CULTURE SHOCK:As 'Irishness' loses its gloss, it should be no surprise that the three longlisted Irish authors did not make the final Man Booker cut
IN THE PUBLISHING world, there was no great surprise that the Irish authors, William Trevor, Ed O’Loughlin and Colm Tóibín were dumped off the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. The advance word had hinted at a feeling that there have been quite enough Irish winners for the moment, thank you.
“Irish” is still seen in London as a category of literature, almost a genre.
Having acknowledged this genre twice in the last four years, with wins for John Banville's The Seaand Anne Enright's The Gathering, another plaudit would be de trop.
Besides, Irishness is losing its gloss. Serious book awards aren’t meant to reflect any fashions except literary ones. They are, however, no less susceptible to passing fads than any other form of collective judgement. In the case of the Booker and Irish fiction, the general Irish vogue that lasted in various forms from the mid-1990s until we became an infamous disaster story never amounted to any kind of favouritism. It merely served to counteract general reluctance to give the prize to the Paddies.
Shortlisted Irish novels that should have won the Booker – Banville's The Book of Evidencein 1989, John McGahern's Amongst Womenin 1990, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boyin 1992, Colm Tóibín's The Masterin 2004 – did not do so. We don't have to appeal to some organised conspiracy of anti-Irishness to account for this. It almost surely has more to do with the hermetic formality of those books than with any deliberate snub.
Nevertheless, the barrier has been there, and all that happened was that it was, for a while, lifted by a broadly benign attitude to all things Irish.
In the absence of that attitude, the barrier has come down again.
In the overall scheme of things, of course, this hardly matters. Prizes are arbitrary and contingent judgements, and have little to do with lasting quality. What may be particularly interesting about this year's events, however, is the exclusion from the shortlist of Tóibín's Brooklyn. The novel ought to be the Booker dream: an accessible masterpiece. The book trade always wants a Booker winner that is, for the general reader, approachable.
Booker juries tend to want a novel that is complex and subtle in its use of language and narrative techniques. These two qualities don't often come together, which is why Brooklynwould have seemed a perfect choice.
The problem with Brooklyn, however, is that it has no purchase in England. In Ireland, it has been hugely successful, selling more than 40,000 copies so far. In the US, it has sold around 60,000 hardbacks – a huge number for a serious work of literary fiction. In England, it has not troubled the tills or the bestseller lists. This is not because of reviews, which have been almost universally enthusiastic. It seems to be quite simply that the story doesn't appeal to English readers.
This is not good news for Tóibín, but there is actually something quite cheering about it. It reminds us that literary globalisation (of which the Booker itself is both a symptom and a cause) only goes so far. There is still such a thing as national taste, still a sense that responses to stories are shaped by collective experience.
That response can be muted in certain ways. On the one hand, it can be disarmed by form – that thing of wonder, a John Banville sentence, is a John Banville sentence in any Anglophone culture. On the other, it can be swept away by exoticism. A big, strange narrative ( The Life of Pior True History of the Kelly Gang, to cite just two recent Booker winners) actually becomes more appealing when it is set somewhere we don't know.
But Brooklynhas these qualities only in low-key ways. The language is in fact beautifully shaped, but it is designed to deflect attention away from itself. The narrative is indeed a kind of epic (a bi-continental and historical drama of exile and return) but it unfolds in tiny domestic details and through a humdrum, scarcely noticed life.
As a work of psychological realism, Brooklynultimately depends on a sense of recognition. It needs readers for whom its heroine's experience of negotiating between two precisely delineated worlds (Wexford and New York) rings bells. It is not necessary to be from either Brooklynor Enniscorthy to be moved by the book: Tóibín's magical evocations of both places make them familiar, even if you have no idea where they are. But it is necessary to see the heroine's grappling with her identity in two parallel universes as more than just the story of an indecisive young woman. That doubleness has to resonate as a way of configuring the human condition.
That can happen for individual readers anywhere, of course, but it won't acquire any kind of critical mass unless it also makes sense of a collective experience. In the US, where the immigrant mentality is central to the culture, a story like Brooklyntouches exposed nerves. In Ireland, of course, the sense of living in two places at the same time, indeed of being two people at the same time, is an aspect not just of the history of emigration, but of our experience of extreme economic globalisation. I imagine the same would be true, in one form or another, for readers of Brooklynin parts of Italy or Poland or Portugal.
For mainstream English readers, however, that doubleness does not really exist. It can be consumed as a half-familiar, half-exotic aspect of Englishness through, say, Monica Ali's Brick Laneor Zadie Smith's White Teeth. But it does not saturate the mainstream collective consciousness in the way that it does in the US, Ireland and other countries. And this is just fine: there are English novelists (Anita Brookner, for example) that I find entirely incomprehensible.
It’s nice to live in a world where we can share each other’s stories. It’s also a relief sometimes to find that we can’t quite do that. In literature at least, mutual incomprehension is not necessarily an ignoble condition.
fotoole@irishtimes.com
