Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction

Marie Mianowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315387888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction discusses the representations of place and landscape in Irish fiction since 2008. It includes novels and short stories by William Trevor, Dermot Bolger, Anne Enright, Donal Ryan, Claire Kilroy, Kevin Barry, Gerard Donovan, Danielle McLaughlin, Trisha McKinney, Billy O'Callaghan and Colum McCann. In the light of writings by geographers, anthropologists and philosophers such as Doreen Massey, Tim Ingold, Giorgio Agamben and Jeff Malpas, this book looks at the metamorphoses of place and landscape representations in fiction by confirmed or debut authors, in the aftermath of a crisis with deep economic as well as cultural consequences for Irish society. It shows what place and landscape representations reveal of the past, while discussing the way notions such as boundedness, openness and emergence can contribute to thinking out space and place and designing future landscapes.

Part I

Opening up landscapes

Renegotiating places of the past

1 Reprocessing landscapes in William Trevor’s “At Olivehill”

It may seem puzzling to start a book on post Celtic Tiger landscapes with a discussion on a short story by William Trevor, while the fictional horizon of that longstanding author is more often than not early or mid-twentieth century parochial Ireland. A recent review pointed out that his work did not in fact evolve much over his career. In a 2008 New York Times review about a selection of William Trevor’s stories¹ written in the 1990s and after, Charles McGrath² wrote how hard it was to see any evolution in William Trevor’s writing over the years and that there was scarcely any hint of the Celtic Tiger in his fiction, nor of the economic consequences. In the same review, however, Charles McGrath describes William Trevor’s writing as timeless. Quoting critic Fintan O’Toole, McGrath adds that, perhaps owing to his past as a sculptor, Trevor’s writing is sometimes sculptural and almost abstract. The timeless characteristic of William Trevor’s writing might explain why it escapes usual categories. His longevity as a writer indeed proves that if his message is also timeless, however it finds in present day events enough material to trigger the flame of creation. But the fact that his fiction remains anchored in the past or away from Ireland should indeed question Trevor’s readers. It might well be a hint that a change of paradigm is necessary to read William Trevor’s work and that, perhaps, reading it as a timeless description of life in mid-twentieth-century parochial Ireland is not doing his work full justice. The close study of his short stories and longer works reveals that in the folds of the implicit discourse so often described as his personal style, a particular space is chiselled in. The space in question is the invisible and mysterious place of creation from which imagination can burst forth in the minds of readers. This particular place of creation is sculpted in the text as William Trevor the sculptor would have sculpted it. As he explained on several occasions, he started writing because his sculpting had become too abstract and he realized the flesh that was missing in his sculpture had found its place in his stories.³

William Trevor left Ireland in the 1950s and has been living in England ever since. His childhood with unhappily married parents who regularly moved across Ireland probably gave him both a complex and an acute sense of home, place and landscape. Indeed, far from being unchanging and immobile, Trevor’s fiction is in fact particularly astute and his writing is especially keen to pinpoint the details that make any kind of balance tip off, while taking great care to observe closely the object of the study on all sides, as a sculptor would his sculpture. For more than half a century Trevor has been observing Ireland from afar, although not from very far away, having moved to London and then settled in an old farmhouse in Devon in the 1950s. But that one step back is enough to create a distance, alter any viewpoint and give depth to any perspective, whether from England or from Italy, where William Trevor also spent a lot of time, and where many of his stories are situated. Among his prolific production of short stories, one of his most recent ones, ‘At Olivehill,’⁴ stands out, the setting being contemporary Ireland during the boom. Published in the collection Cheating at Canasta in 2007, when the Celtic Tiger was still in full swing, it illustrates the changes operated in the landscape at a time when Ireland was going global. Trevor’s art of the implicit shows the way in which those changes affected the relationship of people to place and memory. ‘At Olivehill’ is not only the toponymy of a sacrifice, an Irish Mount of Olives. It also contains potential for a form of renewal, if not resurrection. ‘At Olivehill’ opens a reflection on the way in which, because space and history are intertwined, they live on in memories. It further delves into the way past, present and future are experienced differently in one and the same place, at the same moment in time. Trevor’s writing precisely attempts to find a way to represent the complex layers of time and experience in place. His writing does not denounce change, but it subtly hints at the need for a society to acknowledge the meaning of places, of how they are moulded by history, as well as habits and experience. On the other hand, his stories also present change as an opportunity for places to live on and for memory to prevail. Olivehill might also be the place of a necessary sacrifice for it to become a better place to live in times to come.

From his position as a keen observer of Ireland, attached to particular landscapes and an Irish sense of place of which he knows every subtle variation, Trevor must have been aware, very early on during the 1990s, of the excesses of the boom. He certainly sensed the irreversible folly of it all – madness is after all one of Trevor’s key themes. In ‘At Olivehill,’ he subtly warns not merely of the normalization of vernacular landscapes and their treatment as transnational entities. He also points at the danger of destroying a certain type of layered relationship to place – not only the palimpsest nature of landscape, but a complex relationship to place, which Gaston Bachelard described as ‘topophilia’: inhabited space transcending geometrical space.⁵ In ‘At Olivehill,’ Trevor achieves the double feat of questioning a global process by representing a very local scale in very few pages. He chooses to focus on a specific place, an old Big House, inhabited by the same Irish catholic family since the eighteenth century. The more the story progresses, the more reduced is the scale, and yet paradoxically the more the reader realizes how global the issue is. The cataclysm experienced by the main character, Mollie, appears as a catastrophe on a much wider scale than that of her house and her own fate and Trevor explores both the modes of representing such a personal catastrophe and its links to place.

As in many of William Trevor’s stories, the characters’ resistance to change and their desire to anchor the present moment in a particular memory is fundamental. In ‘At Olivehill,’ what is first presented as an issue of space and a problem of ill-timing, as well as the struggle between two types of landscapes, a traditional, vernacular landscape and a global, normalized one, gradually becomes an issue of place and memory. Trevor excels in the art of indirect statements and implied declarations. He also excels in the art of announcements and revelations – what is not said but nonetheless meant – concentrating on the process of thought associations, rather than on the act of enunciation itself. Trevor not only questions the impact of the Tiger boom on Irish landscapes, but he also forces the reader to view the landscape in all its dimensions: as a space being transformed over time, as well as a place rich with intimate stories. In Trevor’s novella My House in Umbria⁶ the narrator imagined a photograph gathering not only the characters present in the house during that fateful Italian summer, but also those who were part of their lives but not present in Umbria and so could never have been on the photograph, as if to create a fictitious picture at its most complete. In the same way, the narrator of ‘At Olivehill’ adds new details and points of views to a landscape being transformed and to the apparently binary opposition of two generations, in order to offer both a complex vision and sketch out a possible future, without obliterating the past.

‘At Olivehill’ actually starts in medias res after a special announcement and in the middle of the conversation that follows between three characters, Mollie the mother, and two of her grown-up children, two sons, who manage the estate on which she lives with her husband James. When the story opens, the sons have just announced their plan to transform parts of the grounds of the estate into a golf course. And Mollie pleads with them that they keep it a secret from their aging father until he is dead. Thus the story begins:

“Well, at least don’t tell him,” their mother begged. “At least do nothing until he’s gone.”⁷

From the outset, the reader witnesses the building of a secret which needs to be kept from someone whose name remains untold in those first lines.

“We’d never want to distress him,” Tom said, and Eoghan shook his head.

She wasn’t reassured, but didn’t say. She knew what they were thinking: that being old you might be aware of death loitering near, but even so death wasn’t always quick about its business. And she hated what had been said to her, out of the blue on such a lovely day.⁸

As the short story moves on, still nothing is said of what has been revealed. Just as James is kept ignorant of the plan, nor is the reader aware of it, or aware from whom it should be kept a secret. The father is alluded to in the course of the first page but the reader is still left to wonder if he is indeed the character who needs to be out of what has been suggested. The story is already well advanced when the narrator eventually reveals, through an internally focalization on the mother, what has been told to her by her sons:

“You’re good to indulge me, Tom,” she said, even though she had hoped to hear that what had been kept from their father would not come about at all. It made no sense to her that the greater part of Olivehill should be made into a golf course in the hope that it would yield a more substantial profit than the land did.⁹

The narrative th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Opening up landscapes: Renegotiating places of the past
• PART II Metamorphoses of landscape in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz and Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart
• PART III Imagining landscapes of the future in The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy and in City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
• PART IV The in-betweenness of place: Seascapes in five contemporary short stories and Colum McCann’s transatlantic unfolding of place
• Index