Did anyone else read Julian Gough's rant about his fellow Irish writers in The Guardian today?
Gough, a novelist and short story writer who is based in Berlin, bemoans the current state of literature in his home country and is incredibly scathing of Ireland's "pompous" authors, describing them "as cut off from the electric current of the culture".
"If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity ... The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it's a direct connection, writer-to-reader."
I read the entire article, slightly alarmed, slightly bemused. Anyone who has followed my blog for a while will know I have a soft spot for Irish fiction and read more than my fair share of it. Gough's comments made me wonder whether he might actually have a point. Is Irish literature stuck in the past?
But then I realised that Gough's missed a trick. Sure, literary fiction might not be "dealing with the Irish experience over the last decade and a half" but has he read any Irish crime novels recently? There's a relatively new and booming genre out there which IS addressing these issues.
The first name that pops to mind is Gene Kerrigan, a journalist turned crime novelist, who really has his finger on the pulse in terms of gangland crime in modern day Ireland. I read Little Criminals a year or so ago (but never got around to reviewing it) and thought it was bang-on in terms of showing the collision between modern Ireland's new class system -- the nouveau rich and the underworld.
Similarly, Alan Glynn's Winterland, which I read last year, shows the murky machinations of the property bubble (before it went "pop" in 2009), planning policy and politics.
Even Tana French's In the Woods captures the new Ireland, albeit during the Celtic Tiger years, and makes much comment on political corruption and rampant development.
I'm sure there must be loads more...
