FictionIn Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's new novel, her familiar strengths are well in evidence: the linguistic precision conveying the social observations of her cool eye, and the unsettling way compassion emerges from behind the satirical edge.
The opening chapters manifest a sweeping breeziness about the new Ireland that makes you think of Flann O'Brien. For example: "Divorce was available in Ireland these days, but it had arrived, strangely enough, at the same time as the big increase in house prices. When people could afford to divorce, it wasn't available, and then when it became available, it became unaffordable. Almost overnight. The free-market economy was doing what the Church had done for centuries."
So much for the national picture. Ní Dhuibhne's more particular quarry here is twofold: the aspiring middle-class popular-fiction writers of south Dublin, and the purveyors of idealistic social causes.
The breezy narrative voice is subtly but unfailingly distinguished from the reflecting voice of the characters: Anna, the aspiring writer of the next Harry Potter success, reflects on the Arts Council: "Every county, practically, had at least one arts officer now, and as well as that there were heaps of organisations dealing with books in Irish . . . The list was endless, it really was." But this is not the narrative judgement: Anna's careless "heaps of" and "really" identify her voice. Leo, the good causes man who travels from Dingle to Dublin for meetings of his pressure group "(Stop the) Killing Roads" and who is a publisher of books in Irish, is dismayed when he is addressed in Irish by a stranger on the train. "How did she know he was an Irish speaker too? . . . Nobody wants to be told they look Irish, still less that they look like an Irish speaker."
So Ní Dhuibhne is a brilliantly funny satirist. But beware what you are laughing at in this book which wrong-foots you emotionally all the time. There is a fleetingly passing character in this book called Dean Swift: the original Swift's most devastating satirical technique, of making you stop and guiltily examine your assumptions, is at play here.
Leo's campaign against road deaths is hopeless and supported by cranks such as John Perry; his scrap-book of newspaper cuttings of road fatalities is absurd - even childish. But late in the book we read of "a normal weekend in the Irish countryside" when "a 70-year-old woman was struck by a lorry when crossing the road and killed instantly", and "the corpses of badgers, foxes, cats and crows littered the motorways".
Similarly we are amused by the irrepressible cheeriness of the young PR woman Kate whose "job demanded 200 per cent 24-seven . . . She couldn't mope while doing this. Nobody could. Absolutely no way. Cheerfulness was essential." But by the end, we are by no means so sure that this insouciance is discreditable.
THE NARRATIVE THROUGHOUT is shadowed by Anna Karenina. Anna and her lover Vincy are Anna and Vronsky in Tolstoy; Leo and Kate are Levin and Kitty, and so on. The mood is a Tolstoyan compound of improbable optimism and a dark fatalism, symbolised by a homeless beggar whom Anna keeps coming across but not remembering. Finally she talks to him about War and Peace; but no one takes note of what he represents. "Nobody sees homeless persons. They are part of the furniture." Once again we are not sure what kind of novel we are in: an uncertainty that is suggested by the mysterious title which is not explained until we are past page 300.
Ní Dhuibhne's pre-eminent technical gift - to evoke a character or mood unmistakably in three words - is dazzling. It is what enables her to develop this book from a social satire about literary Dublin into a serious, angry novel which is an emotional roller-coaster. The reader should be warned too that the Anna Karenina parallel is not to be trusted, as the book moves back from Tolstoy's contours and subject to its home themes. And there is a fine final irony, in this satire on amateur Dublin women writers and their quest for recognition and awards.
An Irish woman novelist has just won the Man Booker prize; there is a very credible candidate here to retain the title.
Bernard O'Donoghue's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was published by Penguin last year
A social satire about literary Dublin that develops into a serious, angry novel Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne Blackstaff, 354pp. £8.99