Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1: Introduction
2: The Irish in London

Part I: The Mail-Boat Generation
Introduction
3: Navvy Narratives
4: Escape and its Discontents
5: Ersatz Exiles
6: Departures and Returns

Part II: The Ryanair Generation
Introduction
7: Gendered Entanglements
8: Ex-Pat Pastiche
9: Transit and Transgression

Part III: The Second Generation
Introduction
10: Irish Cockney Rebels
11: Elastic Paddies

12: Conclusion

Author Biographies
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Tony Murray is Director of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University.

Reviews

A rich, sympathetic and nuanced exploration of that strange blend of exile and escape, of suffering and play-acting, which characterises the Irish migrant experience in London [...] a valuable, unprecedented and necessary book. Migration from over the water has left a rich legacy, writes Peter Gruner THEY came to London seeking a new life in their tens of thousands - and included many great writers like Edna O'Brien and Brendan Behan. But the Irish often felt they were strangers in a strange land. A new book, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity, by Tony Murray, presents a fascinating story of the Irish immigrants, many of whom dug the roads, worked in the National Health Service or engaged in the arts. Dr Murray, 56, director of the Irish Studies Centre at the London Metropolitan University in Holloway, highlights the experiences of people born of Irish parents in London, including former Sex Pistol John Lydon and John Bird, founder of The Big Issue. Murray's book was drawn from a series of summer schools on Irish literature held at the university with writers including Edna O'Brien, Polly Devlin and Blake Morrison. "Ms O'Brien dealt with migration in her early work Country Girls. Her characters escape from conservative and restric-ted lives back home in Ireland," Dr Murray says. "They discover the bright lights of London and it's very exciting at first. But they quickly become isolated and lonely and ambitions are not always fulfilled." He analyses the literature of John McGahern, who wrote The Barracks, about the experiences of a nurse who returns from London to marry an Irish farmer. Joseph O'Connor and his Cowboys And Indians is featured, dealing with an Irish punk rocker who tries to make it in London. The great playwright Brendan Behan, who regularly travelled backwards and forwards to London, also makes an appearance in the book. "Brendan liked to play on his public persona of being a drunken navvy just to outrage British TV", says Dr Murray. "He did it very well. It's true he liked a drink but he also liked to outrage. He was ahead of his time because he knew how to work the press and raise his profile." The work of Shane McGowan, singer with the Pogues, who also likes to play on the Irish drunken stereotype, is also exam-ined in Murray's work. At the book's launch at London Metropolitan University, Professor John Gabriel, dean of the faculty of social sciences and humanities, described how, while the book is primarily about the literature of the Irish in London, it has a strong sense of history running through it. "From accounts of the 13th-century law to expel Irish beggars, through the development of Irish communities in places such as Wapping and St Giles, to the role of Irish workers in industrial protests like the match girls' and dockers' strikes in 19th century, up to the recognition of the Irish as an ethnic group under the Greater London Council in the 1980s and the spawning of theatres, festivals and book fairs celebrating Irish arts - it is all here." Professor Gabriel added that perceptive insights about Irish migration to London are peppered throughout the book, for example the idea that physical escape doesn't mean you can escape from yourself and that exile is a state of mind as much as a physical location. Dr Murray grew up in Holloway, the son of Irish parents, and went to St Joseph's school in Highgate and then St Aloysius in 1966. His late father, who was a sorter at Mount Pleasant Post Office, was from County Mayo and his mother from Donegal. His parents ultimately retired to Donegal, where his mother still lives. Prior to taking his position at the university in1995, Dr Murray helped run the Irish bookshop Green Ink in Archway. The only problem with this excellent book - which has a colourful cover showing the painting "Vertigo" by Bernard Canavan - is the price. At GBP65 it is well out of reach of many people who would enjoy reading it. Dr Murray suggests people order the book from their library, but in the meantime is hoping that it will be out in paperback soon. * London Irish Fictions Narrative, Diaspora and Identity. By Tony Murray. Liverpool University Press, GBP65 hardback http://www.camdennewjournal.com/reviews/features/2012/dec/feature-how-irish-shaped-london A new book, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity, by Tony Murray, presents a fascinating story of the Irish immigrants, many of whom dug the roads, worked in the National Health Service or engaged in the arts. In today's global economic crisis, and with the collapse of Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy, emigration has once more become a major part of Irish daily life. This is reflected in public, social, and cultural discourses that abound about Ireland's exiles. Works that explore Irish diasporic experiences have become a familiar feature of contemporary Irish literature, with recent publications from authors such as Edna O'Brien, Sebastian Barry, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin. Interestingly, while public discourse focuses on today's migration, much of the literary work produced in the last decade has taken twentieth-century migration as its subject; arguably because post-war migration remains largely under-explored in literature, and under-researched in academic circles. While excellent work on Irish migration has been carried out both in the humanities and social sciences, most notably by Mary J. Hickman, Bronwen Walter, Breda Gray, Liam Harte, and Shaun Richards, there remains a lacuna of knowledge about the lives of Irish men and women who migrated to Britain in the post-war years. Tony Murray addresses this absence of scholarly work on the Irish in Britain, specifically on the Irish in London, in his nuanced and insightful work: London Irish Fictions. London Irish Fictions explores a range of autobiographical and fictional works to consider some of the ways in which the post-war London Irish have represented their own subject-positions and experiences as Irish people in London. An aim of the work is not only to address a deficit of knowledge on such experiences, but also to reveal alternative discourses from negative portrayals of the Irish that appeared in British media since the war. Murray has undertaken a depth of research to complete this work, and his analysis of the twenty-eight texts explored is nuanced and insightful. The reader may experience a slight disappointment in that the sheer number of texts covered does not allow for a deeper exploration of them; however, that was not the author's aim in creating the collection. Murray uses Avtar Brah's trope of "diaspora space": a space "inhabited" not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous (Murray 2012: 181), to explore the ways in which the chosen authors compare migrant experiences formed by interactions or "entanglement" of genealogies of dispersion with those of "staying put" (Brah 1996: 242). He refigures Brah's concept to explore how migrant identities are configured within and across what he coins as the "narrative diaspora space" (Murray 2012: 189). In these narratives, we learn, the Irish diasporic experience is shaped by interactions between the migrant and those who are considered indigenous to Britain, but also, crucially, by interactions with those who stay behind in Ireland. Irish interactions with diasporants of other ethnicities is also a formative part of life in diaspora. Part 1 of the book considers representations of Irish migration to London in the 1940s and 1950s; a key subject explored is that of the tension between migration as escape, and as exile for the Irish migrant. Here Murray acknowledges the implications of gender, class and subject positioning in both the old and new country, that results in a heterogeneous, rather than fixed, experience for Irish migrants. "Navvy Narratives" looks at two novels: John B. Keane's The Contractor (1994) and Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke's I Could Read the Sky (1997) as examples of exile narratives and stories of social isolation and destitution. A discussion of the influence of Celtic mythology on migrant literature is a particularly enlightening focus of this chapter. The work of well-known authors Edna O'Brien and John McGahern are also covered in part 1. In an analysis of Girls in their Married Bliss (1964) and Casualties of Peace (1966) Murray suggests that while much scholarly work on O'Brien's writing has been carried out, the diasporic dimension of her work has been neglected. While this may be true, it is worth noting that in recent years some scholarly work on O'Brien as a diasporic writer has certainly begun. Part 2 looks at narratives of the "Ryanair Generation"; those who left Ireland in the severe recession of the 1970s and 1980s. The term "Ryanair Generation" alludes to the fact that Irish migrants to Britain could travel by air at discount prices which brought about, for some, a new ease of access between Ireland and England. However, as Murray goes on to show, while travel between Ireland and Britain may have been easier, literary texts by authors such as Joseph O'Connor and Sara Berkeley demonstrate that the psychological consequences of migration are no less complex for these migrants than for the generation gone before. The experiences of the second generation, those children born in England to Irish parents, is the study of the final part of London Irish Fictions. As a second-generation Irishman himself, Murray demonstrates a keen empathy with the experiences narrated here, whilst also recognising the many differences in experience. He identifies the common ethnic background that is made apparent in these tales of growing up in an Irish family in London, revealed in similar experiences of school, holidays, religious ritual and family traditions, and the ambivalence, or feeling of in-betweenness revealed by second generation authors such as John Walsh and John Bird. London Irish Fictions is the first book that looks at literature of the Irish in London, and makes a valuable contribution to Irish diaspora studies more generally. Murray's analysis of the role of narrative in shaping diasporic identities is masterly, and sheds new light on representations of exile, escape and belonging in the diasporic experience. A highly enjoyable and recommended read. Works Cited Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Murray, Tony. 2012. London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. Dr. Louise Sheridan completed a PhD on Irish diasporic oral and literary narratives at the University of Northampton in 2011. Currently working at the University of Limerick, her research interests lie in Irish diaspora studies, memory studies in literature, and contemporary Irish literature. Those of us whose disputed Irishness comes from a place outside of the island of Ireland fall on books like this with a relish that speaks as much as anything of the qualities of an emigrant/immigrant experience; that wanting to be recognised, to be heard, to be acknowledged and the inherent insecurity around that for which a physical book, of all things, can bring such succour. That aside though it is more than likely that this book will prove a landmark study of that most essential aspect of being Irish, the experience of it outside of Ireland itself. Tony Murray in a tightly structured and eminently coherent work explores, through an impressive body of literature, the character and condition of an Irishness formed as much by the geography of England's capital city as it is by the streets of Belfast or the lanes of Galway. In that alone this book is authenticating an often denied or derided truth. Murray is to be commended for this fact alone, that collecting the literature of the Irish in London in such a masterful way he is going some way towards establishing a 'canon' which in itself legitimises an experience which often has its very existence questioned. Of course, this initial 'canon' is limited to the geography of London, those are the parameters of the study, but any work that incorporates everything from John McGahern to John Healy, by way of the over-valued Joseph O'Connor and the under-valued Robert McLiam Wilson, touching along the way with issues of sexuality or the self-mythologising wonders of John Lydon, cannot be accused of being exclusive, however much it is a shame that J. M. O'Neill's wonderful London novels didn't make the cut. But, as we all know, make any list and someone will argue with it. Murray's close and intelligent reading of these works though ensure that the mind does not linger long on what is not there. Thankfully Tony Murray appears such a confident and able writer that his work is able to avoid the common excesses that blight so much academic writing. Murray does not blind you, by way of intellectual insecurity, with any verbose meanderings. Indeed such is the clarity of his work that at times it reaches simply pleasurable heights. "Notions of an assumed 'ethnic fade' or naturalised assimilation of the Irish into the host community are problematic," is just part of the fine and precise writing that makes up an excellent introduction. "The vast majority of individuals claiming an Irish identity live beyond the island of Ireland," or "migration does not end at the point of arrival" are just the easiest examples of how to write with both authority and ease. Through it all Murray explores the issues of identity and diaspora in a way that is both honest and clear sighted. He has no interest in brushing away the stresses and strains that exist both between those who left and those who stayed, or between those different generations who left, or those generations who came out of earlier waves of emigration. There is no homogenous emigrant experience. Thus he is able to say that members of the so-called Ryanair Generation came up with the coruscating Plastic Paddy to describe the second generation Irish they met whilst reminding us of the 'Nipples' sobriquet, coined by Joseph O'Connor, to describe young Irish professionals in London. I had forgotten that one though I have often met such people and always thought about them in terms of a word very close to that. Tony Murray may not have set out to create any kind of canon and yet might just have laid the foundations of one. He may instead have set outto explore the parameters of 'narrative diaspora space' and with this book he has certainly helped to create that very thing. A most handsome book, with a wonderful cover, both inside and outside Irish Studies, for student or curious poet, this is clearly a foundation text. Hats off A landmark study of that most essential aspect of being Irish, the experience of it outside of Ireland itself. [...] A most handsome book, with a wonderful cover, both inside and outside Irish Studies, for the student or curious poet, this is clearly a foundation text. Hats off. In today's global economic crisis, and with the collapse of Ireland's Celtic Tiger economy, emigration has once more become a major part of Irish daily life. This is reflected in public, social, and cultural discourses that abound about Ireland's exiles. Works that explore Irish diasporic experiences have become a familiar feature of contemporary Irish literature, with recent publications from authors such as Edna O'Brien, Sebastian Barry, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin. Interestingly, while public discourse focuses on today's migration, much of the literary work produced in the last decade has taken twentieth-century migration as its subject; arguably because post-war migration remains largely under-explored in literature, and under researched in academic circles. While excellent work on Irish migration has been carried out both in the humanities and social sciences, most notably by Mary J. Hickman, Bronwen Walter, Breda Gray, Liam Harte, and Shaun Richards, there remains a lacuna of knowledge about the lives of Irish men and women who migrated to Britain in the post-war years. Tony Murray addresses this absence of scholarly work on the Irish in Britain, specifically on the Irish in London, in his nuanced and insightful work: London Irish Fictions. London Irish Fictions explores a range of autobiographical and fictional works to consider some of the ways in which the post-war London Irish have represented their own subject positions and experiences as Irish people in London. An aim of the work is not only to address a deficit of knowledge on such experiences, but also to reveal alternative discourses from negative portrayals of the Irish that appeared in British media since the war. Murray has undertaken a depth of research to complete this work, and his analysis of the twenty-eight texts explored is nuanced and insightful. The reader may experience a slight disappointment in that the sheer number of texts covered does not allow for a deeper exploration of them; however, that was not the author's aim in creating the collection. Murray uses Avtar Brah's trope of "diaspora space": a space "inhabited" not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous (Murray 2012: 181), to explore the ways in which the chosen authors compare migrant experiences formed by interactions or "entanglement" of genealogies of dispersion with those of "staying put" (Brah 1996: 181242?). He refigures Brah's concept to explore how migrant identities are configured within and across what he coins as the "narrative diaspora space" (Murray 2012: 189). In these narratives, we learn, the Irish diasporic experience is shaped by interactions between the migrant and those who are considered indigenous to Britain, but also, crucially, by interactions with those who stay behind in Ireland. Irish interactions with diasporants of other ethnicities is also a formative part of life in diaspora. Part 1 of the book considers representations of Irish migration to London in the 1940s and 1950s; a key subject explored is that of the tension between migration as escape, and as exile for the Irish migrant. Here Murray acknowledges the implications of gender, class and subject positioning in both the old and new country, that results in a heterogeneous, rather than fixed, experience for Irish migrants. "Navvy Narratives" looks at two novels: John B. Keane's The Contractor (1994) and Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke's I Could Read the Sky (1997) as examples of exile narratives and stories of social isolation and destitution. A discussion of the influence of Celtic mythology on migrant literature is a particularly enlightening focus of this chapter. The work of well-known authors Edna O'Brien and John McGahern are also covered in part 1. In an analysis of Girls in their Married Bliss (1964) and Casualties of Peace (1966) Murray suggests that while much scholarly work on O'Brien's writing has been carried out, the diasporic dimension of her work has been neglected. While this may be true, it is worth noting that in recent years some scholarly work on O'Brien as a diasporic writer has certainly begun. Part 2 looks at narratives of the "Ryanair Generation"; those who left Ireland in the severe recession of the 1970s and 1980s. The term "Ryanair Generation" alludes to the fact that Irish migrants to Britain could travel by air at discount prices which brought about, for some, a new ease of access between Ireland and England. However, as Murray goes on to show, while travel between Ireland and Britain may have been easier, literary texts by authors such as Joseph O'Connor and Sara Berkeley demonstrate that the psychological consequences of migration are no less complex for these migrants than for the generation gone before. The experiences of the second generation, those children born in England to Irish parents, is the study of the final part of London Irish Fictions. As a second-generation Irishman himself, Murray demonstrates a keen empathy with the experiences narrated here, whilst also recognising the many differences in experience. He identifies the common ethnic background that is made apparent in these tales of growing up in an Irish family in London, revealed in similar experiences of school, holidays, religious ritual and family traditions, and the ambivalence, or feeling of in-betweenness revealed by second generation authors such as John Walsh and John Bird. London Irish Fictions is the first book that looks at literature of the Irish in London, and makes a valuable contribution to Irish diaspora studies more generally. Murray's analysis of the role of narrative in shaping diasporic identities is masterly, and sheds new light on representations of exile, escape and belonging in the diasporic experience. A highly enjoyable and recommended read. Works Cited Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Murray, Tony. 2012. London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. Dr. Louise Sheridan completed a PhD on Irish diasporic oral and literary narratives at the University of Northampton in 2011. Currently working at the University of Limerick, her research interests lie in Irish diaspora studies, memory studies in literature, and contemporary Irish literature. London Irish Fictions is the first book that looks at literature of the Irish in London, and makes a valuable contribution to Irish diaspora studies more generally. Murray's analysis of the role of narrative in shaping diasporic identities is masterly, and sheds new light on representations of exile, escape and belonging in the diasporic experience. A highly enjoyable and recommended read. Much academic interest in diasporic narratives derives from the logical assump--tion that it is an intrinsically significant narratological decision for a migrant author to tell tales about migrant subjectivity or to speak his/her story in the voice of a migrant. Proponents of diaspora literary theory have often suggested, at many points compel--lingly, that in creating diasporic narratives, migrant authors can be seen to engage in what Theodor Adorno once described as the writer's attempt to "set up house." "For a man who no longer has a homeland," Adorno explained in Minima Moralia (1951), "writing becomes a place to live." Creating through their texts refracted images of their displaced, unsettled, psychologically homeless selves, migrant writers are seen to engage in the act of constructing homelands within the boundaries of their written narratives. These narratives thereby become "places to live"; spaces to which they (or, more accurately, their images) can belong. To date, relatively scant attention has been paid to the writing of Irish authors who have chosen to emigrate to England. This is almost certainly because the Irish di--aspora has popularly been figured as a mass movement from Ireland to North America, and migration statistics prior to the Second World War support these preconceptions. Between 1841 and 1921 approximately 4.5 million Irish people - more than half the population of Ireland - emigrated, the vast majority of them to America. Far lesser known and perhaps less willingly acknowledged is the fact that, as Tony Murray informs us in his excellent new study, by the middle of the twentieth century Britain had "overtaken the United States as the primary destination of Irish migrants" (39). Although the title of London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity does not make clear that this is a study of post-war London Irish writing, the migration statistics Murray cites offer sufficient reason for his concentration on texts written after 1945. Considering these statistics alongside the paucity of work on literary texts written by and about the Irish in Britain, it is obvious that London Irish Fictions is both a pioneering and imperative study. Throughout the book, Murray draws regularly and usefully on the work of the foremost commentators on the relationship between Ireland, Britain and diasporic identity, including Bronwen Walter, Liam Harte and Aidan Arrowsmith. Most importantly for his purposes here, he also locates a compelling point of synthesis between the work of Avtar Brah on "diaspora space" and that of Paul Ricoeur on "narrative identity" which allows him to account for a multitude of ways of defining, describing and explaining the experience of being both Irish and an inhabitant of London. This dichotomous and often psychologically irreconcilable position is consistently negotiated, Murray argues, in what he conceptualizes as the "narrative diaspora space" of London Irish writing, a concept through which he is able to expand his interpretations beyond ideas and experiences which are common or shared. As a result, instead of repeating the generalizations and simplifications which have sometimes led commentators on Irish migrant narratives to conflate the terms "diasporic" and "exilic," Murray draws essential attention to the underused and implicitly unacceptable idea that emigration from Ireland has often been configured in texts, especially those authored by female writers, as a desirable means of escape rather than as an unwelcome imperative. Murray opens his study with a pragmatic and, particularly given the volume's limited word count, relatively comprehensive account of the history of the Irish in London which is interwoven with an illuminating if all too brief discussion of Irish London writing. Thereafter closely grouping texts under the headings "The Mail-Boat Generation," "The Ryanair Generation" and "The Second Generation," Murray draws important attention to the relationship, consistently evoked in these narratives but often overlooked in extant studies, which exists not only between migrant and receiving community, but also between migrant and sending community. By comparing and contrasting the London experiences of, for example, John McGahern's female protagonist, Elizabeth Reegan, in The Barracks with those of Moran's sons and daughters in Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun's Johnny, Murray convincingly demonstrates that McGahern's works afford a means of "transforming our understanding of migration...from an essentially linear and autonomous process to one of dynamic interdependence between individuals and communities both at home and abroad" (96). The volume is impressive in its discussion of the variety of experiences and viewpoints that these texts display: there can hardly be more disparate subject positions than those revealed through the overtly masculinized "navvy narratives" of writers such as John B. Keane, Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke and those that emerge through the portrayals of escaped feminists in the works of Emma Donoghue and Sara Berkeley. Yet Murray also demonstrates that even as subject positions and narrative focuses alter, the search for personal identity that diaspora engenders remains a constant. Thus, while Joseph O'Connor and Robert McLiam Wilson explore in different ways the "postmodern pastiche" of London Irish spaces, they also conduct shared narrative investigations into the familiar but uneasy territory of the "double exile" (124): a form of emotional homelessness in which a sense of belonging is unattainable both in the place in which the migrant resides and in the place from which he or she originates. In such a modestly apportioned volume, omissions are a necessity, but some here are more pronounced than others. Gendered configurations of identity are given precedence to good effect in the chapter devoted to the aforementioned "navvy narratives," in which Murray ably delineates the "milieu where unspoken social codes and practices of masculinity, imported from rural Ireland, are refigured in an urban ethnic context" (43), and his subsequent discussions of Edna O'Brien's novels co-exist well with his welcome and long overdue research into the "Gendered Entanglements" of Margaret Mulvihill's texts and the works of Donoghue and Berkeley, which deal centrally with themes of lesbianism and incest. Yet the volume sidesteps a comprehensive interrogation of the gendered anomalies evidenced by these texts. It is also curious that the third segment of a study focused on Irish fiction is devoted primarily to second generation memoirs. While the resulting analysis confirms Murray's assertion that texts by second generation Irish writers have consistently but regrettably failed to achieve the prominence that London narratives by migrant writers from other ethnic backgrounds have experienced, this portion of the book points to the necessity for a study which accounts more fully for the reasons for this discrepancy. Yet, if his obvious enthusiasm for second generation narratives reveals a personal bias (Murray admits in the volume's conclusion to being a second generation Irish Londoner himself), his decision to focus on these types of texts is understandable for three reasons. Firstly, it allows space for a discussion of an iconic work such as John Healy's The Grass Arena (1988), a tour de force of literary autobiography and one of the finest texts to concern itself with Irish London subjectivity in its bleakest forms of discontent. Secondly, his discussion of three memoirs of upbringing among the Irish cockney working class poor, and the pairing of John Walsh's and Gretta Mulrooney's narratives, both of which deal with subject of the return from London to Ireland for the purpose of nursing a dying mother, reveal a surprising and revealing depth of consanguinity between second generation Irish London texts. Finally and most importantly, the many merits of this segment - the most fascinating in the book - ably serve to negate concerns about its conceptual irregularities. As the presence of second generation narratives indicates, Murray often chooses in this study to favor eclecticism over discrimination. The merits of such an approach are ably demonstrated through his deft use of Fintan O'Toole's embracing concept of "elastic Paddies" to counter the exclusionary "plastic Paddy" stereotypes which gained currency in the 1980s, a process which serves to blur and interrogate the boundaries of Irishness just as Murray's acknowledgement of the literary qualities of autobiography and the autobiographical qualities of fiction disrupt traditional boundaries between literary texts. In doing so, he laudably challenges the adherence to narrow and stilted definitions of what constitutes both "literature" and "Irishness." In his introduction to this volume, Murray offers a rather complicated reasoning for his inclusions and exclusions, a process of justification which serves to highlight precisely how original his work is at the same time that it signals the degree of research still to be done. Referring to John Walsh's texts later in the volume, Murray suggests that Walsh's project is "to reflect as fully as possible the many nuances and gradations of cultural allegiance wrought" by the duality of experience inherent in being Irish and inhabiting London (174). The same could be said of London Irish Fictions. One can only hope that the attempts to cover the topic "as fully as possible" do not end with this absorbing and necessary study. This excellent new study ... London Irish Fictions is both a pioneering and imperative study. ... [Murray] locates a compelling point of synthesis between the work of Avtar Brah on "diaspora space" and that of Paul Ricoeur on "narrative identity" which allows him to account for a multitude of ways of defining, describing and explaining the experience of being both Irish and an inhabitant of London. ... The volume is impressive in its discussion of the variety of experiences and viewpoints that these texts display. ... Absorbing and necessary. Murray's book makes its own powerful contribution in a study of Irish literary relationships with London that breaks new and important ground by furthering conversations about the keen significance of migration to Irish literary culture. London Irish Fictions is an elegantly written, compelling, and generous book that makes an invaluable contribution to understanding Irish and diasporic literary culture in the twenty-first century. The past few years have been significant ones for the study of the literature of the Irish diaspora. The appearance of Liam Harte's anthology The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725 - 2001 in 2009 and the more recent publication of the two-volume Irish Writing London, edited by Tom Herron, represent two recent landmark moments that have heralded new ways of considering writing by and about the Irish in Britain. Tony Murray's London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity makes a vital contribution to understanding the complex histories of the Irish in London and addresses an important lacuna in Irish literary studies. It is an extraordinarily timely work, published on the eve of "The Gathering", the grand-scale calling home of the diaspora, a cultural and economic call to arms in the form of a calendar of events designed to foster links between Ireland and the "Irish Abroad" and comes at a time when the post-Celtic Tiger "Generation Emigration" is finding its own voice. The painting on the cover of Murray's book, Bernard Canavan's "Vertigo", imagines the migrants of earlier decades, of the 1950s and 1960s, falling from the upended small towns and villages from which they came into a smoking urban industrial metropolis. Canavan's work has, in its own way, drawn new and urgent attention to the lives of the "forgotten Irish", and provided a deeply moving visual account of that elided history. What Murray achieves in London Irish Fictions is similarly impressive and important. Murray skilfully uses work in the social sciences and philosophy as a lens through which to better consider and understand migrant histories and amplifies, in particular, Avtar Brah's theory of "diaspora space" and Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative identity and memory in especially effective and illuminating ways. In this, he develops a new theoretical model for thinking about the literature of the Irish diaspora, which will be of real interest and value to all scholars of migrant literatures. Murray's analysis moves confidently across different literary forms, offering an account of an expansive range of novels and short stories, as well as memoirs and autobiographical texts. In doing so, it crafts an absorbing cultural history of the Irish writer in London and the Irish in London, and its movement through time from post-war migration to the 1980s generation, and the experience of the second generation and beyond makes for a particularly rich synthesis of material. The range of the book is, then, particularly striking, as is the way it manages to be both inclusive and thorough in its expert and detailed analysis of the texts under discussion. Where called for, it provides deft, carefully researched historical exegesis that sheds further light on the migrant narratives under examination. Part 1 begins with a thoughtful and multi-faceted critique of the image of the navvy, one of the most immediately recognisable figures in Irish migrant history, and the readings that follow are similarly finely wrought and judicious. The book attends to key literary figures associated with the story of Irish migration - John McGahern, Edna O'Brien, Joseph O'Connor and Emma Donoghue - as well as names that might be less familiar to readers new to the literature of the Irish in Britain, including Anthony Cronin, Donall Mac Amhlaigh, Margaret Mulvihill and Sara Berkeley. The discussions of Donoghue, O'Brien, Mulvihill, and Berkeley offer particularly sympathetic and sophisticated readings of the sometimes overlooked issue of the Irish woman writer and migration. Throughout the book, Murray's analysis remains interested in how ideas of Irishness are fashioned and tested and set in flux in the texts under examination and in how the writers under discussion imagine the city of London and position themselves in relation to an idea of home. The final section of the book pauses to consider the reason for the relative dearth of literary engagements with the second-generation Irish experience, but goes on to offer an extended reading of the memoirs of John Healy, John Lydon, John Bird, John Walsh, as well as Gretta Mulrooney's semi-autobiographical novel Araby. London Irish Fictions ends with a thoughtful coda about the aftershocks and afterlives of the history of Irish migration and rightly anticipates future conversations about the new wave of emigration from Ireland. Early in the book Murray quotes from an essay by Liam Ryan, which includes the reminder that "Emigration is a mirror in which the Irish nation can always see its true face" (4). In the tradition of holding up a "nicely polished looking-glass" to matters of nationalurgency, Murray's book makes its own powerful contribution in a study of Irish literary relationships with London that breaks new and important ground by furthering conversations about the keen significance of migration to Irish literary culture. London Irish Fictions is an elegantly written, compelling, and generous book that makes an invaluable contribution to understanding Irish and diasporic literary culture in the twentyfirst century. As Tony Murray notes in the introduction to London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity, 'the experience of the London Irish is not as immediately evident in contemporary literature as, for instance, that of the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities' (2). Why this should be is not immediately answerable. Murray alludes to the dominance of the Celtic Revival writers and the cultural weight that Joyce and Ulysses in particular have over the Anglo-Saxon critical faculty. We have certain culturally determined ideas of what Irishness means and, post-1945, The Troubles has been the most immediate. To some extent the development of Irish writing about London has been ignored until fairly recently when writers such as Colm Toibin, Anne Enright, Patrick McCabe and John Banville gained a higher public profile on this side of St Stephen's Channel. Yet, as Murray's book demonstrates, this is merely a fraction of Irish writing; there is a distinct tradition of Irish writing about London , a kind of London Irish identity manifested through a series of writers active for the last fifty years yet passing by the mainstream critical consciousness. London, as Murray makes clear, was not always the intended destination or even a desired one: it was merely the most obvious. The book's subtitle - 'Narrative, Diaspora and Identity' - reflects the London Irish experience primarily through the prism of the diasporic experience. Murray's selection of writers includes the well known: Edna O'Brien, Emma Donoghue, John Lydon and Joseph O'Connor, along with the lesser known, such as Donall MacAmlaigh, Margaret Mulvihill and John Healy. In the case of Donoghue and O'Connor, Murray focusses on their often overlooked works. The selection includes autobiography as well as fiction. As Murray notes 'autobiographical texts [...] employ the aesthetic markers of fiction, both in terms of their narrative drive and with regard to the ways in which the identities of their subjects are revealed' (9). With its focus on the experience of a diasporic community, Murray's theoretical approach is a combination of two concepts: 'diaspora space' and 'narrative identity' (13, 16). The book seeks to re-establish the presence of the Irish in London, to redress the 'deficit in research on post-war London literature' and to offer an 'important counter-discourse to the proliferation of often negative media portrayals of the Irish in Britain since the war' (9). As Murray makes clear, antipathy and hatred towards the Irish started before 1969 and has carried on since 1998 (and the signing of The Good Friday Agreement). Murray divides his book into three parts representing distinct strands of post-1945 London Irish writing. The Mail Boat Generation covers the period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the end of the de Valera era and the rise of the Sean Lemass when it seemed that Ireland would become a modern industrialised society. It was not to be, as the 1968 documentary The Rocky Road to Dublin shows. The figure of the Irishman as both labourer and poet was embodied by Behan in real life and by Anthony Cronin fictively in The Life of Riley: these images of the Irish navvy would serve a purpose but also become a burden. In the work of Edna O'Brien the themes of storytelling and identity creation are shown by Murray to be intrinsic to the notion of Irish identity in the city. Murray's second section considers the so-called 'Ryanair Generation'. In the 1970s the population of Ireland under twenty-five was the majority for the first time since the early nineteenth century. This generation was better educated than its predecessors and consequently had greater expectations for the future, expectations that Ireland in this period could not meet. Murray notes how, with the help of Ken Livingstone and the GLC in the early 1980s, a stronger Irish identity was established through community ventures. With the increase in education came a development of women writers, and it is worth noting how in the first part of the book there is only one (Edna O'Brien) whereas the period of the 'Ryanair Generation' sees three considered: Margaret Mulvihill, Emma Donoghue and Sarah Berkeley. Questions of sexuality are also raised, with Donoghue addressing homosexuality and Berkley incest. Murray places these within the context of contemporary Irish political discourse and shows how London can offer a refuge, although not always. For this group of writers London is not invariably a city of opportunity. The idea of diaspora as exile is reflected in Joseph O'Connor's character Eddie Virago and Robert McLiam Wilson's Ripley Bogle. They also reflect the problems inherent in any new arrival to a country; the art of fitting in depends on many things but both the IRA mainland bombing campaign and the continuation of that old Irish trope the navvy made life particularly difficult for the Irish in London. Virago ends up flipping burgers outside Euston Station, the most common entry point to the city for the Irish migrant. The final section looks at works written by second-generation writers and of the five texts discussed only one is fiction, the rest memoir. The subjectivity of the memoir as something discursively produced is both a post-structuralist notion and also key to the theoretical underpinning of the book as a whole. Murray employs Paul Ricoeur's idea that 'continual re-reading, reinterpretation and reinscribing of our lives (whether consigned to paper or not), in itself, creates meaning' to show how the biographical works of John Healy (The Grass Arena) and John Lydon (No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs) develop this idea with their themes of cultural disjunction and the porous border between fact and fiction (155-163). In all of these texts there is a conflict of identity, between being Irish, British or even London Irish. Greta Mulrooney's novel Araby is particularly reflective of the conflicts between the various identities and its inclusion within the book serves as a useful reminder of the depth and quality of Irish writing over the last twenty years. There are exclusions: the book does not cover drama or poetry and omits such novels as Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto. Whether excluding McCabe derives from thematic concerns or reflects the ambivalent and sometimes hostile reception he has within Irish writing is unclear. The elephant in the room for Murray is the whole question of Irish identity in London during the period of The Troubles, which he avoids. On the other hand, it is perfectly correct to focus on the creative impulse of the London Irish writers of the period outside of any discussion of the post-1969 political situation. They were able to create an aesthetic during a period of political and emotional turbulence and produce an image for themselves that ran counter to dominant British political discourse of the time, as Murray notes. After ten years of the Literary London Conference and Journal, most of the ethnic groups within the city have been considered and discussed. Some writers from ethnic minority backgrounds have been offered more conference time and publication space than others because they have a larger critical presence, such as Zadie Smith. Yet, as Murray notes, the Irish have been in London much longer than most, Jews and Huguenots excepted. They have their own well-established cultural traditions, and yet for the most part they are ignored unless they have a guitar. The Irish in London in fact and in fiction As President Higgins makes the first Irish State visit to Britain, a new book explores how Irish writers have treated the emigrant experience On a number of occasions since Michael D Higgins's inauguration, the President of Ireland has spoken about the key role that personal narratives play in voicing and mediating the experience of Irish migration. Novels and memoirs, he argues, help us better understand the long history of political and cultural entanglements between Britain and Ireland. I'm a product of those entanglements. I grew up in London of Irish parents who came to the city shortly after the second World War. They were typical members of the "Mailboat Generation", or the generation of "nurses and navvies" as they are sometimes called. When they first came over, my dad worked on the buildings and my mum worked on the wards. Like so many couples of their kind, they met in an Irish dancehall - in their case the Round Tower on Holloway Road. They worked hard and played hard and after they got married, they began to put down roots and brought up a family. I and my siblings all went to Catholic schools, attended Mass every Sunday and went to Mayo each summer for our holidays. I was the archetypal second-generation London-Irish kid. Years later, like my parents, I became a migrant myself for a while. When I returned to London, I started to think more about the experience of leaving home to live abroad. All those heady promises - and then the stark realities. How exactly do you come to terms with the gap between them? This was one of the reasons why I set up the Irish Writers in London Summer School in 1996. Each week students read and discuss a set text in class. Then, two nights later, the writer comes in to talk to them about it and his/her experience of emigration. One evening, a student innocently asked me why there wasn't a textbook for the course. Nobody, I pointed out, had really written one. To which he replied, "So, why don't you?" I thought about it for a while, but what worried me was that I couldn't immediately think of an obvious set of texts to write about. There have been a number of iconic novels and memoirs about postwar immigrants in London. Think, for instance, of Monica Ali's Brick Lane , or Andrea Levy's Small Island , or Emanuel Litvinoff's Journey Through a Small Planet . Now try to think of a London-Irish equivalent! I might have a subject but did I have sufficient sources? But then I started digging. I discovered a number of half-forgotten but very good novels, such as Donall Mac Amhlaigh's Schnitzer O'Shea and Anthony Cronin's The Life of Riley . I re-read some of the more canonical writers of late twentieth century Irish literature such as Edna O'Brien and John McGahern. I could see that migration was not necessarily foregrounded in their work, but it was lurking just below the surface in fascinating ways. I was intrigued. So, why had Irish writers been so reluctant to represent their own and their compatriots' experiences of migration to London? Why the reticence? Especially given that they were the oldest and, for a long time, the biggest migrant group in the city? Was it shame, indifference, or plain Irish contrariness? Maybe the answer lay with the second generation? I started reading memoirs by middle-aged men from similar London-Irish backgrounds to myself. This was an encouraging experience. I found some reassuring common cultural points of reference. But it was also a strangely unsettling one. There were so many unexpected and disturbing divergences and disjunctures. My first reaction to this? "That's not how I remember it!" Then there were the omissions. Why didn't they mention, for instance, listening to the Clancy Brothers on their family's old mono record player like I had done. Where was the reference to gathering round a big portable radio with 20 or 30 Irish lads at the top of Highgate Hill to hear Michael O'Hehir commentating on the All-Ireland football final? I then began to have similar qualms when I read novels and memoirs about Irish migrants who, like my parents, came to London in the immediate post-war years. Likewise, with accounts about the later cohort of "Ryanair Generation" migrants whom I met and worked with in the 1980s and 1990s. Why did I find the picture they painted so incomplete? It is clear to me now that I was simply anxious to have my own experience affirmed in print. But that wasn't really fair on my sources. I needed to take them on their own terms. So, I started again and began to listen more carefully to what they were actually saying rather than what I wanted them to say. I looked once more at novels such as John McGahern's Amongst Women, Joseph O'Connor's Cowboys and Indians , John B Keane's The Contractors , at memoirs such as John Walsh's The Falling Angels , John Healy's The Grass Arena and short stories like Sarah Berkeley's The Swimmer and Emma Donoghue's Going Home . None of them could be described as the archetypal London Irish story. But, this time I found something richer, more provocative and ultimately more sustaining - a kaleidoscope of individual experiences and accounts which taken together offered a remarkable portrait of a migrant community as it evolved in Britain over a 50-year period. I sat down and began to write again with a renewed excitement. My subject, as that student pointed out to me, had always been right under my nose. But by this time I had learnt how to read beneath the surface of the texts I was examining. Here were novels, short stories and memoirs written and peopled by men and women who, as well as making journeys from one country to another, had embarked upon narrative journeys of the mind. I feel lucky to have got to know them. They have allowed me, in turn, to travel and migrate, vicariously, through multiple forms of Irishness. They are, to quote Louis MacNiece, "incorrigibly plural" and that is something to celebrate rather than to fear. The Irish Writers in London Summer School takes place in June and July: http://iti.ms/OeLG4B Tony Murray's book London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (Liverpool University Press, GBP19.99) is out this month in paperpack and is available here: http://iti.ms/OeLEK4 For centuries, London has occupied a powerful place in the imagination of artists of all kinds. Writers, in particular, have profoundly influenced popular perceptions of the city. This has especially been the case for people who have visited or migrated to London from elsewhere. New arrivals, whether from the provinces, continental Europe or further afield, have all formed relationships with the city in the light of work by writers such as Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith. For arrivals from other parts of the former British Empire or the Commonwealth, coming to London has often been a wholly recognizable yet profoundly unsettling experience. This is nowhere better illustrated than by the case of the Irish. The long entangled history of Britain and Ireland has resulted in a mutually familiar but deeply ambivalent relationship between its peoples. The often passionate yet sometimes conflicted attitudes to questions of cultural identity that this has provoked are at the heart of the literature I examine in this book. Writing has been one of the traditional ways in which the Irish have negotiated such matters. Obliged, as a consequence of colonization, to communicate through a foreign tongue, the Irish made a virtue of necessity and produced some of the greatest literature in the English language. This facility with words has been commonly attributed to a Gaelic oral tradition which held the skills of good storytelling in high regard. Certainly, for the Irish in London, a facility with words was a quality which helped smooth the process of adjustment to a new environment and society. Writing about this in 1801, one commentator observed: 'In almost every tavern or coffee-house you may meet with one or more of these orators, whose wit and fluency are exerted for the amusement of the company.' For a long time, London provided an important platform for Irish politicians and journalists, and it was no different for writers who saw the city as their primary means of professional advancement. Despite this long-established relationship with the city, the experience of the London Irish is not as immediately evident in contemporary literature as, for instance, that of the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities. However, the exploration that I have conducted over many years into novels, short stories and autobiography about the Irish in London has revealed a substantial body of work worthy of serious attention. The vast majority of individuals claiming an Irish identity live beyond the island of Ireland, and it is notable how migration and diaspora have become especially prominent features of contemporary Irish literature. In recent years, novels about the Irish abroad by Edna O'Brien, Colm Toibin and Sebastian Barry have all been best-sellers. By meshing memory and imagination into narrative, prose literature enables us to see human experience from new perspectives and in so doing rework our perceptions of the world around us. The texts I examine in this book are a case in point. They allow us to travel and migrate, vicariously, through migrants' hopes and disappointments, through complex emotional landscapes of belonging and cultural allegiance brought into high relief by the specificities of personal perspective on a profoundly Irish experience. Some years ago, Maude Casey stated that 'coming to terms with Irish identity in Britain can feel like psychic gymnastics', a sentiment that any of the subjects of the texts I discuss in this book might have expressed about the topic. For most of them, nationality and ethnicity are to the fore, but this may not always be the most significant aspect of a migrant's experience. Other registers of cultural identification such as class, gender or sexuality often produce deeper resonances, something explored, respectively, in the work of critics such as Bernard Canavan, Bronwen Walter and Livia Popoviciu et al. Migration is sometimes perceived as a form of traditional narrative itself. It appears to have a beginning, a middle and an end. When migrants recount their experiences, however, they rarely opt for linear forms of storytelling. Furthermore, no journey of migration takes place in a social or historical vacuum. All such journeys are defined, to some extent, not just by equivalent experiences from the past, but the particular ways in which those experiences have been recorded, represented and disseminated. Migration does not end at the point of arrival. Instead, it continues to impact upon individual lives and identities for some time thereafter. If we accept that migration is not simply the journey itself, therefore, but the subsequent process of arrival, settlement and adjustment, the diasporic dimension of the experience becomes apparent. As well as encountering members of the host community, Irish migrants in London come into contact and dialogue with migrants from other countries. The notion of diaspora also incorporates those left behind as well as those who choose to leave. 'The forms and conditions of movement', to quote the editors of a key study on the subject, 'are not only highly divergent [...] but also necessarily exist in relation to similarly divergent configurations of placement, or being "at home'". Communities of origin, communities of destination and other communities encountered along the way, therefore, all affect (and are affected by) the phenomenon of migration. In the analysis that follows, I demonstrate how the intertextual and intergeneric features of London Irish literature contribute to our understanding of the role of narrative in this process. Narrative both underpins and disrupts diasporic identities across a number of binary oppositions, such as exile and escape; leaving and arriving; staying and going; past and present; and, perhaps most significant of all, memory and imagination. In order to examine how this happens in the literature of the post-war Irish in London, I utilize the concepts of 'diaspora space' and 'narrative identity', elaborated below: the former as a paradigm within which to contextualize my analysis of the texts and the latter as a means of interrogating how migrant subjects configure a sense of self. I look at established writers such as John McGahern, Edna O'Brien, Joseph O'Connor and Emma Donoghue and, by reading their work through the lens of diaspora, bring new light to bear on familiar texts such as The Country Girls Trilogy (1960-64), Amongst Women (1990) and Cowboys and Indians (1991). I also devote space to the (auto)biographies of Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh, along with work by their friend Anthony Cronin and contemporary John B. Keane. No less important in terms of the unique perspective they bring to bear on questions of migrant identity are, amongst others, Donall Mac Amhlaigh's autobiographical writings of the immediate post-war period, Robert McLiam Wilson and Margaret Mulvihill's work from the 1980s, and fiction and memoir by second-generation authors as diverse as Gretta Mulrooney, John Healy and John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten). By being as inclusive as possible, my aim is to provide a broad introduction to London Irish literature for those new to the subject. For those already familiar with the writers included, I aim to provide radically new readings of their work.