There's no point getting upset about it, or looking to pick a fight, but there has been an undeniable tendency in this thing they call Literary Fiction coming out of Ireland lately. But I don' t even want to talk about this tendency. Julian Gough has put it nicely:
"If there is a movement in Ireland, it is backwards. Novel after novel set in the nineteen seventies, sixties, fifties. Reading award-winning Irish literary fiction, you wouldn't know television had been invented. Indeed, they seem apologetic about acknowledging electricity ... The only area where Irish writing is thriving in Ireland itself is on the internet, because it's a direct connection, writer-to-reader. Blogs captured, and capture, Ireland in a way literature no longer does."
When I heard that Brian Dillon was to put out a novel I was very keen to see what both the form and the content would take. Dillon has been UK editor of the wonderfully eclectic Cabinet magazine for a while and his reviews on contemporary visual art I've always enjoyed reading. I knew, or hoped, that here was a novel that would not pander to the boring, staid fashion of contemporary (commercial that is, as opposed to experimental, of which there appears to very little) literary fiction from the UK and Ireland, but rather would be indebted, or in tune at least, to the more interesting, more international conversation to be had in the visual arts. It's something Tom McCarthy spoke about long before he was a Booker Prize nominee - artists could easily chat about Beckett, while novelists squirmed in their seats at the mere mention of their 'forebears'. When I realised that one of my favourite publishers, Sternberg Press, were to put out Dillon's fictional debut, I was even more excited.
So when I got the beautiful little book in the post (design is by Surface Berlin/Frankfurt am Main, who do a lot of great work for Sternberg) I was not all that surprised to see McCarthy proclaim on the backcover: 'At last: an Anglophone writer who takes up the challenge thrown down by the nouveau roman.'
It definately takes up the challenge of the nouveau roman, but there's lots that 'Anglo-Saxon' readers will also be at home with: memory, love, exploration, almost one could say tourist exploration, of an idyllic, if somewhat semantically loaded, destination and the material and the emotional resting place embedded in the title are both ambitiously, artistically rendered by Dillon's fine prose.
These are exciting times. I can't help but feel that despite the growing number of bland MAs in Creative Writing and a growing mania for literary prizes, the fight has been going well for experimental, more Continental novels in English, thanks in no small part to the likes of McCarthy and small, sophisticated presses such as Metronome Press and Sternberg Press.
To go back to Gough's lines - the Internet is changing things, and if writers in the English speaking world couldn't give a toss about Philip Roth - or American writing in general - or Amis, Barnes, Tóibín, then they no longer need to feel isolated. Irish blogging might be a good place to represent the country, but I don't know any interesting literary blogs from Ireland, (but please educate us here at BDP!). But then, we're not interested here in representing countries, who would want to do that!
Dillon got that right too - all we have to go on is that the action of this novella takes place 'on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe.' Despite the fact that it's a book concerned with ruins, and a past that is ultimately concerned with the past - the past is shown to be just that. It feels, with Sanctuary, that a little bit of the future has arrived.
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