Tag: Donal Ryan

The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan

Irish writer Donal Ryan

Donal Ryan’s 6th novel, The Queen of Dirt Island (2022) is a novel of very short chapters. All of them are short-titled and just shy of 2 pages. I would describe myself as a tough reader: it takes a lot to stir my emotions. Yet, chapter one at just one and three-quarter pages, moved me greatly. I read it four times. Of course, the emotion faded with familiarity but Ryan’s skill and control was always evident.

It’s like flicking through a family album picking up tit-bits that put the snaps into a semblance of order and understanding that becomes a narrative.

It’s the story of Saoirse (SER sha) Alyward raised by her mother, Eileen, and Nana, Mary, Eileen’s mother-in-law. Everyone speaks, adults and children, in a basic Irish rural lexicon with a heavy sprinkling of foul language at ease with the many Catholic idioms and easy blasphemy, illuminating the rural mind, more fearful of the weather than of god. They call themselves a family

…all sort of humming along in that comfortable dysfunction that seems to be the best any family can hope for…

but one that is treated with suspicion and contempt: there’s no man in the house. Saoirse had never felt afraid until at the age of fourteen years and nine months when an officious social worker asked her gossip-based leading questions about her mother’s integrity.

Her situation is slowly revealed: poverty, her mother’s privileged but outraged and aloof family, as well as her hardening personality to match the life that treacherous circumstances have chosen for her. It’s a story of husband-less and father-less women surviving in a land of patriarchal power but manage to create their own womanised niche while, at the same time, having to deal with feckless men blind to their own weaknesses.

Ryan describes writing as “burgeoning visions”. One of my gripes is that a few plot points, few ‘visions’, feel as if they’ve emanated from the writer’s universe and squeezed to fit into the story’s universe. For example, the sudden desire of Josh, Saoirse’s ill-matched boyfriend, to be a novelist and write Saoirse’s story,

…to make a record, he said … all of these things that happened, all of these dramas, all of these shades of declension between love and its absence, between living and dying, between love and hate…to sublimate all of this life into art…

the product of which she rejects and writes her own. It is, of course, a success. It’s a petty complaint and thankfully doesn’t distract from the excellence of the writing and the engaging characters and their story. But it could be seen as a metaphor for the resilience of women which makes it less of a complaint and more of a novelistic device.

Donal Ryan is one of many Irish writers that are part of what Sebastian Barry, the current Irish Laureate for Fiction, calls the ‘golden age’ of Irish writing. Writers like, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Paul Murray, Elaine Feeney, Claire Keegan, Barry himself, all much loved and awarded, and Paul Lynch who on November 26th was announced as the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for his 5th novel Prophet Song.

If you like Irish writing please, if you haven’t already, add Donal Ryan to your list.

Here you can read my blog about Ryan’s 4th novel from a low and quiet sea (2018)

You can hear Donal Ryan talking about The Queen of Dirt Island here.

You can buy the book is various formats here.

 

by Categories: Book review, Irish literature, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

from a low and quiet sea by Donal Ryan

Irish writer Donal Ryan

Right from the beginning I should tell you that the writing is assured and fine, but for those of you who want signposts to tell you who says what to whom you’ll be disappointed: the dialogue is imbedded in the prose, unpunctuated, so this one may not be for you.

This is proving to be popular with contemporary writers: the last three books I’ve read have been written with minimal punctuation and certainly no  dialogue punctuation. I was skeptical at first but once you read it, reading it as if it’s being read to you, it’s clear what is dialogue and what isn’t.
 

  It’s about three men: Farouk, his country torn apart by war attempts to save his family and then can’t believe the worst of reality; Laurence, Lampy, a young man with an old chip on his shoulder the size of the bus he drives, a bastard but there’s absolutely nothing he can do about that – but it might be why Chloe doesn’t love him; and John a man bewildered and damaged by idle patents and left with ‘a filthy soul’. The final chapter begins enigmatically and these three men and their relationship to each other become clear only in the last pages. It’s really three back stories before the final chapter sews them all together; a very different form of a novel.

Farouk’s and Lampy’s chapters, and the final one are written in the third person but with many a patch of close writing: third person writing that’s  a-l-m-o-s-t in the first; but John’s chapter is all in the first. I don’t think there’s anything significant about that; it’s just how it turned out. 

The prose, in every chapter, is strewn with very long, sometimes beautiful, sentences full of clauses separated by conjunctions that create a tense tone of urgency as if the speaker has to rush and get as much information into the sentence as possible before they run out of breath because there’s a full stop coming up and there’s more and more important things to say and there’s unease in the voice, which sets the tone, as if there might be failure ahead and the rush is to beat it before the full stop comes into view and there, it’s almost upon you but there’s just another very important thing to say and yet another one and here it comes and there it is.

Alex Clark in The Guardian in mid-2019 acknowledged the boom in Irish contemporary fiction writing and credited its rise to fearless publishers and writers. However, writers have always been fearless; it’s the publishers alone that should now deserve the credit. Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) which takes eight sentences to fill over a thousand pages, was on the Booker shortlist that year, and was picked up by a small publisher Galley Beggar Press (GBP) which also took Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013). That took nine years to find GBP and is considered a ‘difficult’ book. Form and style have broadened literary fiction’s borders and I don’t just mean with the diminishing use of punctuation. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (2020) on the Booker shortlist for 2020 is called ‘a novel’ on the cover but isn’t: it’s a great read but it’s definitely creative journalism. The only thing made-up about it is its form. 

from a low and quiet sea was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and long listed for the Booker Prize (2018).

If it’s writing with characters deeply drawn and language that makes you read sentences out loud just for the joy of it then this one is for you. 

Here you can watch Donal Ryan reading from this book from a low and quiet sea.

You can buy the book here in various formats. 
 
by Categories: Book review, Literary criticismTags: , , , , 1 Comment