There’s a spectacular energy now in Irish fiction and the momentum just keeps building. Lisa McInerney was not the only Irish contender on the shortlist of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016. Anne Enright, whose magisterial sixth novel, The Green Road, was the bookies’ favourite, would also have made a worthy winner.
But by choosing McInerney’s novel, The Glorious Heresies – a debut work raw in places yet overflowing with flair and ambition – the judges have celebrated one of the foremost voices in a new wave of talent that includes authors such as Sara Baume, Mary Costello and Colin Barrett, as well as 2014 Baileys winner, Eimear McBride. They have also chosen a novelist born out of the uncertain landscape of post-crash Ireland.
McInerney developed her writing skills with a cheerfully grim blog about working-class life on a Galway council estate, entitled Arse End of Ireland, written when she “couldn’t afford to drink” outside her own kitchen, and with her Twitter persona, @SwearyLady.
Another Irish writer, Kevin Barry, winner of last year’s Goldsmiths Prize, commissioned a short story from her after reading the blog, and that was the prompt she needed to bring her blogger’s gallows humour to the “bleak vision of modern Ireland” she wanted to commit to fiction.
The Glorious Heresies is the triumphant outcome: a rip-roaring portrait of the underbelly of Cork, where the accidental braining of an intruder with a religious relic sets in train a series of misadventures that have been dubbed “Tarantino via Roddy Doyle”.
The novel features gangsters and drug dealers, alcoholics and heartfelt lovers, and an irresistible anti-heroine forced by Irish mores to give up her baby. The corrupt legacy of church and politics sours the air, and the energy of McInerney’s characters and of her riotously inventive writing shine through the book.
