The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (review)

The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel is essentially, and perhaps unavoidably, an elaborated summary of important Irish novels, more an extended annotated bibliography than a series of exegetical essays. Moving from Castle Rackrent (1800) to the present day (John Banville’s work is given the final, brief mention), the volume is divided predictably, one might say conservatively, into twelve sections: the novel before 1800; the novel and the national tale; the novel of the big house; the Gothic novel; the Catholic novel; the modern novel; the regional novel; the novel written in Irish; the female novelist; the novel and life writing; the novel of the Troubles; and the contemporary Irish novel. Two chapters are given over to considerations of individual writers: there is a chapter on Joyce and another discussing Beckett and O’Brien as exemplars of the postmodern. I applaud the volume’s attempted synopticism, but, as is often true in such multi-authored texts, The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel is severely unbalanced in terms of critical quality.

A great deal of space in some of the weaker essays – weak in the sense that no real argument or thesis is expounded or explored – is given over to simple lists of various works followed by a brief plot summary. Aileen Douglas’s ‘The Novel before 1800,’ for instance, is really a compendium of titles of work predating Castle Rackrent; Vera Kreilkamp’s ‘The Novel of the Big House’ similarly functions as another list, this time organized around authors (from Maria Edgeworth to John Banville): despite her subject matter, she offers no sustained analysis of the psycho-geography or ideological textuality of space as such; James H. Murphy’s ‘Catholics and Fiction during the Union’ is dryly informational, offering (yet) another list of authors who wrote between 1801 and 1922. Bruce Stewart and Terence Brown both have offered overviews of the works of Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien. Stewart’s ‘James Joyce’ neatly summarizes Joyce’s career and major works and would stand as an effective undergraduate introductory lecture on Joyce’s career, but one should not expect any sustained readings of the novels. Brown’s essay on Beckett and O’Brien attempts to locate a postmodernism in these two writers; a major fault here, however, is that Brown begs the question of the term ‘postmodern’ and thus never engages with the vexed question of how the work of a writer as singular as Beckett would resist such an easy – and lazy – characterization. Readers may also be puzzled by Brown’s decision not to mention Beckett’s later trilogy (Company, Worstward Ho, Ill Seen Ill Said), given that it is here that Beckett made his Irishness a major theme.

I am certain that the mandate of the Companion series favours information over exegesis: my criticisms are thus perhaps slightly off the mark. But after reading the tremendously successful essays – essays that manage to be informational and to offer complex and theoretical readings – I wonder if some editorial missteps have occurred here. Miranda Burgess’s ‘The National Tale and Allied Genres, 1770s–1840s’ begins usefully with a section entitled ‘Theories of the National Tale’; here she suggests – very successfully – that the national tale is ‘concerned less with the achievement of a general kind of sociopolitical stability than it is with social and political dialogue and critical assessment’; this observation about the centrality of dialogue and exchange – of negotiated realities – serves her well in her readings of Castle Rackrent, Florence Macarthy (1818), and The Wild Irish Boy (1808). Siobhan Kilfeather’s ‘The Gothic Novel’ is another excellent essay; she offers a splendid reading of the Gothic, using Burke’s notion of the sublime as a guide; through readings of novels as various as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and Le Fanu’s The House in the Churchyard (1861–63), Kilfeather manages to offer a way of thinking about how the particular Irishness of the Gothic (its...