Discovering Kerry gold in Irish fiction

A world-class shortlist for this year's Listowel Writers' Week fiction award shouldn't make us complacent, writes Eileen Battersby…

A world-class shortlist for this year's Listowel Writers' Week fiction award shouldn't make us complacent, writes Eileen Battersby.

This week I completed my second and final year as a judge for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, a prize open to a novel written by an Irish writer and published within the preceding 12 months. Now in its eighth year, the award is one of the highlights of Listowel Writers' Week, an event currently celebrating its 33rd birthday. It is also a major literary prize that can already boast a roll-call of distinguished winners.

Last year's festival was marked by the death of John B. Keane. Mere hours after the fiction prize had been presented to John McGahern for That They May Face The Rising Sun, John B., that skilled exponent of the laconic phrase, died. On Wednesday morning, a couple of hours before I drove down to Listowel, the death of James Plunkett was announced.

That Keane and Plunkett died a year to the day of each other, is eerie and strange, yet oddly fitting. Here were two Irish writers with a powerful grasp of the ordinary, a shrewd reading of social and cultural injustices and an absolute understanding of Irish life; for Keane as played out in the small town, and for Plunkett as lived in Dublin, particularly the working-class Dublin of the early 20th century.

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What would they have thought of the shortlist selected by poet John F. Deane and myself: William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault, Jennifer Johnston's This Is Not A Novel, Shroud by John Banville, Colum McCann's Dancer and The Parts by Keith Ridgway? The Dublin evoked by Johnston and Ridgway is very different from Plunkett's, while the novels by Banville and McCann look far beyond Dublin and indeed Ireland. The doomed Anglo-Irish world of Trevor's 1920s rural Cork would also present another departure.

Any selection or shortlist is invariably open to debate at best, attack at worst. However few could dispute that this is a world-class shortlist. Not only is the quality of the writing obvious but so too, most importantly, is the diversity. This diversity ran through the overall submissions. There are many different genres, styles and voices at work in contemporary Irish writing, with a particularly large contingent geared at the popular fiction market. Our finest writers are superb, but we should not be overly complacent - we also have our share of the mediocre and unconvincing.

Inside most of us lurks a nervous comedian, anxious to break free and share our jokes with humanity at large. Judging by the amount of comedy writing submitted, many Irish writers are interested in humorous writing. Sometimes this works, often it doesn't, but nothing is more difficult than being successfully and convincing funny. Bookshelves sag under the weight of almost funny novels.

Whereas last year our shortlist included two first novels by unknown writers, our five authors this year were all established. That said the revelation of this shortlist is The Parts, a devastatingly assured and sustained performance. Ridgway is extraordinary in that he balances earthy, often raucous comedy with moments of grace and sadness. There is a great deal of shouting in this novel, yet there are also moments of silence and reflection as various characters ponder their pathetic lives. A rather elegant, highly sophisticated writer, Ridgway's dialogue is quickfire, while he is also impressive when exploring the tangled inner worlds of his vividly drawn characters.

His Dublin is a chaotic Hades of sexual frustration, confusion, loss, longing, bitter remorse and apathy. It is the Dublin most of us would prefer to see from a car window. Even at its most surreally hilarious, The Parts is a human, convincing and truthful book. Although far closer stylistically to Martin Amis than it is to Flann O'Brien, and very much a novel of the 21st century, I believe The Parts is the finest and most truly funny Irish comic novel since At-Swim-Two-Birds published in 1939.

John Banville is a European prose stylist of immense art. Each sentence has the authority of a concerto. He is also however, very funny, his wit has style, but it is also black, despairing and very human. It is a Banville quality that is too often overlooked. Axel Vander is yet another of his wry, self-loathing narrators, candidly squirming in the face of his failures. Vander tells part of the story, the rest is beautifully observed. For all the many laughs and dazzling descriptions, Shroud possesses true grief and pain.

Throughout her career Jennifer Johnston has approached story-telling with candour, intelligence and an understanding of the many traditions which shape Irish society. She is an inspired miniaturist who looks at private life against the backdrop of huge things. In this novel, she draws on a theme that is important to her work, that of the Great War and its legacies. This is a beautiful, shrewd no-nonsense novel from a canny novelist who shuns sentimentality yet consistently, as here, achieves a subtle emotion.

Ambition and daring have motivated Colum McCann from his first steps as a writer and Dancer is a book of immense courage. Again, McCann looks beyond standard Irish experience and allows the enigma that was ballet icon Rudolf Nureyev to impose his mysteries, triumphs, blatant greed and genius on a narrative that is informed by the sensibility created by fame. Never presuming to give us his Nureyev, McCann instead explores the world that created and sustained the dancer's elusive persona.

Beauty, grace, understatement and an art that conceals art informs the inimitable and deceptively versatile style of William Trevor. The Story of Lucy Gault marks a return to the Big House theme for Trevor, yet he invigorates this with a remarkable variation and a sinister shift. A chance discovery has disastrous consequences with flight, exile and a life of penance offering the only salvation at a time of change.

No storyteller can match William Trevor, and that is why he won.