The list in Saturday’s Irish Times of the top 100 Irish fiction titles of the first quarter of the 21st century is persuasive evidence of the vitality of contemporary Irish literature, of a tradition as healthy at the bud as at the root.
There is change as well as continuity, however, a 56-44 female-male split indicative of a hard-won equality in a once male-dominated field. Many titles are set abroad and it is remarkable how the US looms much larger in the imagination than Britain. It is, however, striking that, whereas exile was once the fate of many of our finest talents, almost all the writers listed live and work at home.
That is not to say that authors no longer struggle to find an audience.
Anna Burns, who wrote Milkman, the first choice of our panel, was living on the breadline before she won the Booker Prize.
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John McGahern may have become a national treasure by the time That They May Face the Rising Sun (the second choice) was published in 2002, four years before his death, but his early works were banned by the State and he was dismissed from his teaching post.
Mike McCormack had been dropped by his London publisher for poor sales and could not find a home for his masterpiece Solar Bones (the panel’s third choice) until a small Irish publisher, Tramp Press, took a chance on it.
What these and many of the other titles have in common, apart from their excellence, is an eloquent evocation of place, be it Belfast, Leitrim or Mayo, a reckoning with the past and a concern with how to live well, the individual conscience sometimes at odds with community or family.
Irish authors’ stories have also inspired other art-forms. Nine of our top 20 have been adapted for film or television, others for the stage.
But the value of fiction is more than merely economic. Milkman’s young heroine endeared herself to readers not just by outsmarting a paramilitary stalker and wittily critiquing a crooked state and community groupthink but also because she turned a love of fiction into a survival strategy.
