Drama/Poetry: The premise for this collection - "Stories to celebrate 100 years of Joyce's Dubliners" - is a little bit contrived because, basically, it is not exactly 100 years since Dubliners was conceived or written or, indeed, published.
That aside, this creative offshoot from last year's Joycean celebrations and festivities is a worthwhile project, and is certainly to be welcomed and enjoyed.
Joyce's presence in the collection can be gauged mostly by his absence. The stories here do not share in his stylistic technique of "scrupulous meanness", nor do they all share his overly bleak vision of Dublin. Two writers in particular make overt connections to Joyce and his work. Joseph O'Connor in Two Little Clouds brilliantly and comically updates Joyce, capturing a lurid contemporary Dublin in all its gaudy glory. The story is - as perhaps Dublin is at its best - knowing, smart, and utterly desirous of puncturing pretentiousness.
Dermot Bolger's Martha's Streets is awkward in comparison. Focusing on an old woman's reading of Ulysses, it is laboured in its obvious opposition between a liberal Joyce and a backward Ireland.
Interestingly, though, this story is set in a nursing home, as is Bernard MacLaverty's poignant and well observed The Assessment. The place of stories - where they happen - can often say so much about the deepest anxieties of a society at a given time: what does the setting of a nursing home say about Celtic Tiger Ireland? Roddy Doyle's contribution, Recuperation, with superb economy presents an image of a middle-aged Dublin man's detachment from the world. His predicament is emphasised and echoed in the topography of the Northside's Malahide Road and its uneasy juxtaposition of the brand new with an older, almost hidden, world behind the shopping centres and the multiplexes.
What is hidden and unsaid is also central to Ivy Bannister's Mrs Hyde Frolics in the Eel Pit. The outward indications of happy suburban life - houses, clothes - merely mask the tensions and power struggles lurking threateningly within. Maeve Binchy's All that Matters manages to seem both utterly contemporary and to the moment while retaining a more traditional tone, signalling perhaps that the problems "new" Dubliners confront remain the same as they ever were. Anthony Galvin's Patio Nights also unearths the kinds of excitement that exist beneath the calm exterior of housing estate life.
What is always heartening when reading any collection of short stories is being met with diversity: different types of story, different techniques and different perspectives. Clare Boylan's Benny is to Blame is very much in the traditional "oul Dubbalin" mode, which is fun and entertaining but not much more. Colum McCann's As if they were Trees is a brave effort to deal with Ireland's racist attitude to the influx of immigrants. This story was published a number of years ago and it is a pity that one of our best and most interesting writers of the moment had nothing more fresh to offer the collection.
Desmond Hogan's Pictures is a wonderful piece of work: layered like a poem, or indeed, a painting, the story succeeds in ranging between the past and the present, Dublin and the rest of Ireland, personal history and national history. This kind of gem is what justifies a collection such as this one.
The final story in New Dubliners is Frank McGuinness's The Sunday Father. McGuinness is better known as a playwright, so this is a revelation: a strange, powerful narrative told in a compelling stream-of-consciousness mode, dealing with a son's return to Ireland for the funeral of his estranged father. The voice in the story moves between anger, rage and violence, as well as offering a keen eye for grim humour. His language fluctuates between hate and love, manifesting perfectly the uncertainty of the son's position. Certainly, a high note is struck here to bring the collection to a close.
Once again it is demonstrated quite clearly that the short story form is alive and doing very well indeed in the contemporary Irish literary world. A collection such as this one - bringing together varied voices and diverse concerns - need not be merely a showcase for authors' more important work going on elsewhere. It can succeed, as does New Dubliners, in having its own internally generated coherence and rationale. In that way, this book shares something with James Joyce's original.
Derek Hand is a Lecturer in English in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. His book John Banville: Exploring Fictions was published by the Liffey Press. He is currently writing A History of the Irish Novel for Cambridge University Press
New Dubliners Edited by Oona Frawley New Island, 152pp