Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Straight off, the inevitable comparisons to Sally Rooney.
Both are young, female, hail from the Irish Republic, graduates of Trinity College Dublin, and both have authored works that combine mass market appeal with literary novel ambitions. Commentators and reviewers are casting Dolan, as they have already with Rooney, as a voice of the ‘millennial generation’.
Exciting Times, to be fair, shares some commonality with Rooney’s first novel, Conversation With Friends. Both are, in effect, coming of age stories that combine the virtue of clearly identifying the concerns of their generation with the attendant limitation of the self-absorption that often accompanies a bildungsroman. There are also the complications of love triangles in common.
They share, as well, the rather curious feature of taking place in a specific location that the particulars of which are of little import to the story. Conversations With Friends is set in Dublin but could easily be transported to, say, Cincinnati or any number of other small cities. In the same way Exciting Times’ Hong Kong could be Singapore or anywhere one would find foreign bankers and people teaching English as a foreign language.
Both authors also owe a debt to Edna O’Brien. What they don’t share with O’Brien is her fierceness and bravery. It is, perhaps, unfair to point out this out as the situation for young women in Ireland has changed a great deal, thankfully, from the 1950s of The Country Girls.
Where Dolan and Rooney do differ most with each other, is in point of view. Both use first person. In Rooney’s case this is applied in the usual straight-forward ‘I’m telling you this story’ narrative voice. Dolan’s is much more an internal monologue, combined with verbatim accounts of conversations with other characters. It is these conversations that are the real strength of this novel, the thing that hooks you in. The narrator, Ava, who is by turns brittlely needy and mercenarily tough as old boots, is pitted against a number of more self-assured and privileged characters. All of them, excepting, predictably, the Americans, are knowingly witty in that ironically self-deprecating way that underlays what gets called the craic in Ireland and banter in England.
In this novel, Ireland, apparently, and in spite of all the changes brought on by EU membership, is still feeling insecure and defensive in its relations with the English. There are many interesting digressions around the grammatical differences in spoken English that exist between the two countries and how that, in often subtle but telling ways, affects meaning. There is, as well, Ava’s job, teaching English to children, which requires her to explain the peculiarities of English grammar in ways that an eight-year-old will be able to grasp. Her accounts of attempting this are some of the more humorous passages and emphasizes again the importance of how language shapes meaning holds in this novel. For Ava, language serves both to hide and to reveal; to confess or to deflect. Sometimes in the same breath.
Language is Ava’s trump card. Other than being nubile, a ‘clever tongue’ is the only thing she has to offer in the face of her lovers’, Julian and Edith, superiority in class, education and wealth. She is quite literally ‘living by her wits’. The exercise of that wit is what keeps the reader engaged and reading.
Just as I thought Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, was a big improvement on her first, it’ll be ‘exciting times’ to see what Dolan delivers on her next effort.
Exciting Times is available now in hardcover at £14.99. It is set to published in paperback on the First of April, 2021 for £8.99.