his omission was pointed out! So my favourite Irish book of all time is O’Casey’s six-volume Autobiographies series.
Caoilinn Hughes has powerfully captured the Ireland of a decade ago when the economy collapsed like a deck of cards built on corrupt banks and casino developers. Her novel The Wild Laughter is mesmeric in its language, frenetic in its storytelling, yet engrossing in its narrative of one family brought down by a low and dishonest decade – just like the nation.
Roddy Doyle was my first 'grown-up' Irish writer. There are scenes I remember vividly from The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. I first read it in my mid-teens and quickly realised, with exhilaration, what a writer’s role was: to respond to all the textures of life, no matter how sad or difficult or grim.
It’s difficult to choose just one favourite recent Irish book – it’s an embarrassment of riches. The first to pop into my mind is Mary Costello’s 2019 novel The River Capture, in which Joycean scholar Luke must choose between love and duty. Delicate yet unconstrained, uninhibited, and every sentence of it reaching and deeply felt.
John Boorman’s Adventurers of a Suburban Boy is a lovely autobiography. There’s so much of Wicklow in it [where Boorman lives] and his time shooting Excalibur. He lived through such mad times. He tells a story when he was shooting a movie with Lee Marvin in the States. They’re driving this jeep. Lee Marvin’s out of his mind drunk and he climbs up on the roof while John Boorman drives back towards the hotel. The cops pull him over: “Sir, can we see your driver’s licence? You do realise you’ve got Lee Marvin on top of your roof?”
Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea is about a famine ship. Bodies on board just pile up and are chucked overboard. It’s beautifully written. You feel like you’re reading a history book, but there’s a mystery and adventure to it. It’s such a brilliant book.
Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland by Eddie Lenihan allows us a glimpse into a parallel world that is both distant and eerily close to our own, inhabited by those who dwell in ringforts and in the shadows around us. Chilling and often droll, this book is a classic.
Paula Meehan’s As If By Magic is well titled, as it certainly had me under its spell! Drawing on decades of beautiful, powerful poems, it’s a great book to dip in and out of: reading even one poem of hers is bound to enrich your day. I promise.
Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy captured an Irishness that hadn’t really been captured before – obviously the darkness; small-town Ireland, how it’s small but it’s also the universe. It’s a hilarious book with these wonderful lines like “Mr Algernon Carruthers always on these ships going around the world and eating big dinners.” I suppose it’s the kid, too. We’ve a little bit of Francie Brady in us all.
Anna McPartlin’s Below the Big Blue Sky is about a family dealing with death and grief in that Irish way, finding humour to deal with the aftermath of this character Rabbit Hayes, and about how they try to re-build their lives. The book is a sequel, but it stands on its own as a story. She’s a fantastic writer.
I loved Dancer by Colum McCann. It’s based around Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nuréyev. It follows him throughout his life – from poverty, walking the streets of Russia, desperately trying to outfox those people who were trying to outfox him – and how he’s swept along and destroyed by his obsession.
I started reading Colum McCann’s Apeirogon during lockdown. It’s a complicated read. It’s about two men who are on either side of the Palestinian divide. They both lose children. They try and bridge together communities, fighting for peace through understanding each other.
My experience of reading Irish literature was sort of ruined by my education. It was Patrick Kavanagh, mountains and hills, old spinster women with Brian Friel. Things I found unrelatable. Then I read this play Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh. I couldn’t believe you could write this freely. Some of his words aren’t really words. This is how me and my friends talk to each other. All of a sudden literature was cracked open for me.
Patrick Freyne is my favourite Irish writer. He’s up there with A.A. Gill. He’s an incredible asset to Ireland. His book OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea has just come out. His writing just glistens. I know when he stops writing, we’ll want to gather all his articles together and marvel at the way he has tracked Irish life and current affairs in such a funny and deft way.
Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth is the first big house novel. You wouldn’t know where it came from – it was a beautiful, instant piece of pure creation. She inspired Walter Scott. Therefore by extension JM Synge and Federico García Lorca, who was influenced by Synge. There is a thread of influence that goes back to her.
Kevin Barry’s new book of stories That Old Country Music. To replace an unhelpful addiction with a really positive addition, Kevin fits the bill. There is a distinction between stories you should read and stories you want to read – his stories are stories you want to read. You get a strange hunger for them, a kind of Barryitis, where you want to be in the presence of his sentences.
The opening of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin – which is about the French guy Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk across the Twin Towers – is amazing. Himself and his girlfriend are going up through the building, with this plan of how to get onto the roof. From the first page, you get sucked in. It’s what I love about a book. You nearly want to wake up early to read it more.
I loved Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I read it really quickly. I couldn’t put it down. I bought it as a Christmas and birthday present for everybody I knew that year it came out, but I just cannot watch the awful TV version.
I keep The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats on my bedside table. Poetry skews quite young; only the very greatest poets like Yeats keep getting better into old age. We’re living through such challenging and divided times. It’s been a great comfort re-reading poems of Yeats – who lived through so much extraordinary history – to know you can go through hard times and come out the other side. “We had fed the hearts on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare/More substance in our enmities/Than in our love”. I think about that line of his a lot.
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is a very concise book, but it has the whole of Ireland’s boom and crash, and the eeriness of those ghost estates for the people trapped in them. As well as being an emotionally very powerful book, it’s a history of modern Ireland. It completely gets that period. It’s an extraordinary novel.
- Irish Book Week runs October 17-24
