Out with the auld, in with the new

Today’s Dublin is a far cry from the city mapped out by James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ – but, given how much it’s changed in recent years, are writers reflecting a contemporary capital?

THIS YEAR'S St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin will be led not by a theme, not by a historical figure or event, not by a thousand shades of green but by a new short story. Roddy Doyle's Brilliant,commissioned for the occasion, will be brought to life by street-theatre groups and performance artists. (There's more on all of this in today's Magazine.) The idea was partly to give a nod to Dublin's new status as Unesco City of Literature and partly – and much more trickily – to give us all a lift.

Few writers are as well placed as Doyle to do both. On the one hand a Booker-winning literary figure, on the other, a tireless chronicler of the bits of Dublin that don’t often make it on to the pages of literary fiction. In the new story a black dog of depression has settled over Dublin and stolen its funny bone. A gang of children take off in pursuit, chasing the dog from suburban gardens through the city centre to the zoo and back to the sea. It’s a Dublin road movie in which the roads themselves – and the buildings, and the statues – get in on the action.

Doyle could never be accused of neglecting his home city in his writing. A view is doing the rounds, however, that Irish literary fiction has turned away from the modern world, while crime writers battle at the coalface of global capitalism. But is it true?

Even the most desultory count adds up to a fistful of literary novels set in a recognisably current capital: Keith Ridgway's The Parts;Paul Murray's Skippy Dies;Nuala Ní Chonchúir's You;Kevin Power's Bad Day at Blackrock;Anne Enright's The Gatheringand her new book, The Forgotten Waltz, due for publication next month; Dermot Bolger's New Town Soul.

The latter is a novel for young adults written in the Gothic tradition of Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu but steeped in the contemporary teenage world of Facebook and text messaging. Are Irish novelists under an obligation to engage with what has been happening in the country in recent years? Not as far as Bolger is concerned.

“I don’t think novelists are obliged to do anything except write novels,” he says. “And I think that there’s a very great danger in seeing novelists as spokespeople for anything other than themselves. The word novelist is a very grand term. I can only talk about myself: for me writing has always been my way of trying to make sense of the physical world around me. And in doing so, hopefully, that world will also make sense to the people who read my books.”

In terms of a book’s location the crime writer is, according to Declan Hughes, the author of the Ed Loy series, in a different position to the literary novelist. There is a kind of obligation, but it’s demanded by the genre itself. “The kind of crime fiction I write – hardboiled crime fiction – centres around the detective and the city,” Hughes says. “If you look back to Dashiel Hammett with San Francisco, or Raymond Chandler with Los Angeles, the city is a character in the novel. I have been quite conscious about trying to use Dublin in that way.”

He has also, he says, tried to show the way in which Dublin, like Los Angeles, has sprawled outwards over the past 10 years. “People used to say, ‘Oh, Dublin’s like a village – everyone knows each other.’ Well, I think that’s only true now in the sense that Washington’s like a village and everyone knows each other. The 500 journalists and lawyers and politicians and rich people know each other. But after that . . . you don’t know everyone who’s driving on the M50 at 6.30 in the morning, do you?”

Much of the action in Hughes’s books takes place along the sweep of Dublin Bay, from Howth through Killiney and Dalkey to the Wicklow mountains. Hardly the mean streets.

“You don’t get the full picture if you’re only in the mean streets,” he says. “The big gates to the mansion as are resonant as the alleyway where the body is dropped, and those connections are where the crime novel really begins to accumulate a kind of energy.” From this point of view the crime novel’s relationship to the city is primarily one of space rather than time; the city is the three-dimensional space within which the story happens, so its sense of “right here, right now” is not so much a conscious stylistic decision as a byproduct of that literary architecture.

Hughes suggests women’s fiction has had an even bigger role to play in changing ideas about what the purpose of fiction should be. Often denigrated as escapist fluff – “chick lit” – this kind of writing may, he says, have helped create “an expectation that there will be realistic fiction about contemporary life”.

Another big change has been the blurring of boundaries between literary and genre fiction. Two decades ago it would have been unthinkable to find a crime novel such as The Lemur, bearing on its cover the legend: “John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black.” The best of our crime writers are just that: very good writers. In Hughes’s books, observations about Dublin aren’t always simply bits of information to advance the plot, they’re more like jazz riffs where he shows off his writing skills. Before he got into the crime business Hughes was one of our most gifted playwrights.

There has also been a widening of the boundary fence around the term "crime novel". Tana French has produced a trio of linked psychological mysteries. The narrator of her most recent book, Faithful Place, is an undercover detective who has tried to sever all ties with his dysfunctional city-centre family, only to find himself being drawn back into an old personal trauma.

“In a lot of ways Faithful Place is a love song to Dublin; not just to the good bits but to the bad bits as well,” she says. “There’s a certain way in which you bitch about a place which is your home. You wouldn’t go away and complain about the day-to-day things in your holiday spot, because it’s not yours to complain about. You only complain about things at home because you feel it deserves the best, in some way. It deserves to be a good place.”

For French, as for Hughes, crime fiction is unavoidably linked to the society from which it comes. “I’ve got this theory that crime fiction is like a dipstick indicator in society, because crime itself is so shaped by the time and place in which it happens,” she says. “To give an extreme example, you don’t have drive-by drug shootings in 18th-century Siberia. So it’s very much shaped by the priorities of the time; the fears, the desires that go with a certain society. In Ireland the amount of corruption on planning decisions and things like that, and the amount of things done to the property market that really should not have been done, those things were predicated on the Irish craving for home, the desire to own our own property, and the terror of being dispossessed.”

And literary fiction has faced up to these themes. When it was first published, in 1990, Dermot Bolger's The Journey Homewas described by one critic as "the best novel about Dublin since Joyce". It, too, is a tale of Dublin suburban sprawl, but with the emphasis on families from rural Ireland moving to the city – a story we now, in our new-found urbanity, seem to have forgotten about.

“I’m like the vast and overwhelming majority of Dubliners in that I don’t have a drop of Dublin blood in me,” Bolger says. “My father is from a family of seven in Wexford town; my mother was from a family of 11 on a small farm in Monaghan. A number of them came to Dublin during the war. Almost all of them had to emigrate.”

This mutability, Bolger adds, is written into the DNA of Dublin. “For any city to be a lively, vibrant place it needs to have a perpetual influx of new people coming in with new ideas and new cultures and new influences. Forty years ago that influx was coming from Monaghan and Wexford, and it’s coming from Lithuania and Poland now.”

Realistic or not, fiction of all kinds is, in the end, fiction. Another type of Dublin truth-telling is evident in the work of Dublin poets. In his introduction to Gerard Smyth's The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems,Thomas McCarthy describes the poetry as "Dublin geography, in a compelling Dublin remembered but washed clean of sentimentality like the wet cobblestones of St James's Gate". Certainly a poem such as Smyth's The Russian Delicatessen,which will be published in the forthcoming edition of Poetry Ireland Review, can evoke the city in a way that is both timeless and utterly immediate:

“When the Russian delicatessen opened opposite the Chinese takeaway, I thought of my father and what he might say . . .”

“Cities have always been my thing,” Smyth says. “Walking cities has always been one of my favourite activities, and I learned to walk cities in Dublin.”

Dublin may have sprawled beyond its old boundaries in the past decade but, he argues, “the shape of the city hasn’t changed. The heritage of the city hasn’t changed. There are still the same statues and the same landmarks – the river is still the same river that courses its way through it.”

But post-boom, says Smyth, who is also a managing editor at The Irish Times, there is a new uneasiness in the equation. "Dublin, whether people accept it or not, has been at the centre of the fall from grace that we've suffered. I'm not saying that people outside Dublin haven't suffered. But as the capital city Dublin bears a responsibility for what happened." It is too soon to see this awareness turn up on the page, he says. "What has been happening is so quick and so dramatic that it will take time for someone to emerge to navigate through it, and mediate it, and write it into literature in some way or other."

Hughes agrees, to the extent that he has taken a break from his Ed Loy series and is writing a stand-alone novel set in the US. “Having set five books in a row in Dublin I actually did want to step back, because the whole political and economic situation was so volatile and huge that you couldn’t quite take it in,” he says. Like Bolger, however, he questions the extent to which writers are obliged to take a moral position one way or the other.

“That’s not your job as a writer,” Hughes says. “It may be your job as a citizen, or as a father, or as a drinker late at night to go, ‘Maybe it was better when we had nothing.’ But as a writer you’re going, ‘What is all this? How do we capture all this? How do we describe what is going on?’”

Engaging with a constantly changing cityscape has its perils, says Hughes. His most recent novel, City of Lost Girls,refers to a gents' toilet at the Forty Foot as "the urinal with the greatest view in the known world". "Between the book getting locked down after galley proofs and the book being published, the urinal with the greatest view in the known world was closed," Hughes says, ruefully. "So you're writing historical fiction whether you like it or not."

You can download Brilliantfrom roddydoyle.ie or get a printed copy from Dublin libraries