Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery

Abstract

Reviewed by: Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis by Eóin Flannery Kevin Hargaden (bio) Eóin Flannery, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), ix + 239 pages Ireland almost went bankrupt in 2008. The aftermath was marked by devastating unemployment, a return to mass emigration, and the establishment of policy commitments directly responsible for the present housing crisis, along with innumerable cuts in funding and limitations on social initiatives as part of the crushing austerity regime. It is surprising how quickly the death of the Celtic Tiger has been assumed into Irish discourse as an event we all acknowledge but do not particularly need to reference. The economists who boosted the bubble are back on our screens and in our broadsheets as commentators. The ten-year anniversary passed without much more than a few newspaper features1 and we have slipped happily back into economic buoyancy, marked by inflated property prices and semi-regular chastisements about the importance of keeping wages low to maintain the market’s confidence in our productivity. It is hard not to think that this period in our recent history warrants more attention. And in Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction, Eóin Flannery, from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick, offers a crucial intervention. It might seem that an assessment of this period from an English literature department would be marginal. Surely it is the economists and sociologists who must take the lead on understanding the significance of these events? But Irish novelists were examining the economic and social changes wrought by the Celtic Tiger through the boom days and into the period of barren bust. Flannery considers Chris Binchy’s Open-Handed (2008), Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010), Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015), Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December (2015) and The Spinning Heart (2012), his debut novel that preceded The Thing About December in terms of publication but exists in a subsequent text within the novels’ narrative chronology. He also considers Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion (2013), Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013), and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), as well as discussing the poem The Celtic Tiger (1999) by the late Denis O’Driscoll. Throughout these discussions, Flannery is concerned with ‘how authors of Irish literary fiction grapple with the registration of debt and indebtedness in the Celtic Tiger period and its aftermath’ (p. 9). This is a fascinating way into [End Page 127] an essential conversation – the abstract concepts of neoliberal capitalism can be illuminated in a fresh light when set inside the plot of a novel. There is a logical progression through the different books discussed. We start with Binchy and Cunningham’s novels which present ‘not a clinical analysis of a crudely divisive economic system but a second-hand description of well-known commoditized types’ (p. 38, emphasis original). These may be entertaining novels, but they are structured so as to engage with the Celtic Tiger in a way that re-inscribes the consensus narratives which are grouped under the ‘we all partied’ and ‘a few bad apples’ clichés. We end with The Mark and the Void, a complex novel which confronts the reader directly with what we think a novel is and what it can do. The relationship established between the main characters – a novelist named Paul suffering writer’s block and a depressed financier named Claude – allows Murray to draw attention ‘to the fictive nature of the macrostructure of high finance’ (p. 181). This is a work of literary criticism before it is a work of social analysis and Flannery’s insights offer readers a renewed appreciation of the works under discussion. Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood is the focus for the second chapter and Flannery unveils the role shame plays in the narrative, proposing that while not perfect, the novel offers ‘a prompt with which to commence renewed discussions regarding the possibilities of shame in the Irish context’ (p. 73). Flannery shows us how Donal Ryan’s novels formally...