Post-catastrophic Irelands in contemporary fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between neoliberal late capitalism and the climate crisis in Irish writing. It focuses on the imagined post-climate change Ireland of Danny Denton’s novel The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow (2018), which shows a feudal society clinging to a Dublin sunk below rising waters. This analysis posits that The Earlie King employs “weird” methodologies to imagine an Ireland so wracked by environmental destruction that the transactional structures of capitalism which catalysed this destruction are rendered inoperable by it. It draws upon Mark Fisher’s work on “eerie” and “weird” modes of writing, and the partially overlapping theorisation of the “New Weird” fiction movement by participating authors Steph Swainston and China Miéville. Other fictional Irelands ravaged by the aftermaths of crisis are proliferating, in texts such as Sara Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive (2018), Oisín Fagan’s Nobber (2019) and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014). Collectively, these texts display a direct inheritance of the 2008–9 financial crash. Luke Gibbons writes that Irish modernists “did not have to await the twentieth century to undergo the shock of modernity.” This is echoed today, in post-crash Irish writers’ lived experience of the depth of suffering which follows capitalist collapse.