All that glisters is not gold

Fiction, like much else in life, has become tougher, brasher, more defiant

Fiction, like much else in life, has become tougher, brasher, more defiant. Novels are no longer being published by the old-style gentleman publisher in love with books and language, but by businessmen influenced by accountants with units to sell. Marketing has undermined dedicated editors with a vision.

Readers everywhere are losing out. The race is on; not for our imagination but for our cash. Gossip about huge advances and new writers being liberated from obscurity actually generates more attention than the novels.

Author interviews and points of sale, the fact the writer once lived on the moon for six months or six years, or served in the Foreign Legion, or was previously anything else but a writer, sells far more books than a positive review. Radio interviews are the goal of the publicist. But then, fiction, it could be argued, is now as much about agendas, social comment and personalities as states of mind and messed-up relationships, never mind stories. Plot is now the exclusive territory of the thriller writers - many of whom are natural writers - as fiction in general becomes more about tone, trends and attitudes.

If all of this appears confusing, it is because it is confusing. In Ireland, it is particularly bewildering because the majority of Irish fiction continues to be published by London publishers who have somehow - well, there's no somehow in it - been permitted to define the voice of Irish writing. They publish the writers - whether it is John McGahern or William Trevor or Claire Keegan or Sean O'Reilly, as well as some very silly stuff - and so shape Irish fiction. Some Irish writers therefore appear as if by magic to Irish readers, while the process is also unfair to Irish publishers. To be Irish, in London at least, is to be trendy: "I'm Irish therefore I write".

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Someone else must have noticed by now that some Irish novels dismissively reviewed in Ireland garner wonderful reviews in the London papers. No review is definitive, opinion amounts to individual taste and responses differ. But allowing for generalisations and the gentle Irish art of begrudgery - now undercut by a new defiance and mutual defensiveness among writers - the English and the Irish don't seem to agree about Irish fiction. Meanwhile, some excellent recent Irish fiction demands to be celebrated. This is not a novelty, the good have often been ignored, but the better recent Irish fiction, Anne Haverty's The Far Side of a Kiss or Christopher Nolan's The Banyan Tree, have been overshadowed by poorer, trendier books that have been more loudly hyped.

So the English publishers treat Irish fiction as if it were a gifted, engagingly wayward thoroughbred. It is not just the Irish who receive this special treatment, the Scots are also marketed as wild exotics. The vernacular in most cases appears to amount to packing as many swear words in a sentence and on to a page as will fit. The irony, of course, is that the best Irish fiction being written is highly sophisticated, lyric and rather formal - look at John McGahern, William Trevor, John Banville, Seamus Deane, Jennifer Johnston, Neil Jordan, Deirdre Madden, Eoin McNamee, Sebastian Barry, Mary Morrissy, Colum McCann or Anne Haverty. Street speak is not the natural medium for Irish writers - even a career Dubliner like O'Casey had to work at it.

Indeed, Hugo Hamilton's early German/Irish novels are far superior to his ill-considered excursion into Dublin gangster street argot.

But the Irish are not the only outsiders. Generations of African, Caribbean and Indian writers working in English have long been published first in London. Multiracial Britain has long embraced its colonial and mixed-race writers be they Black, Indian or Japanese; from South London or Birmingham. The Irish are different; specifically because a tradition is a burden as well as a benefit, so too is the legacy of censorship, religious doubts and repressed sexuality.

And for Irish writers, Britain's closest most distant neighbours, there is the further complication of also possessing a literature written in a first language that only a small proportion of the population understands. No one could claim the Irish 19th-century novel stands shoulder to shoulder with its English counterpart. How on earth could it? The realities of Irish social history delayed the creation of a strong novel tradition to draw on.

It is patronising but it is a fact that some of the current Irish fiction seems to be favoured by London publishers who view it with a voyeuristically benign nod, as if to say: here is the Irish youth; university students and office workers and comics, no longer peasants, and now getting drunk on drugs and sex, gangland sprees and the old stalwart, teenage pregnancy.

Is it not odd that London agents and publishers, despite the notable contribution of David Marcus, largely determine Irish writing? It is certainly true that they are more interested in pushing an urban, streetwise image of Ireland - such as Anne Enright's What Are You Like?, a tough narrative relieved unexpectedly by the touching portrait of Evelyn, the anxious stepmother intent on understanding her stepdaughter - than in promoting The Banyan Tree or James Ryan's gently layered Seeds of Doubt.

Sex, not nostalgia, has become a priority. London still hankers after its clichΘd image of Ireland as a place of drunk, dangerous, sexually repressed romantics, albeit now skulking in cities and bedsits rather than on the family farm, with the exception of Pat McCabe's small-town hell. By the way, if it's meant to be funny, then the London publishers, at least, seem to think the comedy should be grotesque, as grotesque as McCabe's, or increasingly, sneering, knowing, slick, with no apparent regard for the fabulous, surreal black comedy of a Flann O'Brien or a Beckett.

Even by the tritely unconvincing standards of Julian Gough's superficial campus romp Juno & Juliet, one might wonder at the need for a sentence such as: "If you made it into your teens in Tipperary without being impregnated by your grandfather, the county council gave you a medal" - unless as a way of pandering to an English readership.

Equally, who exactly was Eamonn Sweeney's slickly intelligent observation, The Photograph, written for? English readers could certainly respond to it as political satire Irish-style, but for Irish readers - or for anyone aware of Ireland's recent history of disclosure, political scandal and clerical child abuse - its send-up of Irish political life is not even a guessing game as the plot and characterisation are so blatantly obvious it makes it impossible to respond to as a novel.

That seems unfair to Sweeney, but as a novel it reads like a series of shrewd, journalistic swipes about Tribunal Ireland including daft portraits of Charles Haughey as the chieftain, the Canny Dub in the anorak and the self-destructive journo, with Albert Reynolds not exactly ingeniously transformed from a manufacturer of dog food to baby food, as a fallen good guy.

Why make a novel out of the facts revealed by newspapers? Sweeney's point that the journalists sat on all of this for so long is hardly the stuff of fiction - or perhaps it is. At the heart of Damien Owens's Dead Cat Bounce is the narrator's teenage sister's pregnancy. "Bad luck you call it," laments their widowed mother. "She goes to bed with some stranger and gets pregnant and shames us in front of the whole world and you put it down to luck?" As a novel, it reads like an extended stand-up routine that is never quite as funny as it seems to think it is.

Then, there's Jamie O'Neill's sub-Joycean pastiche At Swim, Two Boys. While it's great to know O'Neill has read Ulysses, the problem remains - so have the rest of us. O'Neill's stagy and relentless borrowings from Joyce and O'Casey make it impossible to take his novel with its archly knowing tone seriously, yet the English publishers feel they have presented us with a fresh epic.

The odd thing about this novel is that James Plunkett's Strumpet City is far better and I suspect Irish readers of 30 years ago would have been tough on O'Neill. Nowadays we are being advised to "persist" with reading it - what does that mean? Should reading a novel become a chore or an exam or an achievement? This is not to suggest that only younger writers are writing poor books. It is difficult to understand why a writer as established as Bernard MacLaverty could be satisfied with as poor an effort as The Anatomy School. But then, look at Salman Rushdie, still writing the same, angry but now tired satire, as a generation of gifted Indian writers has moved on.

Anyone reviewing books is usually asked two questions: "have you read any good books lately?" followed by the more barbed: "what do you think of Irish fiction?"

Well, there are two ways of answering that. The preferred is to admit to reading books by people who come from all over the world including Ireland. To be asked what one thinks of Irish writers is like being asked which do you prefer male or female writers? Having read a lot of Irish fiction over the years, including some I would not have chosen to, and some more recently for this article, I have to say, as with any body of work by writers from the same country, there are good novels and poor ones, with the best novels often overlooked.

Another problem is that Irish fiction is presented as a single genre, as if there are no categories - the comic, the corny, the great, the memoir-as-fiction, the spoof. It is as one. The dark and profound stories of Sean O'Reilly's Curfew are light years removed from the near- ridiculous romance of best-seller Niall Williams whose blend of myth and Hollywood has become increasingly hampered through As It Is In Heaven and The Fall of Light by his forced lyricism and tone of humourless profundity. Yet The Fall of Light has been offered by Picador as serious literary fiction instead of the romance fantasy Williams is so clearly drawn to. This is unfortunate.

But then, so is the fact so many people regard Neil Jordan as a film maker and forget early works such as The Past, The Dream of a Beast in which the physical evocation of Dublin and its suburbs had a chilling exactness, or his Guardian Fiction prize winning, Night in Tunisia collection - incidentally first published in 1976 in Dublin by the Irish Writer's Co-operative.

Admittedly his most recent novel Sunrise with Sea Monster is a disappointing echo of The Past.

It certainly appears that some younger Irish writers are consciously writing for the readers of today, not posterity. Another fact that is far more interesting, however, is that Irish drama through Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Billy Roche, Marina Carr, Paul Mercier, Enda Walsh and Conor McPherson in general remains superior to many of the new novels. No Irish writer, not even John McGahern, has as consistently presented the changing face of small-town Ireland as playwright Tom Murphy. Even his untypical play, Too Late for Logic, catches the essence of suburban Dublin better than most novels. The theatre of ideas contained in the plays of Frank McGuinness is an attempt to look at society, albeit often from a historical perspective, but with a depth absent from much Irish fiction.

Yet the short stories of the younger writers, judging by those of Claire Keegan, Blanaid McKinney and those of Mike McCormack's Getting It in the Head collection, are more than holding their own against most of the novels. It is particularly exciting to note that the gifted Keegan's major Irish influence is none other than William Trevor.

But then, for all the current craze for young, brash, urban rebels, it must be said that possibly the most exciting literary "discovery" of recent years has been that of the late Maeve Brennan, whose collection, The Springs of Affection, represents the best of Irish writing, as does the publication of her early novella, The Visitor. Added to that is another irrefutable reality, there are more world-class Irish poets than novelists. Is this because the poets are allowed time to mature? Is it because they are judged by their work and what they have to say - and not by gimmicks or the trends of the moment?

The publication of the recent Booker longlist generated some surprise. Only two Irish writers featured on it. Eoin McNamee for The Blue Tango and Ciaran Carson for Shamrock Tea. Both are from Northern Ireland. Neither was on the short list. In itself, a Booker non-appearance is not that important.

The judges are notoriously capricious. Over the years, any number of fine novels has slipped through that net; among major Irish casualties Anne Haverty's The Far Side of a Kiss, Mary Morrissy's Mother Of Pearl and The Pretender, Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness, any John Banville novel you'd care to mention and the most surprising omission of all, Eugene McCabe's superbly atmospheric Gothic pastoral of love abused and avenged, Death and Nightingales.

McNamee is merely the most recent Irish faller. If he has written one of the best novels of 2001; so too has Anita Rau Badami with The Hero's Walk and Abdulrazak Gurnah with By The Sea - and they weren't Booker short-listed either. Nor were Nadine Gordimer and V.S. Naipaul. Prizes are lotteries, reviews are often caught up in petty politics and personalities. In Ireland, reviewers are expected to celebrate Irish fiction or be charged with acts of petty betrayal at best, or cultural terrorism at worst. This is not helping anyone.

Fiction is consistently caught by the various traps of what exactly it is supposed to be. Yet its great gift is its diversity and range. We love stories and surprises, suspense and mystery, but nothing attracts quite as much as the ordinary. It is also the most difficult feat to achieve convincingly. Irish and English writers are drawn to extremes - look at Pat McCabe's world - whereas the Americans and the superb writers of India are so good at describing the ordinary.

McGahern has mastered the ordinary, as has the often underrated Deirdre Madden - novels such as Remembering Light and Stone (1992) Nothing is Black (1994) and One by One in the Darkness (1996) reveal a quiet, intelligent voice concerned with the problems of living. It is interesting that Colm Toib∅n's The Blackwater Lightship is one of the few recent Irish novels to actually take on the present as the ordinary. It is worth contrasting Irish writer William Wall's Minding Children, on the theme of the child-minder from hell with US writer Suzanne Berne's A Perfect Arrangement, a similar story. Whereas Berne kept her narrative by sheer force of good writing in the ordinary, Wall verges towards the surreal in his central characterisation and his novel ultimately loses out to Berne's superior, more layered novel.

Many Irish writers have been over-hyped of late. Yet former Whitbread winner Christopher Nolan's beautiful novel The Banyan Tree was shockingly overlooked - everywhere. It is an engaging and profound novel. Set in Co Westmeath, it is the story of one woman's life from young mother to ancient widow patrolling the farm neither of her sons wants. Minnie O'Brien's destiny is settled when she sells a mousetrap to a kindly man needing assistance in her father's shop. Told through a dreamy, third-person voice in an earthy, inventive prose, there are several atmospheric set pieces. It is a subtle, beautiful and non-sentimental portrait of a rural world that is disappearing in the rapidly suburbanised Ireland of today.

This enduring tension between the rural and urban in Irish life and writing is no longer a battle, more a complex relationship. The fact is Ireland's relentless and ill-planned suburbanisation has created a cultural insecurity with many smaller towns more aware than ever of being neither country nor city. From the mid-1980s onwards and throughout most of the 1990s, cultural commentators rather than literary critics decided an urban literary revolution was in progress.

Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle were hailed as its new voices. Yet this was far less a revolution than a return to the social realism of James Stephens's sinister parable The Charwoman's Daughter, written as long ago as 1912, as well as, of course, to O'Casey and Joyce who had celebrated a Dublin created on the shoulders of a rural Ireland even then under pressure by a population looking outwards.

Far more recently, the late Paul Smith's powerful Dublin slum saga, The Countrywoman appeared in 1962, followed by Annie a decade later, while another of Ireland's overlooked writers, Desmond Hogan, has always been aware of this rural/urban tension, and the emergence of the city voice.

I well remember a particularly embittered Irish academic rounding on me some years ago, accusing me of reviewing "only contemporary fiction, not literature". Well, in his anger he had missed the importance of a point hidden in his attack. Certainly it would be wonderful to review - and so re-visit - week-by-week the acknowledged masterpieces of world literature.

Contemporary fiction, in time, can become literature - providing the academics get around to reading it. Some fine contemporary fiction already is literature; consider J.M. Coetzee and Saul Bellow. Any reader seeing William Trevor in Claire Keegan has to be heartened. Some of the greatness of Ian McEwan's beautiful Atonement lies in its echoes of Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf. Irish writers of the present have much to look to and celebrate, but criticism must be seen as constructive not as dismissive, personalised attack.

There is no new saviour as such of Irish fiction, Trevor remains the towering presence, just as Heaney and Longley dominate the poetry, and Murphy the stage. Not all that glisters is gold, but a surprising amount of it is.