Chapter 3 reads Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, a Graham Greene-style thriller set in Lumumba’s Congo, and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, a neohistorical romance set in nineteenth-century Paraguay. Bennett’s work unsettles late imperial English realist conventions to contest the apolitical apathy that characterizes much contemporary fiction about Africa and offers a related critique of Irish revisionism. Enright’s experimental novel explores the meaning of ‘female adventure’ and ‘emancipation’ in a catastrophic wartime setting. Both novels express anxieties about whether the novel as form can offer something more than just passive or compromised testimonies to violence in the Global South. In both instances, new modes of Irish political fiction struggle to release themselves from inherited colonial discourses.

This chapter offers a study of some key developments in Irish realism from the 1980s to the contemporary moment. The Irish novel in a variety of forms, including the bildungsroman, the family novel, the expatriate novel and political fiction, has developed significantly in this period and its highest achievements are distinguished by memorable characterisation, probing social critique, and lyrical writing. Stressing issues of form, style, and affect as well as content, the study examines a selection of Irish fictions, urban and rural, domestic and overseas, northern and southern, and considers their relationship to wider and ongoing changes in Irish society in recent times.