Madam, – Fintan O’Toole (Weekend Review, March 6th) commented on Julian Gough’s recent criticism of Irish literary writers as being “cut off from the electric current of the culture” – obsessed with the past and avoiding contemporary Ireland. In response, Mr O’Toole argues that novels or plays set in the past can apply indirectly to contemporary life, and that such work by Irish writers often does this. That may well be so, but it leaves unchallenged the fact that our fiction writers, with rare exceptions such as Kevin Power, John Broderick and Jack White, have consistently failed to face up to, and reflect, contemporary Irish life as lived by contemporary Irish adults.
Maeve Binchy and the school of female chick-lit writers that took inspiration from her have dealt with this life. More recently, a new school of crime writers has also done so. But these are forms of genre writing with no high literary pretensions.
Mr Gough was referring to our “literary” writers, those who figure, and are celebrated, as our “Irish writers” par excellence. I am talking about the same persons. And the fact is that the Northern war, with its repercussions in the Republic, and Celtic Tiger Ireland, passed these writers by. Indeed, for the past 50 years, Irish adults who wanted to read fiction which reflected themselves and their lives, mentally, emotionally and occupationally, have had to find such reflection mainly in American, British and Latin American writing.
I say “Irish adults” with intent. Irish fictive writing has distanced itself from contemporary Irish adult experience not only by locating itself mainly in the past. It has also done so – whether its depicted setting is from the past or present – by specialising in physically or mentally sub-adult characters and lives, in marginal circumstances.
This avoidance of contemporary Irish adult life by these writers whom Mr Gough aptly calls “a priestly caste” has had an unsurprising outcome. In the past 60 years, Beckett and his “world” apart, the self-proud Irish literary industry has not produced a single character or fictional “world” that has become a representative icon of the contemporary in the English-speaking countries. – Yours, etc,