Ireland’s new wave of female novelists are giving women the final say | Canada Voices

Over the past decade or so, Ireland has produced a clutch of female novelists who have shown readers, especially millennial women, a version of themselves that contemporary Irish literature had not yet provided. In their novels and short stories, Sally Rooney, Megan Nolan and Claire Keegan are bearing witness to Ireland’s long history of female erasure, at the same time that they are carefully attuned to the way we live now.

The leader of this band of literary subversives is Rooney, the 34-year-old from Castlebar, County Mayo, whose four books have sold more than six million copies globally. With her 2018 novel Normal People, Rooney established herself as a novelist of rare subtlety, as receptive to the small dips and grand swerves of her character’s emotional topography as Henry James – smart people with a stunted approach to expressing their feelings.

Normal People‘s two protagonists – Marianne, a wealthy silver-tongued loner, and Connell, a working-class brainy jock – are joined together by Connell’s mother Lorraine, who cleans house for Marianne’s mother. No sooner does Rooney establish this somewhat facile class dialectic than she subverts it. Some of the joy in reading this book is watching the distribution of power shift among the two friends and part-time lovers as they vacillate between vulnerability and bravado, the badinage of two friends in total sync. “At times,” Rooney writes, Connell “has the sensation that he and Marianne are like figure skaters, improving their discussions so aptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them both.”

Rooney has more on her mind than just friendship. Ireland’s long history of patriarchal power, its negation of female will in the public and private spheres, shadows her characters. Marianne is a victim of this subjugation, bullied by her intellectually insecure brother Alan, while Connell is trapped by the same snare, a closet aesthete and writer who flashes his jock-bro charm to avoid censure from his classmates. As the two begin to shed the final pieces of themselves they have withheld from each other, the bond anneals into a condition of unwavering faith and trust, of two free souls shaking off the yoke of their country’s past.

Rooney’s characters radiate warmth and fellow feeling; you feel good about them, the way they get on in the world. Megan Nolan’s characters are much harder to like, her female characters stuck in a disequilibrium of the self. Unlike the empaths in Rooney’s fiction, Nolan’s men and women behave according to rules of engagement that push them in the wrong directions, toward mutually assured self-destruction.

The twentysomething unnamed narrator of her 2021 novel Acts of Desperation is a young professional so eager for companionship that she metabolizes her partner’s selfishness, his casual and callous acts of betrayal, as acts of affection. In order to keep him close, she keeps watch on her eating habits and sexual appeal at the expense of virtually everything else in her life. “I’d thought that a man’s love would make me so full up I’d never need to drink or cut or do anything at all to my body ever again,” she says.

This, as Nolan sees it, is the precarious state of coupling in the Instagram age. The novel’s rake maintains a surreptitious relationship with his former lover, whom Nolan’s narrator stalks online, examining every social-media post as a kind of torture. This suspension of disbelief is a form of self-abnegation – given the sorry state of Irish men, she has to endure her deceiving boyfriend with clenched teeth, like tolerating a bad house guest who overstays his welcome. When she discovers a long e-mail exchange between her partner and his ex, she lets it pass through her like a bitter pill, through her anger and back into her myth of domestic bliss, holding fast to the idea that “a man’s adoration … would make all the bad parts of myself be quiet forever.”

Untangling myths – personal myths but also national ones – has been a remit for Claire Keegan ever since the writer published her earliest stories in her 1999 debut Antarctica. Raised on a farm in County Wicklow, in the northwest of Ireland, Keegan’s language is precise and taut, as shorn of ornamentation as it is charged with the interior drama of her character’s desperately forlorn lives.

Keegan crafts intimate moral tales that resonate across centuries of Irish oppression. Like Rooney and Nolan, Keegan confronts the perils of womanhood in a country historically besmirched by machismo. The three long stories that appear in Keegan’s 2023 book So Late in the Day: Stories of Men and Women have the lineaments of female victimization narratives: a misogynist laments his ex-fiancée; an old scholar berates a young PhD candidate for her success; awomen on a business trip slips into a sexual liaison with a maniac. But the stories are as much about the male characters – their fears of obsolescence and loneliness, of sinking into a void where no woman will come looking for them.

In her 2021 novella Small Things Like These, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, drives to his local convent to make a delivery and finds a young girl in the adjacent supply shed. What is the source of her fear? Furlong notices that the high wall next to the convent is topped with glass shards, and that the convent is locked from within.

Keegan is evoking the Magdalene Laundries, the brutal workhouses for unwed mothers controlled by Ireland’s Catholic Church for more than 200 years – the last of which closed in 1996. Furlong is the offspring of one such forgotten woman, a teenager forced to give up her child. In the book’s final scene, Furlong attempts a modest act of redemption for his mother and the unnamed thousands of abused women without a voice. He takes in the girl, finding some small spark of radiance that has heretofore eluded him – “the best bit of him … shining forth, and surfacing.” In Keegan’s fiction, the historical becomes personal, the past always pressing down on the present, and women have the final say.