The best books that capture the haunted geography of Dublin

Joyce’s first novel is kind of an Irish Catcher in the Rye: a book about sullen adolescence so profoundly resonant with actual adolescence it can turn lonely teenagers – me included – into novelists.

I was sixteen when I first read it and the Dublin it contained, full of rattling political arguments, philosophical waffle, reeking beaches, brothels, boarding schools, and an entire chapter itemizing hell, was recognizable to me even though almost ninety years had passed since it appeared.

Portrait, like other works by Joyce, dignifies the decrepit postcolonial outpost that is Dublin without ever being anything other than honest and fantastically true to detail. This is important to me because I don’t believe the banalisation of fiction – where everything should be set ‘everywhere’, or be as translatable as possible to mainstream American and British audiences – is doing it any favours.

The Dublin of Portrait is mercilessly specific and real.

McGahern is famous for writing slow-burning accounts of life in mid-century rural Ireland.

The Pornographer, however, is about a lonely bachelor who writes porn in his suburban bedsit then gets the bus into town to seduce women in gloomy dancehalls. He makes one of them pregnant and a battle of wills begins: he thinks she should obtain an abortion, she thinks they marry. This is remarkable because it is set in 1960s Dublin, a time and place in which the Catholic Church reigned supreme.

The book’s depiction of a night-time city composed of grimy pubs and starchy hospital wards is unforgettable, but its fascination for me lies in the protagonist’s casual cruelty towards his lover: this was what I had in mind when developing Cormac, the protagonist of my book – a passive, affable, but ultimately detached man who wreaks emotional havoc by accident and reflects a very Irish, still enduring, brand of insulated misogyny.

I also planted little references to The Pornographer throughout my book. Nobody seems to have spotted them yet.

When Enright won the Booker for this novel she blazed onto my horizon – I was nineteen – as an Irish woman who wrote candidly about the legacies of poverty and abuse, set much of her novel in the radically unfashionable suburb of Broadstone, staged a climactic scene in the flatlands of Donabate (close to where I grew up), and then won a massive prize for doing that.

Everything Enright writes is marvelous, but The Gathering gives you a frank, familiar, post-Celtic Tiger version of Dublin that has been endlessly inspirational to my own recreations of it.

I love the scene in which the protagonist, middle-class Veronica, stands helplessly in the posh department store Brown Thomas realizing that she can buy any number of luxury things but nothing will ever please her worn-out, vacant mother, a victim of history: that so much pain can be registered in so slight and feminine a moment is an example of pure skill.

A non-fiction recommendation this time, and a recent release.

Hennigan’s essay collection is a beautifully written account of the final years, and opaque recollections, of her grandmother Phil, who spent much of her life in various psychiatric institutions.

I have been interested in this theme for years – Ireland, in the first decades after independence from Britain, has some of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world: prisons, borstals, orphanages, magdalen laundries, and psychiatric hospitals both provided employment and regulation and also kept a whole population of ‘problem’ people out of sight).

This fact, and its repercussions in culture today, fascinate me, and Hennigan’s gentle and loving consideration of Phil’s trauma, loneliness, mania, and the maternal lineage it involves (her own mother was institutionalized) is also an angry illustration of just how badly women and the working class have been treated here.

A post-Donna Tart’s Secret History-esque tale of literary mystics who make up a secret society at Trinity College Dublin which tends, unfairly, to get left behind in analyses of Irish ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction.

This is fiction from or dealing with the abrupt and accelerated modernity that hit Ireland like a cultural torpedo in the early 2000s, and quite a lot of it fails to capture the discombobulation of living through that time.

The First Verse is a campus novel about sexy secretive students and shady deeds which also plots a queer geography of Dublin’s gay scene as well as illustrating the emotional tension that exists in Dublin between city centre and its polarised northern and southern suburbs.

Dublin is such a mannered city, caught in Georgian poses while falling apart as postmodernity obliterates its value system, that it surprises me there aren’t more Dublin novels about baroque subcultures. McCrea is also a Proustian scholar, so you know you are in good hands.