It is possible to identify trends in the critical writings about Troubles fiction. Early studies of Troubles novels include articles by Irish scholar Alan Titley, sociologist Bill Rolston, and the military historian J. Bowyer-Bell, who all wrote about stereotypical representation. The methods adopted by these writers tended to be structuralist. The other main approach adopted by critical writers in the 1970s and 1980s was evaluative summarisation. In the 1970s, critics evaluated specific novels in relation to their perceptions about the representation of reality in the novels. In the early 1980s, the concern was often with the representation of psychological realism in the novels. More recently, literary critics, some working within the emerging
institutional discipline of Irish Studies, have turned their attention to the work of a younger generation of novelists, often arguing that these novels break the traditional forms of Troubles fiction representation.
The secondary literature, in general, characterises Troubles fiction as either a static site of cultural production in which certain negative stereotypes (Titley,
Rolston, Bowyer-Bell), or false stereotypes (Magee) are endlessly reproduced, or as a site of cultural production that has experienced a form of cultural rupture, as a
younger generation rewrites traditional stereotypes and stories (Patten, Pelschiar).
Analytical methodology is not explicitly discussed, and treatment of the novels is either by means of survey techniques, which sometimes wrench the stereotype from its context, or through the interpretative practices of close reading. The close reading micro-level methodology favoured by literary critics is sometimes built on
foundations of critical social theory, but rarely is the question of method dealt with explicitly.
In the critical writings of the 1970s reference is made not only to the domestic novels of Hegarty, Jennifer Johnston and De Vere White but also to the thrillers of Carrick, Barlow and Breslin. During the 1980s the structuralist orientated critics were still providing overviews of the range of Troubles fiction while much of the
evaluative criticism focused on the novels of the established literary novelists, Jennifer Johnston and Maurice Leitch. In the 1990s Jeffrey and O’Halpin and Bill Rolston still referenced thrillers of the 1970s and 1980s, and Magee refers to a large number of thrillers, but most of the critics working in the field of Irish Studies began to ignore these novels and concentrated their attention almost entirely on the post-1985 Irish novels. Jennifer Johnston novels and MacLaverty’s Cal are still regularly referenced but the picture emerging from the critical writings of the 1990s and 2000s is skewed towards the literary novels emerging from Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 1980s onwards. The interest is in a certain type of writing and certain types of authors, but this does not tell the whole story of Troubles fiction, and it elides the relationships between the earlier novels and the later ones.
This review of the critical secondary literature reveals that there are certain novels that are repeatedly included in studies of Troubles fiction, and many novels
that are ignored. It is possible to map an emerging canon of Troubles fiction. For the purposes of this study, the criterion for selection relates to the number of times a novel is cited in the secondary critical literature. Much of the critical literature is evaluative, but for the purposes of mapping a canon, it does not matter whether the critics review the novels favourably or unfavourably: the criterion for selection is to be included at all in the critical literature. The list of novels cited in the secondary literature in ranked order is as follows:
Johnston, Jennifer, Shadows on our Skin, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1977 (13 citations)
McLaverty, Bernard, Cal, Belfast, Blackstaff 1984 (11 citations)
Herron, Shaun, The Whore Mother, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973 (9 citations) Seymour, Gerald, Harry's Game, London, Fontana, 1977 (8 citations)
Johnston, Jennifer, The Railway Station Man, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1984 (7 citations)
Leitch, Maurice, Silver’s City, London, Secker and Warburg 1981 (7 citations) McNamee, Eoin, Resurrection Man, London, Picador, 1994 (7 citations) Kiely, Benedict, Proxopera, London, Victor Gollancz, 1977 (6 citations) McLiam Wilson, Robert, Ripley Bogle, Belfast, Blackstaff 1989 (6 citations) Beckett, Mary, Give them Stones, London, Bloomsbury, 1987 (5 citations) Driscoll, Peter (1976), In Connection with Kilshaw. London: Sphere , 1974 (5 citations)
Higgins, Jack, Prayer for the Dying, London, Collins, 1973 (5 citations)
Higgins, Jack, The Savage Day, London, HarperCollins 1972 (5 citations)
Lingard, Joan, The Twelfth Day of July, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1970 (5 citations) Patterson, Glenn, Burning Your Own, London, Minerva, 1993 (5 citations)
Patterson, Glenn, Fat Lad London, Chatto and Windus, 1989 (5 citations)
Powers, M.S., The Killing of Yesterday’s Children, London, Chatto and Windus, 1985 (5 citations)
In this list of seventeen novels, eight were published in the 1970s, seven were published in the 1980s and two were published in 1990s. Nine of the novels can be described as belonging to the thriller genre, Silver’s City, Harry’s Game, The Whore Mother, Proxopera, Resurrection Man, In Connection with Kilshaw, The Savage Day, Prayer for the Dying and The Killing of Yesterday’s Children. Two novels are love stories, Cal and The Railway Station Man. Four novels are best described as
bildungsromans, Shadow on our Skin, Ripley Bogle, Fat Lad and Burning your Own.
Lingard’s The Twelfth Day of July is a children’s book, and Mary Beckett’s Give them Stones is the only domestic drama in the list. There are fourteen novelists cited in this list of seventeen novels, and most of them are Northern Irish. Of the four who are not Irish, Gerald Seymour is English, Peter Driscoll is South African, Joan Lingard is Scottish but lives in Northern Ireland, and Jack Higgins comes from an Irish family. Three of the novelists are women. Two novels by Jennifer Johnston, Jack Higgins and Glenn Patterson are included on the list.
The canon identification exercise can be modified to focus on novelists rather than specific titles, because it is acknowledged that in popular fiction, it is sometimes
the overall work of the novelist rather than specific titles that are important. The criterion for selection for this part of the exercise relates to the number of times a novelist is cited in the secondary literature. It does not matter whether the critics review the novelists favourably or unfavourably. The criterion for selection is to be included at all in the critical literature. The list in ranked order is as follows:
Jennifer Johnston (21 citations) Joan Lingard (18 citations) Shaun Herron (13 citations) Jack Higgins (13 citations)
Bernard MacLaverty (12 citations) Maurice Leitch (11 citations) Glenn Patterson (11 citations) Gerald Seymour (11 citations) Robert McLiam Wilson (9 citations) Benedict Kiely (8 citations)
Deirdre Madden (8 citations) M.S. Powers (8 citations) Colin Bateman (7 citations) Eugene McCabe (7 citations) Eoin McNamee (7 citations)
There are only two novelists whose novels appear on the first list but do not appear on the second list, Peter Driscoll and Mary Beckett. Driscoll’s In Connection with
Kilshaw is cited five times, two of these citations are from articles written by Bill Rolston. None of the critics praise the novel. Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones is cited five times. Critics tend to praise the novel. The two ranked lists provide an overview of the emerging Troubles canon. Later in the study, a number of models will be used to analyse the primary texts, and at that point it will be interesting to return to the emerging Troubles canon list and consider those novels and novelists in relation to the analysis of Troubles fiction that emerges from the application of the models.