Sebastian Barry and Emma Donoghue shortlisted for Dublin Literary Award 2024

The Dublin Literary Award, sponsored and supported by Dublin City Council, has always prided itself on the eclectic range of its interests – books are nominated for the prize by libraries all around the world – but this year’s must be one of the most unusual shortlists in my years of covering the prize.

There’s a sense of a split personality in the list, which can be divided into three broad categories. There are two highly-achieved literary books that have already been recognised by last year’s Booker Prize, from writers at opposite ends of their careers: debutant Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You and national treasure Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time.

Then there are two more low-key and accessible works of literary fiction, in Emma Donoghue’s novel Haven and Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter, both of which are quieter in their approach but nonetheless enjoyable.

Finally, there are two baggy monsters: including the only translated novel on the list, from Romanian literary superstar Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu. His mammoth novel Solenoid matches Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright’s even bigger Praiseworthy as the most ambitious, eccentric and likely divisive novel on the shortlist.

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The good news is that there is probably something here for everyone. But the judges have a very difficult decision to make.

Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, translated by Sean Cotter (Deep Vellum, 672pp)

This unsummarisable monster of a book starts with the narrator’s body – he’s drowning his hair lice in the bath – and eventually expands to cover not just the known universe but other dimensions too. The narrator is a teacher and failed writer in Bucharest, whose approach to literature is somewhere between Karl Ove Knausgaard’s everything-including-the-kitchen-sink detail and Gerald Murnane’s obsessive self-examination. “I want to write a report of my anomalies,” he says. Well, it will take a while.

As a guide to “the infinitely glorious and infinitely demented citadel of my mind”, it’s the sort of book that contains everything, which is just as well since it’s also the sort of book that you can only read with pleasure if you forget about all those other novels you might sometime want to get around to. You need to commit. One of the most compelling sections is a long account of the narrator’s time in a sanatorium as a child. (Thomas Mann is one of his literary touchstones.) Elsewhere we get the discovery of magnetic coils – or solenoids – all through the city, including under the narrator’s home, which link to his quest for other dimensions.

Less engaging are the frequent interjections of his dreams and hallucinations: I began to dread the approach of their telltale italics. Throw in obscure novels, dream-readers, hypercubes and lots more, and you can believe Cǎrtǎrescu’s claim that he wrote Solenoid in one long unedited process. There’s a certain charm to the telling, but the book treads a fine balance between aweing the reader and overwhelming them. Anyone with an appetite for Nobel Prize-winning fare – a world internal, hypnotic and , very European, where plot is a bourgeois extravagance – will love it. Others should approach with caution.

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (And Other Stories, 700pp)

Making Solenoid look skimpy and straightforward is the enormous Praiseworthy by Aboriginal Australian author Alexis Wright, best known here for her award-winning 2007 novel Carpentaria. It feels like a warmer, more organic book than Cǎrtǎrescu’s somewhat cerebral narrative: Wright adopts an omniscient voice that blends the mythical with the earthy to tell the story of the Aboriginal community of Praiseworthy in remote northern Australia.

The book is focused on the division between the local community and the white government’s ignorance: “Once upon a fine time for some people in the world ...” goes the opening, looking down on the land from a sky where Qantas flights coexist with “ancestral serpents”. A haze has descended on the town, linked to climate change caused by “others who did not give a rat’s arse about saving a dying world”. The battle is on.

Central to it are the Steel family, whose “fascist” younger son Tommyhawk is persuaded by media reports of rampant paedophilia in Aboriginal communities and accuses his older brother, Aboriginal Sovereignty, of raping a young girl: “Ab. Sov” then, somewhat symbolically given his name, goes missing, presumed drowned by suicide. The narrative, loaded with charm and chutzpah, circles the same events and themes repeatedly, which is both engaging and frustrating. It seems to constitute a rejection of western linear storytelling, but its length and roundabout way of going about its business means it’s likely to be rejected by some readers.

The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr (Dialogue Books, 224pp)

Canadian writer Suzette Mayr was a new name to me, but her three decades of experience as a novelist show in her sixth novel The Sleeping Car Porter, which won Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize in 2022. It’s a smooth ride set on a train crossing Canada in 1929, from Montreal to Vancouver on an 88-hour journey. All human life is aboard, and our guide is Baxter, a black porter who is saving his tips and earnings to enrol in dental school (an odd detail which never quite convinces).

Of course, train compartments encourage secrets, and part of the fun of the book is working out what the various passengers, from sappy newly-weds to garrulous spiritualists – with Baxter-appointed nicknames including Mango, Blancmange and Liquor Head – are hiding. But Baxter is hiding something too: he is gay, though with limited experience (“four times. Always in the dark”), and fears someone discovering the pornographic postcard he’s carrying as much as he fears passenger complaints accumulating enough demerits to justify his sacking.

Just when it all seems to be running pleasantly on, a mudslide strands the train for days, providing necessary tension to the story. Passengers jump down and run along the tracks (“against the rules!”) and the stasis of the train provides an analogy for Baxter’s hesitant life. There are lots of miniature dramas in the book rather than one explosive conclusion, but its humane and readable approach means this could be a popular winner.

Haven by Emma Donoghue (Picador, 272pp)

The popular and productive (she has published four novels in the last five years) Emma Donoghue needs no introduction, and her 2022 novel Haven is a solid work of traditional literary fiction. It imagines the first steps toward the establishment of the monastery on the island that we now call Skellig Michael off the coast of Kerry, in the 7th century AD.

Three monks set sail, led by Brother Artt – zealot, receiver of visions and self-appointed prior of the new settlement – and supported by the reliable Cormac (a plague survivor, therefore deemed chosen by God) and young Trian, who has a secret (and it’s not just that he’s left-handed). The story proceeds slowly, almost in real time – we’re one-third through the book before they make landfall – and we get an intricate account of their struggles to make a new life on the inhospitable rock. Trian and Cormac are set to practical tasks – chipping hollows in rocks to collect rainwater, killing auks for food (“a bit of heart meat will do you good”), while Artt has his mind on higher things, such as the carving and erection of a free-standing cross that nobody else will see. Careful with that chisel, Prior!

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There is plenty of activity, but the pedestrian pace persists, and a bit more conflict would have been welcome as Artt gets more extreme (“cooking is a worldly affectation”) and the other two reluctantly knuckle under. But we do get a final escalation of drama, with an intense and well-rendered ending that makes up for the delay in getting there. This is a readable and enjoyable novel, though it feels less distinctive than the other shortlisted titles.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Faber, 272pp)

Sebastian Barry hardly needs another prize, but what can you do? He will insist on writing very good books. His Booker-longlisted Old God’s Time takes us into the head of retired policeman Tom Kettle, who is learning – as the American writer Cynthia Zarin put it – that “it is one of life’s mysteries that what makes tragedy both bearable and unbearable is the same thing – that life goes on”.

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Tom has lost everyone dear to him – to suicide, drugs and more – and is on the brink of departing himself, noose around neck, when life calls him back. “Oh, again, again.” He is asked by two former colleagues about an old case he thought he had forgotten about. This sets in train a whole pre-existence involving Ireland’s past, from “political bombs with personal outcomes” to the great shame of institutional child abuse.

But the novel itself goes from being largely reflective and internal, to being full of drama in a sweep of events that pulls the reader along much as did Barry’s American novels Days Without End and A Thousand Moons. The results are both as lyrical as we might expect (“the sunlight stuck its million pins in the pollocky sea”) and as hard-hitting as a headline. The book asks us whether it’s harder to live with a death that happens for a terrible reason, or one that happens for no reason at all, and shows how memory can be both a comfort and a torture. I don’t think it’s merely national chauvinism that makes me think this moving and upsetting book would be a worthy winner.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (Fourth Estate, 272pp)

American writer Jonathan Escoffery drew some raised eyebrows last year when this debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize: it seems quite a stretch to consider it a novel rather than a collection of linked stories. But irrespective of what it is, the quality is high.

The stories are set largely in Miami, where Escoffery grew up, circling the extended family of brothers Trelawney and Delano. In the excellent opening story, In Flux, the well-covered topic of identity is given freshness and wit through Trelawney’s confusion around the racial categories people want to put him into. “What am I?” he asks his mother. In another story, Odd Jobs, when he answers a classified ad from a woman who wants someone to give her a black eye ostensibly for a photo project – “just a solid sock to the face. Sorry, no black guys” – it becomes a reflection on fathers and families.

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Fathers feature a lot. In Splashdown, Trelawney’s cousin Cukie tries to belatedly learn from his mostly absent dad as he becomes a father himself. “What kind of man is he?” The subject matter and form of If I Survive You – linked stories about an immigrant community in the US – puts it alongside great debuts like Junot Diaz’s Drown and Bryan Washington’s Lot. But the tone is more polished and writing-workshop-literary than those, occasionally sounding more like a writer than a character. “He lowered himself to his knees and peeled the bin’s lid off tenderly, as though expecting to locate the tattered map to his father’s soul.” But overall this is a debut that’s more than promising – it’s effective, impressive and pleasurable to read.

The winner of the €100,000 prize will be announced by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Daithí de Róiste, on May 23rd, as part of the International Literature Festival Dublin, which is also funded by Dublin City Council