Retrospective (Re)Visions: Post-Agreement Fiction

Abstract

The contemporary Northern Irish novel is largely situated within the broader politics of the conflict, emanating from its distinct yet interrelated historico-political contexts—be it the time of the Troubles, the (post-)ceasefire period or the current phase of post-Agreement politics. With the political situation gradually devolved into deferred narratives of ‘new beginnings,’ post-Agreement novelists have responded to, resisted or refuted “the cultural politics of suspension”1 that have come to characterise the political status quo in the North. As Linden Peach has observed, “[i]n Ireland and Northern Ireland, there has always been a strong sense of the novel as a mutable and transgressive form,” one that provides “an appropriate vehicle for the ideological debates and conflicts that constitute so much of Irish social and political history.”2 Thus, it comes as no surprise that the novels set against the backdrop of communal violence have become “one of the region’s few growth industries,”3 having mutated into new form(at)s of Northern Irish fiction such as thrillers, crime narratives and romances.4 In spite of the generic limitations of ‘Troubles fiction,’ the period of political violence has produced “almost 400 novels relating to the Troubles,”5 most of which appeal to the masses by virtue of their formulaic narration. As a result, the many novels to have appeared since the outbreak of violence in 1969 have done little or nothing to portray Northern Ireland other than as “a fated place, doomed to inevitable and enduring violence”6 and have often been classified as “‘Troubles trash.’”7 Such reductionist tendencies, however, have been challenged by a number of Northern Irish novelists who published their work around the time of the declaration of the first ceasefire of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1994. These writers, as Eamonn Hughes argues, have been acutely aware of the “need to locate the Troubles as one strand in a more complex set of stories,” as if “realising that there are other stories to be told about Northern Ireland.”8 Correspondingly, Neal Alexander makes a generic classification of fiction produced within the intermediary stage of the peace process as “post-ceasefire novels,”9 while defining the period between 1994 and 1998 in terms of the political euphoria it thrust upon the general populace, one that anticipated a certain closure to, or rather consolidation of, Northern Ireland’s conflictual past.