Contemporary Irish writer and award winner, Donal Ryan, is intrigued by today’s Irish people, regardless of whether they are new immigrants, or their Irish roots are generations deep. He cares deeply about them, which is understandable because he grew up in a “typical” rural Irish village. In her November 12 presentation, Barbara R. discussed five of Ryan’s books. Barbara’s use of online interviews provided illuminating insights into what explains Ryan’s drive to write, his evolving writing processes, and his goals for each book.
Revealing and understanding “real” Ireland, from the 1980s to today, grounds the five books. The Thing about December (2013) and The Spinning Heart (2012), his first published books, are set, respectively, at the start of the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom and during its collapse. A Slanting of the Sun: Stories (2015) has nineteen short stories and nineteen characters. Each story is an opportunity to learn more about Ireland: its people, historical events that still influence everyday life, and the impact geography and place have on people’s aspirations and options. Ryan flexes his “creative muscle” by using different literary structures in various books, such as in A Low and Quiet Sea (2018).
Ryan excels at “getting in the head” of his characters. Readers are not simply told the idiosyncrasies, contradictions, pet peeves, puzzling loyalties, or unadmitted shame of a character. Instead, these traits become known gradually through a character’s behaviours, interactions with family and neighbours, and self-reflections.
Ryan’s writing style makes characters and plots come alive and feel tangibly real. Excerpts read from his books demonstrate Ryan’s use of local Irish dialects and idioms, grammatically incorrect remarks and thoughts, and intermixing different characters’ viewpoints in the same paragraph. The presentation concluded with a longer reading from All We Shall Know (2016) to illustrate the kinds of literary gems Barbara discovered throughout Ryan’s work.
Posted by Barbara R. and Mooréa G.