Tales of the centuries: a history of the Irish novel

One of the main problems confronting the writing of A History of the Irish Novel was getting beyond our obsession with the singular achievements of certain writers – James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Maria Edgeworth – which skews the literary landscape by suggesting that when Irish writers bothered to write a novel at all it was only to write great ones. The reality, of course, is that the novel is at once the most throwaway and accessible of forms as well as the one which increasingly aspires to be imperishable art.

In a roundabout way John McGahern offered a template for the novel form past and present, but particularly for the Irish novel form. In his short story Sierra Leone the narrator says of his family's constant reiteration of the events of their mother Rose's death:

I heard them go over and over what happened. As if by going and over it they would return it to the everyday.

The basic need of all story-telling is to return the extraordinary to the ordinary, to make the strange a part of the everyday. McGahern’s narrator goes on to say that “they were succeeding” because “They had to”. For the would-be Irish novelist, and indeed critic of the Irish novel, this note of urgent necessity is important because what is at stake for their art is relevancy. Novels and novelists come and go, are read or not, because the story told is relevant or not to the moment of the reader.

One of the more urgent Irish stories to emerge from a history of the novel from the seventeenth century to the present is, ironically enough, how a fundamental strain exists between national narratives and personal narratives, between the story of the individual versus the wider "history" of Ireland. From early on in a novel such as Sarah Butler's marvellous Irish Tales from 1716 or the brilliant work of Lady Morgan in the early nineteenth century there is the often overwhelming presence of a potted history of Ireland, as if each new reader must first be acquainted with Ireland's entire story before engaging with any one particular story. Even James Joyce's mighty Ulysses, the most humane of modern novels, is burdened with this need to engage with Irish history.

The human stories central to all these novels are diverse and engaging, forever charting the changing nature of Irish life, rendering moments and capturing images that reverberate down the years. For example the passages depicting the northside of Dublin in John Banim's 1826 novel, The Nowlans, are repeated 80 years later in Joyce's work, suggesting how the famine halted progress at so many levels. That novel, too, in its descriptions of Irish rural life in the 1820s, points to a maelstrom of identities and loyalties and possibilities that also become devastatingly silenced as the traumas of that century unfold.

It takes a writer such as George Moore in his novel The Lake from 1903 to reimagine the post-famine relationship to the Irish landscape as one of possible love and intellectual nourishment. Such a trope of a personal and human link to the world of nature becomes commonplace in the Irish novel in the 20th century. As does the focus on becoming, narratives of the move from adolescence to adulthood, as if the story of the self and its growth into being is now the only story to be told.

The novel form has always been linked, as one might imagine, to that which is new, that which is news. The processes of modernisation have always been news in an Ireland that is either ending or beginning, perpetually in the midst of being born or dying. It is perhaps one reason why the Irish novel has had such a purchase on the global literary imagination. This “story” of moving between the old and the new, its attendant gains and losses, is not just an Irish story but is everyone else’s story too. So Roddy Doyle, Claire Kilroy, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph O’Connor and Sheridan Le Fanu are truly global only when they write intensely local stories managing to connect with others who also share their concerns.

The novel is traditionally associated with revelation: with unearthing what has been hidden, ignored or denied. Certainly that is an element of the Irish novel, though it might be argued that it is a very narrow perspective that pushes the notion of the novel as a kind of therapy. More salient and interesting, though, is how Irish novels reflect the ways in which we use language not for revealing ourselves but rather concealing ourselves. Joyce knew that, as did Samuel Beckett, and so too does an author like John Banville whose literary output focuses on characters who elaborately, and through his wonderful turn of phrase, beautifully – conceal their true selves or try to. And Deirdre Madden, too, in her recent work meditates not only on the limits of language but also on how forms of expression – acting, photography and writing itself – attempt to render the world as it is and thereby change it in the process. So stories have been important, but so too has been that kind of anxiousness about the very language and form itself as each writer strives to make the novel speak as they would want it to speak.

Each generation believes its own time is utterly exceptional and the contemporary moment is no different. After reading and critiquing novels from the seventeenth century to the present it is clear that Irish writers have always exploited and explored this gap between exceptionality and the boundless possibilities of everyday life. What has been remarkable is how the novel in Ireland, at its very best, has been a vehicle where stereotypes have been skewered, where representative types embodying national or political or historical currents and fads are undone by the elusive complexities of people as they actually are: contradictory and inconsistent. This desire to render a world as it is, tell the stories of Irish life as they are, and not as others might want them to be, continues to provoke our novelists into art.

A History of the Irish Novel by Derek Hand (Cambridge University Press, £19.99)