DUBLIN, says Brendan Kennelly in his introduction to this vibrant and varied anthology, has been called "the centre of paralysis, the largest village in Europe, the second City of Empire, Scandaltown, Strumpet City, Joycetown and, now and then, the capital of Ireland".
Having spent "only" 40 years of his life in the metropolis, Kennelly claims he is still technically viewed as a "culchie blow in", but that dubious appellation still has not deterred him (or fellow culchie Katie Donovan) from editing a compilation of great vigour and versatility.
The authors featured read like a grocery list of Quotable Notables - Joyce, Shaw, Behan, O'Casey, Yeats, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, John Banville, William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, Joe O'Connor. (Joe's now only slightly more famous sister also appears.)
There is a spirited extract from Hugh Leonard's best book, Home Before Night. Nuala O'Faolain is given a lot of rope, but justifies this generosity with some trenchant insights. Likewise V.S. Pritchett, who writes like Norman Mailer on heat. One would have to take issue with him, however, when he states: "The Irish writer works best in his own country." Try telling that to Joyce or Beckett, to name but two.
John Waters explores his favourite thesis, that Dublin (particularly that odd beast, Dublin Four) is as much a state of mind as a geographical location, with all the attendant anomalies. There's a hilarious anecdote from Bernard Neary about "Lugs" Branigan receiving a canteen of cutlery by way of a thank you from a group of prostitutes (he preferred to call them "pavement hostesses") on his last day of service in the gardai. John Banville weighs in with an extract from The Book of Evidence which grips you with its hypnotic frisson and, I think, European flavour. It works because it's self sufficient even though taken out of context. Other passages - be they prose, poetry or polemical soundbite - aren't so happy, or so adroitly judged.
There are some curious omissions. Why no Gay Byrne, for instance? An extract from The Time of My Life would have been preferable to Fintan O'Toole's (admittedly fine) piece on the media guru. I could also have done with a passage from his namesake, Gabriel Byrne's fine - paean to an evocative past, Pictures in My Head.
There is not a sausage by or about Paddy Crosbie. The inclusion from David Norris tells us nothing about his views of Dublin. Eamonn Mac Thomais is also badly under represented. And there is only a cursory reference to that archetypal Dub, Noel Purcell, by Philip B. Ryan, when a full scale extract from that author's biography of him would surely have been the thing. Mary Russell writes a vivid account of a dramatisation of Lee Dunne's Goodbye to the Hill, but surely this is to fudge the issue again: why not something from that text itself?
Dublines is to be commended for its open ended structure, where worthies of yesteryear rub shoulders with the likes of Dermot Bolger and the late, lamented Pat Tierney, thus circumventing what Kennelly calls "the dull despotism of time". It's a tangled skein of a book, a sketchy confection you delve into for occasional nuggets.
Some of the choices are a bit on the cavalier side in the sense that they have only a tenuous connection with the editors' brief, but they are all grist to the underlying mill of a city that's as cherishable in its begrudgery and small mindedness as it is in its chummy camaraderie. Thus, healthy dollops of plamas sit astride arrant vilification in a heady cocktail most bibliophiles "will have sampled in some form before. But I imagine they will have their collective appetites whetted anew by this chameleon portrait of "the shabbiest, most derelict city in Europe" - according to Frank McDonald.
Kennelly dubs (no pun intended) the city a "post colonial prostitute trying to sell her body and soul to the highest or slyest bidder". His book attests to the fact that there are really as many Dublins as there are Dubliners - or, indeed, Dublines.
