Dermot Bolger


Dermot Bolger is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet born in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin. His older sister is the best selling writer June Considine.
His early work – especially his first three novels, all set in the working class Dublin suburb of Finglas, and his trilogy of plays that chart forty years of life in the nearby high-rise Ballymun tower blocks that have since been demolished – was often concerned with the articulation of the experiences of working-class characters who, for various reasons, feel alienated from society. While always retaining his outsider’s perspective, his later novels have been more expansive in their themes and locations, with several based on real life incidents. Two novels chronicle the fate of a real Anglo-Irish family, some of whom embrace communism in the 1930s with tragic consequences and who, although seemingly at the opposite end of the social spectrum to the factory workers in his early novels, find themselves equally alienated from the perceived notions of Irishness that prevailed for long periods in 20th Century Ireland. Another novel uses the real-life story of a wartime sea rescue, by the unarmed crew of a tiny Wexford ship, of German sailors from the navy who previously tried to sink them, to explore Irish neutrality during World War Two. In much of his work Bolger questions the relevance of traditional nationalist concepts of Irishness, arguing for a more plural and inclusive society. As an eighteen-year-old factory worker in 1977 Bolger set up Raven Arts Press, which published early books by writers like Patrick McCabe, Colm Toibin, Sara Berkeley, Fintan O’Toole, Eoin McNamee, Kathryn Holmquist, Michael O'Loughlin, Sebastian Barry and Rosita Boland as well as the first English language translations of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and, in 1988, Paddy Doyle’s ground-breaking and shocking memoir, The God Squad: one of the first books to break the silence about institutional child abuse in Ireland. In 1990 Raven followed this up with Song for a Raggy Boy a harrowing memoir of life in an Irish Industrial School by the poet Patrick Galvan, which was made into a successful film. Bolger ran Raven Arts Press until 1992, when he co-founded New Island Books with Edwin Higel to continue to support new Irish writers. In recent decades he has acted as associate editor of the “New Irish Writing” page, which has been edited by Ciaran Carty in a succession of Irish newspapers since 1989, continuing a tradition started by David Marcus in 1969. In May 2010 Bolger’s wife, Bernie, died.

Writings

Night Shift
This is Bolger's first novel. The central protagonist is Donal, a young man from Finglas who works the night shift in a local factory. Donal's girlfriend, Elizabeth, is pregnant and they both live in a caravan at the foot of her parents' garden. Needless to say, her parents are hardly thrilled at the situation and Donal works hard to improve the life he shares with Elizabeth. This is a complex narrative, containing meditations on the prospects for young people in 1980s Ireland and the rupture between tradition and the future. Whilst the ending is not what one could describe as happy, it is hopeful in that Donal begins to achieve a degree of clarity about his life, including his relationship with Elizabeth, his relationship with society, and, ultimately, what it will mean to be Irish in the latter part of the 20th century. This novel introduces many of the themes that will resurface in much of Bolger's later writing.
The Journey Home
The Journey Home was originally published by Penguin and was a controversial Irish bestseller. It was later re-issued by Flamingo/HarperCollins. Eighteen years after its publication, it was published in the United States by The University of Texas Press and received the lead front cover review on the New York Times Book Review section. The Irish Times said of it: "All 1990s life is there – drink, drugs, political corruption – all the words which have been repeated so often now that they have lost their power to shock. Here, they shock."
The Family on Paradise Pier
The Family on Paradise Pier starts in the tranquil idyll of a Donegal village in 1915 and follows the journeys of one Irish family through the War of Independence, the General Strike in Britain, the dangerous streets of 1930's Moscow, the Spanish Civil War and on to Soviet gulags, Irish Internment camps and London during the Blitz. The Goold-Verschoyle children are born into a respected freethinking Protestant family in a Manor House alive with laughter, debate and fascinating guests. But the world of picnics and childish infatuations is soon under threat as political changes within Ireland and the wider world encroach upon their private paradise.
The Family on Paradise Pier tries to show how quickly a family and a class can find themselves displaced and considered foreigners within their own land, with a new generation forced to invent new roles in which to belong. For Eva the dream is to be an artist, yet her fragile vision cannot cope with first love or the reality of London art school. She finds herself married into a stiff Anglo-Irish family, struggling with growing debts and with trying to keep open her soul to the new perceptions while yearning for personal freedom.
Politics is how Eva's brothers make sense of their new world. The eldest son, Art, rejects his inheritance to become a hard-line Marxist. Isolating himself from his family, he tries to belong among the poor, a party agitator working as a manual labourer in Dublin, Moscow and London. Brendan, the carefree and less fanatical younger brother, also embraces communism until confronted by its harsh realities in the Spanish Civil War with consequences that will haunt and divide his family.
Based on real-life people, this family saga grows into a kaleidoscopic portrait of the lives, dreams and tensions of a generation finding their own paths in life between the World Wars. Bolger recreates a family in flux, driven by idealism, racked by argument and united by love and the vivid memories of childhood. The character Brendan is based on Brian Goold-Verschoyle who died in a Soviet gulag and Art is based on the real-life Irish communist Neil Goold-Verschoyle. Eva is based on Sheila Fitzgerald and the novel itself has its origins in tape recordings that the author made in her caravan in 1992.
Father's Music
“Music is the pulse of Tracey Evan's life, its beat luring her through dance clubs and rave parties, a seemingly free-spirited 22-year-old London college drop out who laps up the late-night, often ecstasy-induced, pleasures of that city. Yet behind her tough street-wisdom and promiscuity, lurk layers of vulnerability and self-loathing. Her spirit is still in thrall to a past she cannot quit and to memories she cannot obliterate, even by living on a knife-edge of risk.
That risk is never greater than when she enters into an uninhibited world of sexual games and fantasies with Luke Duggan, a married Irish businessman living in London. At once loathsome and tender, the chameleon-like Luke is torn apart by the alternating currents of his infamous Dublin criminal family, from whom he has tried to distance himself.
When family responsibilities force Luke to return to Dublin, taking Tracey with him, their games of risk and chance become frighteningly real. It is her first visit to Ireland, except for a brief, traumatic childhood excursion to seek her father, a wandering traditional musician from Donegal who vanished after Tracey's birth. Now, as Tracey tries to thread a path through the dangerous criminal underbelly of a drug-ridden city, primed to explode, the answers to her questions about herself, her lost father and Luke's ultimate motives become gradually and terrifying intertwined.
In this psychological thriller, Dermot Bolger has fashioned a portrait of a young woman's search for truth in a sea of moral ambuguity, where she can be certain of nothing, least of all her own feelings.
Other novels: