Five best of Irish fiction

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, Stefan Beck has offered, over at the New Criterion’s Arma Virumque blog, a “Five Best of Irish Lit” (no Angela’s Ashes, he promises) in the style of the Wall Street Journal’s “Five Best” format:

(1) James Joyce, Dubliners.
(2) Flann O‘Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds.
(3) Frank O‘Connor’s 1952 story “First Confession.”
(4) J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man.
(5) Roddy Doyle, The Commitments—by which he really means Alan Parker’s wonderful 1991 film based on the novel.

Assuming that such native Irish writers as Swift, Wilde, Shaw, and Beckett do not qualify, because they turned their backs on Ireland, here are my five (taking for granted the place of Joyce and O’Brien on any such list):

• Sean O’Faolain, Bird Alone (1936). Banned as obscene by the Irish Censorship Board, this novel tells the story of a staunch Fenian, looking back over his participation in the Troubles, now ostracized and living alone.

• Elizabeth Bowen, A World of Love (1954). Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899. Her best novel is The Death of the Heart (1938), but it is set in England; her best book about Ireland is her history of the family estate, Bowen’s Court (1942). This late novel, about the discovery of love letters from an unknown woman to a soldier who died in the First World War, is carefully plotted but simply told.

• J. G. Farrell, Troubles (1970). If Beck can include one ringer, so can I. Farrell was born in Liverpool, but his family was Irish. And this novel is set in a hotel on the South Wexford Coast. The Irish War of Independence looms in the background.

• Brian Moore, The Mangan Inheritance (1979). Moore was beaten to the punch by John Irving’s World According to Garp (1978), a novel on a similar subject, but this is the better book. A failed poet, descended from the famous Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, is left a fortune by his wife, dead in a car accident, making it possible for him to set off in quest of his bizarre family history.

• William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002). There is not much by Trevor that is not worth reading, but this novel is truly haunting. In 1921, the Anglo-Irish Gault family decides to leave Cork after the father shoots an arsonist, but nine-year-old Lucy does not want to leave—and then, through an astonishing chain of entirely credible incidents, she gets left behind.

Speaking of the Wall Street Journal’s “Five Best” series, by the way, Shelley‘s Heart (see below) was named one of the five best political novels, second only to The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope, a novelist who spent eighteen formative years in Ireland.