Outpost and Outlier: The Ireland of Three Recent Irish Fictions

Abstract

In this essay, I read three recent Irish fictions by writers sensitive to Ireland’s perennially fraught position as both outlier and outpost of European and British cultural, as well as political domains: Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs, Jo Baker’s A Country Road, A Tree, and Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman. In The Little Red Chairs, to begin, O’Brien seizes contemporary Ireland’s outpost-of-Europe realities to invent a counter-intuitively plausible plot in which her fictional stand-in for one of the most notorious outlaws of recent European history—Radovan Karadžić, the Butcher of Bosnia—hides for a time in Ireland’s back-of-beyond Connacht province, and does relatively well there. In Baker’s A Country Road, a Tree, on the other hand, it is Europe that gives shelter of a sort to a fugitive Irish citizen. I say of a sort because in order to take that shelter, the novel’s cultural fugitive—dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett—chooses perilously, if not absurdly, to remain in France during World War II. Finally, the fictional memoir that is the text of The Temporary Gentleman, Barry’s “West Brit” fiction of the postcolonial Irish mid-century, reminds us that the call to be Irish is rarely answered exclusively. No, these two other calls also make some claim on the Irish person: the calls to be European and to be English.