All the Irish literature I've ever read

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Gods of aviation and good health willing, I should be in Ireland for a few days last week of September. I have never visited before, and I’d like some reading suggestions before the trip. Here’s my current Eir-Con list. It’s not very long.

(Not counting for this purpose Iris Murdoch who called herself Anglo-Irish, lived in England and belonged to English literature. For similar reasons I’m not counting Oscar Wilde.)

James Joyce, Dubliners in translation. I barely remember the stories that are not “The Dead”, the book’s core. But “The Dead” is famous for a reason: it’s still one of the best short stories ever written. (The John Huston film is not shabby either.)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also in translation - from this I mostly remember the excruciating details of the imagined Purgatory and Hell. 

Ulysses, in a v good translation. I read this in my late teens and I’m sure some things went way over my head. I’ve read it alongside an abridged, teen-friendly Odyssey and compared the loosely corresponding chapters. The book encompasses everything from Greek mythology to toilet jokes, and Dublin in it sounded like an interesting place full of wonders. In a slightly self-indulgent piece on my personal reading history from yonks ago on the website Literary Mothers, I argued that teens could get along quite fine with the modernists, and that it’s the realist and psychological novels that will need you to have lived a little and possibly tried to earn a living or be in a relationship to be able to fully enjoy them. As a late teen reader, I expect I enjoyed the Greek mythology and the pudenda jokes, the sublime whimsy and the shit, and that the stuff in between those two poles, the marriage, the father-son, the earning a living was probably not as fully processed.

Beckett. Can I count Beckett here? He was kinda French. I’ve seen and read several Godots, but usually find the live performances trying. I wouldn’t go to see a Godot again, put it that way. I’ve seen Endgame and Happy Days at least x 2, one with Juliet Stevenson as Winnie… don’t consume Beckett jet-lagged, friends. I’ve seen an excellent Not I and Rockaby thanks to this DVD box set, Beckett on Film. There’s also a Patricia Rozema Happy Days in there, and an Atom Egoyan-directed Krapp’s Last Tape, which I somehow missed. His novels are, I hear, a madly intense world, but somehow never got round to the novels in earnest. 

Can we count the Northern Irish-Canadian-American Brian Moore? The Belfast of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is what Toronto must have been like before the 1960s: the Orangemen and Presbyterian Arcadia in all shades of drab.

Eimear McBride: The Lesser Bohemians. I liked this one a lot. It’s split into an experimental half, which is, like her much lauded debut Girl is a Half-Formed Thing written in pulsions not sentences, and a more traditionally told part. Sexual molestation by family members though - a lot of that in Irish literature. I would have enjoyed the entirely experimental Girl save for the topic of a girl being molested by a family member.  

A side note: quote/unquote experimental fiction is a very angloworld notion. In every other language, where book markets are not dominated by realist / psychological novels, “experimental fiction” is just fiction. English-speaking world feels it needs to warn you. 

Colm Toibin, Master. This is him imagining what being Henry James must have felt like. While CT is a stellar raconteur and an interview subject, his fiction I find dull-ish. Some novelists are OK at fiction and brilliant at non-fiction. This 2019 piece on his cancer treatment was a devastating read, but for undiscussed reasons: he spent the entire treatment alone while the beloved boyfriend spent that period working in LA.

Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends. And that was quite enough. They’re fun enough, her novels, but characters read like they’re performing themselves. Everyone’s of course a Marxist.

Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times. More performative Marxism in a young protagonist who teaches ESL in a private school in Hong Kong and only dates wealthy people (a banker, who pays all her bills, and a (female) lawyer with whom she ends up eloping. Her ESL colleagues are beneath her). Most interesting thing here: linguistic musings about correct and normative English, from one end of the former British Empire (Dublin) to another (Hong Kong). 

Claire Keegan, Foster. (Keegan was recently shortlisted for a Booker for Small Things Like These). It’s fine if minuscule - a short story practically. Farming, poverty, and the family abuse here only hinted at.

Paul Benedict Rowan, Making ‘Ryan’s Daughter’: The Myths, Madness and Mastery. This is a history of the making of David Lean’s and probably Hollywood’s last big blank-cheque studio movie, Ryan’s Daughter, in the spectacularly scenic Dingle, Co Kerry, Ireland. Not literature, technically, but the film itself is quite literary and of a certain literary-cinematic tradition.

Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges I loved, but The Banshees of Inishirin was completely pointless (this review, which asks why were the writers so terrified of spelling out what was going on in Ireland during that time, is the best thing written about that sad fillum). 

Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde? OK, OK that’s a stretch.

Keith Ridgway (Northern Irish and also lives in London on and off) - Animals is excellent as is Hawthorn and Child, but his latest short story collection Shock I could take or leave. (His politics, as expressed on Twitter, on the other hand… he is still a die-hard Corbynist, and would probably call himself a Marxist. What is making Irish literary circles Marxist, is what I’d like to know.)

Speaking of Marxist… Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies and her newsletter should perhaps be mentioned. They are not literary but the newsletters often deals with larger cultural issues, including fashion. 

I’ve started and abandoned a number of Irish books (by Edna O'Brien, by Anne Enright, both excellent writers) because of the tone. It’s this folksy, jocular, I’m talking to a community of people who know what I’m talking about tone that at first sounds smooth but quickly turns irritating. I’ve just started Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore, and it’s exactly like that again, but I’ll press on for a bit longer.

I’ve ordered Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (his The Bee Sting just been shortlisted for the Booker, as have three other Irish authors) and intend to get hold of Claire Kilroy’s Soldier, Sailor which the Times (London) literary editors have been raving about.

So is Irish literature… a lot of soc-realist or lyrical novels about families (including abuse, alcoholism, farming… and trendy millennials of the family carving out their notionally Marxist, post-graduation lives) and in the other, much less populated corner, the ultra-modernists who want to escape all that? 

I’m pretty sure I’ve read William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey, after I liked the Atom Egoyan film. But I can’t remember anything about it. I must have read some Roddy Doyle too at some point, there are some stirrings of memory. 

I’m pinning my hopes on Paul Murray. And I’m ordering Fintan O’Toole’s social history of the most recent and very eventful decades of the Republic, We Don’t Know Ourselves. Ireland had a version of Quebec’s The Quiet Revolution last 20 years, I think... But wait, who’s Sebastian Barry, should I read him? And Meg Nolan, is she on the Rooney-Dolan axis? 

David Lean, looking at Ireland in 65 mm Super Panavision