The
Irish economy crashed in 2008. The
Celtic Tiger was slain, and modern, cosmopolitan Ireland was left in ruins. From the ashes of this once mighty land, from
amid the smouldering, empty ghost towns around Dublin, there are whispers of
song, of voices trying to be heard, of a people trying to say: we’re still
alive in here, we still matter, please don’t forget about us. Donal Ryan’s debut novel, The Spinning Heart,
gives voice to those people.
Before
being nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, Ryan’s novel had already
gathered much critical attention. As the
first novel published by Doubleday Ireland, it seemed chosen to speak or a
nation. Then Waterstones, the UK book
chain, selected it as one of their choice books of the year, after it had won
the Bord Gáis Energy Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. All of which must have been some major
validation for Donal Ryan who admits he had been collecting the rejection slips
from publishers for this and the novel he had written first (The Thing About
December). None of this I knew when I
picked up The Spinning Heart a few months ago and read it.
The
first point to note is that The Spinning Heart is a polyphonic novel. Each of its 21 chapters is a monologue from a
different character, some of them quite short, and their points of intersection
slowly accumulate, creating an impressionistic vision of small town Ireland. Ryan has admitted in interviews that his is a
difficult novel to pitch. Say it’s a novel about recession and watch their eyes
glaze over. So you say it has kidnapping
and murder in it, but James Patterson this is not. So all you can say about it is that it is an
ambitious, beguiling novel about people trying to survive when the world is
crumbling and tumbling around their eyes.
Sometimes
with polyphonic novels, each of the different voices can begin to sound similar,
if not the same. It is a relief to
report that Ryan’s voices remain distinct, mostly due to his canny ear for
dialect and turns of phrase – be they from Irish builders, a stranded Serbian
immigrant, a single mother or a young child – and that his densely-packed
sentences allows us to peer into the very souls of his characters. There is something very special going on
here. Often with a debut novelist, you
hear critics harping on about the ‘promise’ of this author – if he’s like this
now, imagine how he’ll be in ten years, with experience and skill under his
belt. With Donal Ryan we have something
more than that, we have talent fully formed, prose realised with such skill and
beauty on the page it is tough to believe this is a debut (which it isn’t, as
he had already finished the novel that will now be his second novel… but still,
wow.)
The
Spinning Heart, then, is a powerful, incendiary novel that displays immense
power from its writer. It is a novel
that speaks to a contemporary problem with heart and grace, and though it
offers no answers – there might perhaps be none, there certainly isn’t for the
characters we meet here – it is a novel that will remain important for
highlighting a moment of major international change through the eyes of some of
those on the ground, caught up in the spinning heart of the crash. Donal Ryan is most certainly a writer to
watch.
Will
it be short-listed?
Almost
certainly, I feel. Not that long ago a
debut novelist won the Booker – Aravind Adiga with The White Tiger. With The Spinning Heart it could happen
again.
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