Tackling the Tiger myth

During the boom years, many books, plays and films about the Celtic Tiger were made, but most now seem like products of their time. Some writers, however, stood outside the bubble and caught the zeitgeist, argues Alan O'Riordan

YOU CANNOT ask the artist to do anything but make art. But at the same time, no artist is without a context. And so it is inevitable that over the past decade or so various writers, playwrights and directors for stage and screen have shared a concern for reflecting a rapidly changing Ireland. And while it is true that we cannot ask the artist to have a purpose, many did take it upon themselves to deliberately address the Celtic Tiger period. That can be a dangerous impulse.

It can lead to work distracted by the surface and all that’s new, but neglectful of such essentials as character and the marriage of plot to detail. Looking back, from these dark times, it seems that this was the central problem for work about the boom, and works that solved it proved most convincing.

Society tends to look to the novel for a reflection of its contemporary concerns, a function of the novel’s place as the art form of the middle class. It happened after 9/11 and novelists were more than happy to comply, with everyone from Don DeLillo to Ian McEwan bashing out a zeitgeist-probing work. And sure enough, shortly after the turn of the century, the “Celtic Tiger novel” became a brand. The hunt was on in the review pages: what did it look like? What made for a successful one?

The first question is easily answered – it was set in Dublin; it featured careerist, unhappy Irish and, usually, a cast of immigrants, too. The second was difficult to answer, because probably only one successful novel has been written about Celtic Tiger Ireland: Bad Day at Blackrock, Kevin Power's fictionalisation of a notorious southside nightclub killing.

This should not be surprising. Great novels usually benefit from distance – The Grapes of Wrathwas written 10 years after the Wall Street Crash, War and Peace60 years after its events. On the other hand, the novel has one advantage over other forms as a way of documenting its times: it can contain all the surface details it likes, but use them to probe deeper. Power did this where writers such as Chris Binchy, Anne Haverty, Keith Ridgway, Stephen Price and anyone who wrote chick-lit were less successful.

For the great trick for the novelist is to elide Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident. The novelist as social documentarian must, in adding local colour, or making a character live, make contingent details seem necessary. Our heroine’s Ugg boots must say more to us than that women in that time wore Ugg boots. Mediocre books stay that way because they fail to do such things. The author has his thoughts about His Society. He deems them Important. Now he needs a Plot. Any will do, and any characters too. For they are the vehicle. The novelist here is hunting big sociological game and to him the mechanics are a plaything that we all know is not the real business. Sadly, this method is doomed to fail. The workings of the novel are felt to pause whenever a knowing, writerly voice emerges to give us his (always judgmental, ungenerous) thoughts on Dundrum Town Centre or what have you.

Good books, on the other hand, take those very same accidental details of contemporary life and make each of them seem essential to the artifice. Nothing is wasted. It is a continuous whole, and the characters do not hop on and off the omnibus of the author's journalistic sniping. It is a feat achieved by Flaubert in Sentimental Education– very much a novel of its own turbulent time, but a classic for the reasons mentioned above. No movement of Madame Arnoux's fan can we tell to be accidental. No chance encounter is, as it were, an accident. It has all the exquisite inevitability of music, and, hence, is a thing of great beauty as well as a document.

BUT THE BEAUTY is not the difference between triumph and failure; Bad Day at Blackrockis not always beautiful. It is, like Sentimental Education, always internally coherent. It emanates from the world in which it is written. The plot does not stop for journalistic comments about our new-found foibles. Power's details, written with an insider's assurance of southside tribes and remarkably free from the condescending tones of his peers, add up to the novel's defining moment; it seems inconceivable without them, in fact. This has been criticised as tendentious, as overstating the meaning of a very modern Irish tragedy. But for the purposes of the novel, it is a stroke of genius. With it, Power makes every little vulgarity and contradiction (they kick a guy to death, but call the police, and carry his coffin) cohere to not just internal harmony, but resonate for the wider society.

We looked, too, to ancient Irish myths during the Celtic Tiger years. Táin Bó Culaigne became The Bull, Michael Keegan-Dolan's savage, physical satire on the land where the man who's shite at golf can be king – it has to be mock heroic in this ironic age. In 2006, Paul Mercier's Homelandused Oisín's return from Tír na nÓg, except with Oisín as a kind of Frank Dunlop figure – a long way from the gods and fighting men. And this is something of a problem: transposing myths pokes fun at the vainglorious character of boom-time Dublin, but it necessarily deals in caricature. It is a great method of diagnosis but cannot, as it were, operate – go beneath the skin. For that, convincing characters are needed, but all too often we settle for types, with the Property Developer becoming a new kind of stage Irishman.

More head-on approaches to the times often suffered from over-ambition – a perhaps misplaced Joycean attempt to get everything in when a Beckettian attempt to leave everything out might have given more precision. Nicholas Kelly's underdeveloped Grown Ups(2006) was a case in point; distracted by the wealth of material offered by our malaise – career pressure, high rent, quarter-life crises – it could not find any coherent story in which to put it all. The Peacock showed us what we were missing, though, with some excellent English plays. Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, for instance, uses psychology and mental illness as a starting point, carefully navigating the fault lines of a complex and multiracial society. There was no new play as important or as thoughtful written here (a sign perhaps that, for such subject matter at least, integration has not yet been truly addressed in Irish society). It was left to plays of smaller scope and ambition, ultimately, to form, taken together, a worthy reaction to the times. We did not get the Big Play, but numerous little gems, such as Gary Duggan's Monged, and Gúna Nua's Scenes from a Watercooler. On screen, Gerard Stembridge's About Adam(2000), which seemed slight at the time, gains more resonance with the years, and damn near invokes dewy-eyed nostalgia now, because it dared to be true. While many others were only content to show how misguided we were, and shortsighted in our contentment, Stembridge immortalised our own (very short) permanent period, as Richard Ford called it: those handful of days before jihad and global warming became our daily distractions. We were happy and rich and outside history; we were wrong, but that was not what it felt like. Dublin was as fresh and innovative and exciting-looking as About Adammade it.

It is surely humbling to anyone harbouring a great artistic enterprise that such minor works can come to capture an age. Late 1940s film noir now appears to have that documentary function, capturing the transience and uncertainty of the post-War generation with their motels, shiftless characters and dark roads. About Adam, because it was not trying to "say" something, is the same. Place it beside John Boorman's ludicrous The Tiger's Tail(2006) and the point is made.

RTÉ's Bachelor's Walkachieved something similar on the small screen. We were allowed to care for the pathetic problems of Raymond, Michael and Barry for a brief moment. And the series, content to give us a cool and post-historical Dublin, was content not to labour the point, and avoided the tyranny of the new. It did this in a way that many other small-screen failures did not, most notably The Big Bow Wow, one of RTÉ's first and worst looks at boomtown Dublin. The much-hyped 2004 series crammed in every cliche, with its Docklands-living, careerist uber-bitches, jokes about elaborate coffees, austere noodle bars and characters who talk like e-mail, expounding their banal "theories" of life. It now stands not as a document of the boom, but as a document of how ham-fisted some representations of it were.

IN CONTRAST TO the wealthy worlds of Bacherlor'sand Bow Wow, Mark O'Halloran and Lenny Abrahamson's fine and spare Prosperity looked at the underbelly of the boom. But that story, sadly, will always be with us. The world of Bachelors Walk, superficial as it was, is gone. And now, as the world's problems again become epic and truly chaotic, the question is whether the middle-class, rather polite forms we used to reflect the last few years will continue to suffice. In a couple of years we might get a mature Celtic Tiger novel, to be sure, but by then will we care?