It is now about seven years since Ireland was plunged into one of the severest economic crises to hit any country since the Great Depression. A spectacular property collapse sent banks to the wall, put tens of thousands out of employment and resulted in many more forced to leave, a painful return to the desolate days of mass emigration that were thought banished for good.
Flickers of life have been seen in the economy of late, however, and writers have also shown an increasing vigour for trying to make sense of why things went so wrong. Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart and Capital Sins by Peter Cunningham are just two of the more impressive works to examine the Celtic Tiger economy’s implosion. Now to the fray comes Dermot Bolger with Tanglewood. Bolger is one of the country’s most talented writers – his 2012 novella The Fall of Ireland also examined this period, while his 1990 The Journey Home captured a gritty Dublin going through rapid change. As Ronan says to Chris, the two characters at the centre of Tanglewood: “When you lose something, you don’t get it back. Remember that.”
We are back in the Irish capital, then, in the affluent suburb of Blackrock as the property market is about to crash. Chris and his wife, Alice, are desperate to move out of their small house and buy something larger, as all their peers have done. So Chris and his neighbour Ronan agree to build a townhouse on their shared property, at the behest of a shadowy developer, which will fund the couple’s dream home. But it’s the wrong move at the wrong time, Chris has put most of his family’s savings into the project, and what happens will tear both their families apart.
Bolger at times veers dangerously close to stereotyping. Not everyone in Dublin had a trophy home or talked incessantly about property prices, while not every construction worker from Eastern Europe was stoic and sensible. However, he is simply too good an author to slip terminally into these lazy descriptions. And it is precisely his examination of the experience of many emigrants and illegal workers in Ireland that sets the book apart. The most fully explored character is Ezal, one of the builders on this ill-fated townhouse project. He says little, works hard, but sees the tail end of the Celtic Tiger boom for what it was: “The Irish liked to consider themselves sophisticated, but their inflated sense of destiny, and their optimism that their debts could be eternally long-fingered, reminded Ezal of peasant villagers, meekly surrendering their savings to pyramid scam conmen promising endless wealth.”
It soon transpires that Ezal has fled the former Yugoslavia after witnessing ethnic cleansing of his village and the deaths of his family members as a teenager during the 1990s war. In Dublin, as an illegal immigrant, he has been able to forge a new identity, with a new name and through this character we enter into an underground city, mixing with Moldovan plasterers, Romanian bricklayers and even weightlifters from Belarus.
The city is reinvigorated by this fresh angle and shows how much has changed since he wrote The Journey Home.
Another way Bolger expertly uses Ezal is to savagely critique the treatment meted out to some of these migrants by the Irish contractors who became too greedy as the property market overheated – especially hard to fathom when one considers the Irish experience of emigration. “Ezal had seen their famished faces and wondered how Irish employers could not see this exploitation occurring. The answer was that the Irish had no wish to see ... They were too busy coping with being rich, and too terrified of being left behind to notice the unsold apartments starting to clog up the outskirts of towns.”
Tanglewood is an impressive feat by an author fearlessly interrogating one of the most traumatic moments in recent Irish history. It’s a mirror to an age when the party ended.
John Dennehy is deputy editor of The Review.
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