The culture vultures are circling

PRESENT TENSE:YOU JUST KNOW that somewhere out there, hunched over a keyboard, a novelist this week had a eureka moment. The epic post-9/11 novel they've been struggling over for two years? It's now an epic post-credit-crunch novel.

Every so often, we get an abrupt shift in the economic, political or cultural landscape that bumps the concerns of popular culture on to a new path. It might be a slow but lingering obsession with an era, as occurred during the Thatcher years or 1980s' Ireland. Occasionally, it will come out of the blue, as with 9/11.

However it happens, it alters the mood, the aesthetic, the objective of art to such an extent that it becomes a dominant theme, an issue that artists feel they must actively address.

The enormous shock of this financial crisis, with its potential social and political consequences, has the feel of one of those moments. It means that you had better get used to the post-credit-crunch novel, post-credit-crunch television, post-credit-crunch music, post-credit-crunch theatre, post-credit-crunch film.

Some of it will rise and remain vital through the decades. Most of it will drop quicker than an Anglo Irish Bank share. But it will be ubiquitous.

It's unlikely to fully supplant the dominance of 9/11 and the Iraq War in modern culture, unless a new US president and a new crisis prove so cleansing that they actually mark the point at which American culture finally finds some sort of collective closure. I somehow doubt it.

Everything from Batman to Sesame Streethas been coloured by the war on terror. And while Joseph O'Neill's Netherlandhas been repeatedly cited as an instant masterpiece of post-9/11 literature, it's unlikely to put a cap on the flow of books. Two decades later, British fiction is still dissecting the Thatcher era (the Man Booker shortlist includes The Northern Clemency, which begins in 1974 and covers the next 20 years). 9/11 is likely to be on American minds for at least a similar length of time.

However, another era-defining moment has to elbow its way in at some point, and the near-collapse of the world banking system seems as good a candidate as any. Perhaps writers and film-makers will focus on the anatomy of the crisis itself, or on the subsequent recession. Or they may be concerned with the post-American era that it is increasingly talked of, and which is likely to be obliquely or directly addressed.

However, because the current mood is less "end of empire" and more "end of civilisation", we might ordinarily expect to see this reflected through a boom in post-apocalyptic literature or film. In fact, we're already in the middle of that.

Pre-2000, there was a rush to make movies that levelled New York, gouged holes in continents, or allowed volcanoes to chase people through Los Angeles. The events of 9/11 subsequently helped that evolve into an era of post-apocalyptic movies, including adaptations of I Am Legendand Children of Men(both books from a different era, it must be said), and Pixar's animated Wall-Ebrilliantly marrying cuteness and environmental catastrophe.

Novelists have also dwelled on the potential of collapsed society, most obviously Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which only hinted at the causes of the blasted landscape, although when he wrote of melted skyscrapers he probably didn't have a run on the banks in mind.

More locally, it will be fascinating to see how Irish popular culture deals with the current economic collpase. The last recession inspired a very particular aesthetic on paper, on screen, on stage, most notably Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy, and the Passion Machine plays. These emphasised certain truths about Irish society and the national personality and exaggerated others we simply wished were true.

These now seem very much rooted in their time, although that maybe because it's an era we have not really returned to since, as if we were swept away from it by the wave of prosperity.

Yet it has yet to be replaced by a similarly recognisable aesthetic for the boom years, or at least nothing particularly cohesive. There is no one novel that has nailed the period, although it may be folly to believe there ever will be. Still, it is curious that in a "literary" country, the book most easily associated with the Celtic-Tiger years is not a novel, but David McWilliams's The Pope's Children. That book is often a caricature as much as a study, but it still took an economist to be the first to put some shape on an era that will always be associated with the economy.

This time, though, I don't believe we'll move on so suddenly. Maybe we will never get a great book or film or television series out of the boom, that it will instead be a jumble: a bit of Raw here, a few pages of The Pope's Childrenthere.

Or perhaps we will finally get some perspective on it. Because, if there is one irony about this economic collapse, it is that the recession will certainly prove the best place from which to appreciate the boom.