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Seeking redemption through art: the example of Colum McCann

Colum McCann is rightly acknowledged as being one of Ireland’s most talented living novelists. The success of his most recent novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009), which won the National Book Award in America in 2009 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011, really cemented his reputation as a writer of substance. He is also one of the new generation of Irish novelists who possess few discernibly ‘Irish’ traits, their preoccupations being of a more global nature. In A History of the Irish Novel, Derek Hand notes how McCann ‘investigates the boundaries between Ireland and the rest of the world, dealing in a number of works specifically with the problem of emigration and immigration’. He goes on to say something that is regularly reinforced by Flannery in his analysis: ‘No longer do the certainties of rigid and real boundaries – national, personal or spatial – operate as they once did, as people exist in many places simultaneously.’ Given his undoubted gifts and originality, it comes as something of a surprise to me that up until recently no monograph had been published on McCann’s fictional writing. Flannery’s study will undoubtedly be an indispensable reference point for future literary critics who seek to engage with McCann’s work. In his introduction, Flannery charts the originality of McCann’s aesthetic, explaining how he ‘is a writer in constant flow – his fictions and other writings are channels through which the mobility of Irish identity is trafficked’ (3). This is not simply a result of the writer’s own experience of emigration and migration, but is, rather, a part of what McCann himself describes as ‘a new cartography of thought, a new landscape of desires, among the Irish today. Our mental maps are no longer necessarily located in twenty-six and thirty-two counties’ (3). Indeed, the gap between the local and the global is becoming increasingly blurred as a result of increased mobility and information flows made possible by the advances in technology. What Flannery senses is unique to McCann can be found in ‘his belief in the redemptive power of narrative and storytelling as a utopian resource . . . ’ (5). In much of his fiction, hope emerges out of despair and art possesses a redemptive capacity. The book goes through the work in chronological order, beginning with the short story collection Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994) and ending with the 9/11 novel Let the Great World Spin (2009). In his treatment of each new instalment of the oeuvre, Flannery shows genuine ‘empathy’ with his subject, a trait he detects on numerous occasions in McCann’s own work. The short story ‘Sisters’ from Fishing the Sloe-Black River ‘recedes from the