Aingeala Flannery’s novel, The Amusements (Sandycove), has been chosen by Colm Tóibín as the winner of the John McGahern Prize for debut book of Irish fiction published in 2022. The prize, inaugurated and sponsored by the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool and now in its fourth year, has been won previously by Adrian Duncan for Love Notes from a German Building Site; Hilary Fannin for The Weight of Love and last year by Louise Kennedy for The End of the World is a Cul de Sac.
Also shortlisted for this year’s prize were Niamh Mulvey’s Hearts & Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth (Picador); and Niamh Prior’s Catchlights (JM Originals). Tóibín said of The Amusements: “Aingeala Flannery captures domestic scenes and intimate family dramas with an acute eye and a profound sense of sympathy. Some scenes are rendered with brilliant comic timing and gusto; in other scenes, she dramatizes the conflict between generations and between neighbours with insight and flair. She links the stories and the characters with real ingenuity so that a picture emerges not just of a small seaside town on the south coast of Ireland but an entire society in a state of restlessness and flux.”
Prof Pete Shirlow, director of the Institute of Irish Studies, remarked on the continuing strength of entries: “Now that the prize is in its fourth year, we are delighted here at the Institute to continue our support of emerging Irish writing. Every year we have been impressed with the strength of the field and I am pleased to see another worthy winner in The Amusements from a writer with a special talent for narrating the lives of a community we all recognize but often fail to fully see.”
Alhough The Amusements is Flannery’s first book, she has a long pedigree in writing. A native of Waterford before growing up in Co Kilkenny and in Dublin, she has had a fascination with words and with storytelling for as long as she can remember. She grew up in a home where multiple newspapers were an ever present and has vivid memories of her father’s regular purchasing of western novels in Waterford’s shopping centre. Like so many before and since, her reading of fiction developed through encounters with Enid Blyton and she recalls the miraculous appearance of a mobile library and its impact upon her imagination when she was a young girl living in a small Piltown housing estate.
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From here she and her family moved to Dublin where, as a teenager, she saw her first words published in the Clondalkin and Tallaght Echo in the form of GAA match reports. Her father, though from Wigan and an ardent rugby league man, had fallen in love with hurling, and the family’s local GAA club, Round Towers, became an important part of their lives. Clondalkin’s Carnegie library saw Flannery graduate from The Famous Five to Judy Blume novels, poetry and song lyrics.
Schooldays were fine but the way English literature was examined was limiting, never allowing Flannery the time to cast the perfect sentences she so desired. And she recalls her time studying English at Maynooth with a wry smile, a period so many go through, lost in the pretentiousness of long chats about Kundera, Sartre and Camus. She spent a period bartending in New York, a time superbly mined in a chapter of The Amusements titled Kamikaze: “I wanted to mosey around and take it all in. The boys outside the bodega on Clinton Street hissed when they saw me coming. On Houston, people milled about clutching beakers of iced coffee. Cargo-panted hipsters, dainty Asian women in black shift dresses, office workers with half-moons of sweat beneath their shirtsleeves. All of us on the hot nervy brink of eruption.”
She describes Kamikaze, alongside St Otteran’s – a chapter told through a child’s eyes of a visit to a psychiatric hospital – as the ‘origin stories’ of what eventually becomes The Amusements. When I ask her about what genre her book fits into, she is insistent that “it is most definitely a novel”. “You cannot have people walking into a short story and doing nothing”. She then speaks at length in defence of the short story, a form she loves and admires.
Her debut novel is “the portrait of a community”, a very deliberately polyphonic book in which the reader’s concentration is rewarded as characters appear and reappear, sometimes as prominent drivers of the narrative, at other times as delicately polished cameos. Trying to control these many characters as they walk in and out of each others lives over several decades was no easy job – Flannery describes painting her kitchen in blackboard paint in an effort to keep on top of the ever expanding Venn diagram.
The seaside town of Tramore and its changing seasons is the setting for most of the novel. It was hard for me to stop Morrissey’s Everyday is Like Sunday playing in my head: “the coastal town that they forgot to close down”. We see this town in its many faces, from a post-Celtic Tiger place of “infinite ugliness… corralled in a valley of concrete and glass” to a place of amusements, ice creams and beautiful sunsets. Prompted originally by William Trevor’s short story Honeymoon in Tramore, one can also see how Flannery’s admiration for writers like Elizabeth Strout, Kevin Barry, Anne Enright and Sara Baume works through her debut book.
The McGahern Prize is just the latest success for The Amusements – earlier this year it was named the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2023 and has gained widespread acclaim among the critics. When Flannery comes to read at the Liverpool Literary Festival on October 7th she will be visiting a city with strong family memories, her mother having trained to be a nurse with the Wirral Group in Cleaver and Alder Hey in the 1960s, like so many other Irish women of her generation.
Now working on a new novel, the future promises even greater things for Flannery; The Amusements is another worthy winner and a sparkling debut. Entries for the John McGahern Prize 2023 are now open.
