“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Monday, March 22, 2010

It’s A Long Way From Licking Goobers Off The Cobbles

You hear a lot of guff these days from Ireland’s literati about Irish literature’s failure to produce the Great Celtic Tiger Novel. ‘Where, oh where, is the Great Celtic Tiger Novel?’ is the general gist of it, followed by, ‘Why, oh why?’ and ‘Oh when, oh when?’. Well, a little birdie tells me that the wait is almost over. Once Amadán O’Lungamhain concludes IT’S A LONG WAY FROM LICKING GOOBERS OFF THE COBBLES, his five-volume epic ring cycle on the eradication of TB, he’s setting his sights on the Celtic Tiger years. A HILL OF MAGIC BEANS should be arriving on shelf near you by 2051 at the very latest.
  At the risk of sounding a tad more obtuse than usual, I really don’t get this obsession with the Great Celtic Tiger Novel. Yes, I understand that Ireland is a post-colonial country that has yet to shuck off its inferiority complex, and that a reluctance to engage, as Brian Cowen might say, with ‘we are where we are’ is a symptom of that. And yes, I understand that writing novels about the past offers the opportunity of rewriting the past, and thus making the official version of our tawdry history that bit more palatable. And I understand too, if the post-boom years are any marker, that Ireland is one of the very few modern nations for which the past is not another country where they do things differently; Ireland, as the newspaper headlines on any given day will tell us, is a country that bears an eerie similarity to the psychological landscape of Flann O’Brien’s THE THIRD POLICEMAN, in which past, present and future are locked into a hellish cycle of eternal return. If our politicians, financiers, bishops and electorate are all doomed to repeat their mistakes over and over again, never truly escaping tragedy into farce, then why should our novelists be any different?
  Maybe it’s the case – and bear in mind that some days I’m more wilfully obtuse than others – that I’m simply too callow or uneducated to appreciate the subtle nuances of a body of literature that glories in its inability to come to terms with the present, or at least to try. But it seems to me that any self-respecting novel should be more interested in raising pertinent questions than providing belated answers, in wrestling with current dilemmas than offering quasi-philosophical interpretations of historical events. The point of any art, surely, is to reflect and / or investigate the culture from which it springs. That’s not as easy as it sounds, of course, especially when it comes to the novel. A good book can take an author years to write, so that he or she finds that the zeitgeist has long sailed by time the book lands on a shelf. It’s also true that a crucial moment in a nation’s development can take many years for all the sediment to sift down, so that an author can see it clearly enough for what it really was. By which time, unfortunately, the novel is no longer relevant as a tool to aid our understanding of ourselves, which is the fundamental point of art.
  You wouldn’t know it if you only listened to the Irish literati, but there is a body of writers engaging with modern Ireland. Only time will tell if they are entitled to call themselves artists, but right now they are asking hard questions of our society, our mores, challenging our ethical stances. This is the kind of thing that good crime fiction does as a matter of course, and that a number of Irish crime writers are doing on a regular basis. Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Tana French, Declan Hughes, Gene Kerrigan, Alan Glynn, Stuart Neville – these are some of the writers who do not allow themselves the luxury of elapsed decades before confronting the issues that are relevant to a country bedevilled by corruption at virtually every strata of society. Yes, yes, I know I cut a pathetic figure bleating on yet again about the relevance of Irish crime fiction, but you’d need to be a far more obtuse figure than I not to appreciate the fact that there is a phenomenon at play here; and more, that such writers – like Liam O’Flaherty publishing THE ASSASSIN in 1928, or Colin Bateman publishing DIVORCING JACK in 1995 – deserve credit for their courage in grappling with crucial issues when they are still live, messy and important.
  All of which protracted preamble leads me to the ever-radiant Arlene Hunt, who appeared on TV3 last Thursday morning chatting about her new tome, BLOOD MONEY. I can’t say too much about the novel just yet, as I won’t get to start reading it for another day or two, but I do know that the story dips a toe into the murky waters of organ tourism, aka the black market in organ transplants, and subsequently tip-toes through an ethical minefield. Now, I have no idea of how prevalent organ tourism is here in Ireland, although I’ve no reason to believe it’s not as common-place here as it is anywhere else; nor do I know how qualified or otherwise Arlene Hunt is to write about the topic. I do know that Arlene Hunt is a terrific story-teller, though, and that I’m looking forward to reading a topical novel about contemporary Ireland.
  Topical novels about contemporary Ireland, eh? When literary Ireland finally gets around to pulling its head out of its ass, and stops whining about how the Arts Council trough is no longer as full as it used to be, and realises that it’s not entitled to consider itself an heir to Joyce, Beckett, Shaw, O’Casey, et al simply because there’s a harp on its passport, it might want to consider the following question: Is a topical novel about modern Ireland once in a blue moon really too much to ask?

2 comments:

seana graham said...

From his interview, it sounds like Alan Glynn's Winterland might have been an excellent Celtic Tiger novel if the boom hadn't fizzled while he was still writing it. Now it's just an excellent post Celtic Tiger novel.

We have a similar thing over here where everyone seems to be waiting for someone to write the definitive 9/11 novel. For awhile, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was getting the title, and now I'm hearing things about Colum McCann's latest, but I take exception to the idea that an event that traumatized the national psyche must by necessity be set at (one) of the scenes of the crime. It would be more about the reverberation. And, yes, could even be about Right Now.

Pepper Smith said...

You may be waiting a while before the literary community has anything nice to say about crime fiction, if they're anything there like they are elsewhere. Anything truly topical probably smacks of headline-robbing to them.

Shrug. When compared with the amount of time people have been telling stories, how long has literary snobbery really been around? Maybe it's only a phase a portion of the storytelling community is going through, and we just happen to live during the time when they're the most vocal? How many of what are revered as classics of literature are really genre fiction that was written before the labels existed? Is it primarily that unlabeled genre fiction that was the most topical for its day?

I don't know. All we can do is write the best stories we can write, and know that what we write may not be recognized for what it is until we're long gone. Judging by what we consider classic literature today, there may be a good number of crime fiction writers whose work would be included a hundred or two hundred years from now.

That would be an amazing bit of revenge, wouldn't it?