Books of the year: Ryan ascends to the top table of writers with his latest novel

From the best Irish novelists to great nature writing, and a memorable US ambassador to France, Jack Power selects his books of the year

Donal Ryan is quickly ascending to the pantheon of great Irish writers.

Heart, Be At Peace by Donal Ryan (Doubleday, Penguin pb €16.99)

It might have been premature — just — to include Donal Ryan in the all-time pantheon of Irish writers before the publication of the magnificent Heart, Be At Peace but that wonderful, upliftingly good, that tremendously well-constructed novel secures his place at the very top table of Irish novelists.

Probably among all novelists working in English, too. Yes, it is that good.

The vibrancy, the dirt-under-the-nails intimacies he unearths, the recognition of primal forces in building or sundering family and/or community relationships, the susceptibilities of the unhappy and unfulfilled are brought together in a way that inspires and intimidates in equal measure.

His portrait of Bobby, one of his cornerstone figures, and his constantly darkening struggle to protect his family and community from the world’s nastier intrusions is exemplary and sobering.

In a year that McGahern’s That They Might Face The Rising Sun was brought gloriously to the screen it is hard to imagine that someone somewhere is not working on a screenplay for Ryan’s trilogy, one that concluded with Heart, Be At Peace.

Now a lecturer at the University of Limerick Ryan has become a truly wonderful novelist. If he is half as good a teacher as he is a writer his students are indeed privileged. And his trilogy would just about fit in a decent Christmas stocking.

The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry (Canongate, hb €17.99)

If Ryan’s Heart, Be At Peace is a masterpiece of orchestration then Kevin Barry’s fourth novel, and his first set in America, seems something closer to free-form jazz — or sean-nós dancing if that comparison is not a step too far.

The novel may seem less structured but that is one of its many achievements. That looseness seems a feint, a contrived vulnerability to seduce and entice.

Come into my web said the spider to his reader. The unrelentingly manic energy of the writing almost, but never fully, seems to dictate the novel’s direction of travel.

It is written at a pace that leaves little or no room for regret. The tale of two fleeing lovers — Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie — is a well-worn plot but Barry’s rollicking almost hopelessly romantic descriptions of their race toward inevitable destruction has a Jericho-3 velocity that moves from one calamity to the next long before the bruises of the last brush with reality have healed. Hand break turns abound.

A tale of forced emigration, a tale of the presence of real tragedy in 19th century transatlantic relocation too, it is on a far tighter scale than E Annie Proulx’s magisterial Accordion Crimes but may be all the more memorable and impactful for that economy. 

It describes brothels in Montana where lost miners are offered whatever pleasure they desire through a price list in Irish. Hardly the ‘Mother Mo Chroí’ or the ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’ version of the Irishman’s emigrant life. 

Hardly experiences to describe in letters home to grieving mothers, not back then anyway.

If Colm Toíbín’s 2009 Brooklyn is firmly rooted at the Mills & Boon end of the spectrum of Irish emigration novels then The Heart In Winter, for all its fantasies and tragedy, is at the other, suck it up or disappear end. 

Hard-nosed but often hilarious it is not hard to imagine the squadrons of west Cork miners who tried to put down roots in Montana’s Butte living or drowning just as Barry describes. 

Hard-scrabble lives often mired in violence, suicidal drinking, marrow-sucking loneliness or newly learned narcotic misuse. Knife fights instead of football matches. 

It even has that by now standard figure in Irish writing — the overly devout hypocrite in the figure of Polly’s abandoned and consequentially miffed husband, the miners’ boss Long Anthony Harrington. 

That his anger is fuelled by economic rather than emotional distress — their marriage was transactional — just adds to the dystopian thread so deftly woven into what, had fate been kinder, might have been ordinary lives by Barry’s acrobatic but deeply graceful witing.

If there is a scriptwriter trying to capture Ryan’s trilogy then sure another is trying to make The Heart In Winter fit in an hour-and-a-half film, maybe even two hours. 

If the Coen brothers, whose script for True Grit is one of the very greatest celebrations of English in our modern world, took on the project it would be entirely appropriate — and what an appetite that would whet for the film and for Barry’s next novel too.

Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s astonishing life of seduction, intrigue and power by Sonia Purnell (Virago, €31.25)

No matter who president-elect Donald J Trump nominates for one American office or another it is unlikely that anyone, no matter how bizarre, will have a back story as colourful as Pamela Churchill Harriman who, at the time of her death in a Paris swimming pool almost 30 years ago, was America’s ambassador to France.

Appointed by Bill Clinton, she was born Pamela Digby to comfortable if provincial, aristocratic parents in 1920.

She knew quickly that a life riding to hounds in Dorset was not for her. Driven by an ambition that seemed more an affliction than a blessing it is a tribute to her “magical” skills as a seductress, a communicator, a confidant, a socialite and, finally, a diplomat that she realised most of her ambitions.

She, nevertheless, died alone and in conflict with the children of her third husband Averell Harriman. 

When he died in 1986, she inherited €100m but just over a decade later, when she died in 1997 that had dwindled to just €10m. 

Money troubles clouded her last months and contributed to her death in the Paris Ritz just less than 30 years ago.

It may not have been the primary intention of author Sonia Purnell but her descriptions of the blinkered machinations at the decision-making tier of America’s Democratic party all those years ago showed the early signs of the fatal disconnection from that party’s natural constituency, a disconnect that means Trump will appoint America’s next ambassador to France.

This is a very well written biography of one of the major secondary figures of the last century — and that century’s reality rather than its expressed values.

It’s almost Anna Karenina meets The West Wing and will interest anyone who cares about how this world is managed by powerful elites — or, as time has shown, mismanaged.

Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers by John Gierach (Simon Schuster, hb €18.00)

Though this uplifting anthology was published in 2020 Gierach’s death in early October meant a deep dive into some of his more than 40 books. 

Though presented as an angling writer all through his career he was more a philosopher than anything. AA Luce in a Stetson.

He was a wonderful writer and had depth of perception that put him among the very best in the idiom he devoted his life to — that point of reverie where nature writing and the foolishness of much of what we do collide. 

It is possible but not certain that the world will find another Gierach.

His subject, his instincts are no longer as popular as they were, and our world is all the poorer for that.

Rest in peace John Gierach, may you find rising trout wherever you are.