LITERARY CRITICISM: LIAM HARTEreviews A History of the Irish NovelBy Derek Hand Cambridge University Press, 341pp. £55

LET’S BEGIN with a starter for 10. Which Irish novelist made the following statement, and when? “It is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of fiction – realities are too strong, party passions too violent, to bear to see, or care to look at, their faces in a looking glass. The people would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature.”

No, not James Joyce in 1904, or John McGahern in 1974, but Maria Edgeworth in 1834, bemoaning the ineffable nature of Irish society, which simultaneously drew her in and repulsed her. Nor would this be the last time that an Irish novelist would cavil at the stubbornness of their raw material: Seán O’Faoláin made a similar complaint about the insufficiency of what he called “the dramatis personae” available to the Irish novelist in the 1960s. And only last year Julian Gough criticised his fellow novelists for shunning the looking glass entirely, thereby cutting themselves off from “the electric current of the culture”.

This perennially problematic relationship between social change and the novelistic imagination is one of the unifying preoccupations of Derek Hand’s long-awaited history of the Irish novel in English, which provides a masterly survey of the form from 1665 to 2010. Again and again a core paradox presents itself. As a literary form that has always revelled in anxiety and uncertainty, the novel is ideally suited to capturing the idiosyncrasies of the Irish experience, yet it is continually judged by some of its most accomplished practitioners to be somehow inadequate to the task. Successive literary generations, it seems, find the novelty of the contemporary moment to be both imaginatively invigorating and maddeningly troublesome.

Therein lies the novel’s chief cultural challenge and its chief cultural value.

Hand’s history is divided into seven primary chapters, alongside which run eight interchapters, each of which offers a close reading of a representative novel from the period under review. It is a structure that works well, though the interchapters begin to shrink a little in size as we approach the contemporary era.

In his introduction Hand sets out the parameters and central tenets of his study. A history of the Irish novel, he suggests, is many things: a record of the struggle to articulate “the Irish story” across four centuries; an account of evolving Irish identities; a chronicle of power and authority; and, pre-eminently, a history of Ireland’s journey towards modernity. By virtue of its inherent openness to the promise of the new, the novel is capable of yielding special insights into a society that Hand sees as being in a state of constant transition.

One consequence of the novel's democratic openness is that some of the finest works of Irish fiction are formless, "mood pieces rather than strict narratives", in Hand's words. Another is the Irish novelist's predilection for radical ambivalence and incompleteness, as evidenced by the brilliantly inconclusive endings of works such as Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(1916), Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September(1929) and Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark(1996), the last two of which are the subject of compact interchapters.

Anxiety and apprehensiveness, then, are the signatures of the Irish novel, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the precariousness of the Protestant project in colonial Ireland meant that the country was never a stable home for the Anglo-Irish. Hand provides perceptive, historically contextualised readings of a series of works that portray Ireland as an ongoing problem to be solved, a place always on the cusp of an ending and a beginning. Thus the formlessness of Thomas Amory's The Life of John Buncle, Esq(1756-66) mirrors the instability of the borders that separate fiction and reality in Ireland, and the tension between composure and hysteria in Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer(1820) reflects Protestant fears of what an emerging Catholic middle class might portend.

Moving into the revivalist period, Hand traces the modernist novel’s struggle to chart Ireland’s political reimagining of itself through the fictions of Joyce and George Moore, both of whom turned realism into a revolutionary act. The modernist tendencies of post-Joycean Irish fiction are intelligently analysed in chapters four and five, with Hand providing a welcome reappraisal of the radicalism of Liam O’Flaherty’s marriage of political critique and stylistic experiment.

Turning to post-1960 developments, Hand finds in the eponymous hero of John Banville's Doctor Copernicus(1976) a template for Ireland's uncomfortable negotiation of the ambiguities of the modern in the contemporary period. And in Banville, of course, the preoccupations of Edgeworth, Joyce, Beckett and Bowen are revisited: the inadequacy of words to describe the phenomenal world, the discrepancy between reality and representation.

In his final primary chapter Hand identifies contemporary novelists’ reimagining of time and place as key areas of critical interest. In doing so, however, I think he underplays the extent to which the times and spaces of contemporary Irish fiction are inhabited by protagonists shaped by unprocessed traumas, which make any accommodation between self, place and community impossible.

As with any act of canon formation, Hand’s choices in this chapter will provoke disagreement. Banville, Benedict Kiely and Roddy Doyle are afforded more space and critical praise than Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín or Patrick McCabe, the contribution of the younger generation of Northern Irish novelists is summarily discussed, and Anne Enright’s achievement is addressed in four sentences.

But then, as Hand explains in his introduction, A History of the Irish Novelis designed with dialogue and debate in mind. It too partakes of the dialectic of endings and beginnings he highlights, and challenges us to reassess our settled assumptions. Accessible, wide ranging and critically discerning, this is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject that we have.

Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester. The paperback edition of his most recent book, The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir 1725-2001, is published by Palgrave Macmillan this month