The reasons for setting a novel in the city.

As I state elsewhere I’m not Irish. However I have lived for many of my important years in Dublin. To me it’s the default city. I’ve lived in other places but the experiences I have had in the Irish capital are really what made me me. Therefore when I came to write my novel Framed In Rathgar, it wasn’t so much a choice to set the book there, I just did because that is the place I knew the best.

Dublin of course is steeped in literary heroes, enough in itself a reason to be inspired. To name a few you have James Joyce, Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats; all with ties to the city. But these are the obvious ones. Just after I first moved to Ireland I found myself in a bookshop and decided it would be inexcusable not to buy some Irish books. Among the ones I chose was The Informer by Liam O’Flaherty (published in 1925). Set in the 1920s. it tells the story of a man who informs on his friend and spends the rest of the novel in fear of the repercussions. Set in a grimy, poor Dublin where men book themselves in to hostels for a place to stay the night only if they can afford it and roam the streets the rest of the time looking for any money they can spend, this was a very different view of the city I had, having come in the closing years of the Celtic Tiger.

The fascinating thing is with its Georgian buildings still intact this fictional world is still there, almost as if I had been reading a document from the city’s history. Just walking through Merrion Square and the surrounding streets, or on the Northside Mountjoy Sqaure, are enough to take in the grand buildings and let your imagination run wild. The fact is I’ve just taken two places I frequented, there is so much more, the city is full with this identity… and doors that tourists love to photograph.

For others Dublin is a fast moving city of opportunity and learning, Trinity College, Grafton Street and Guinnesses, modern reasons to visit, but stretching back through the years in its urban soul. There are so many hooks to put a story on here, and so much of its own local myth you will never finish with the possibilities of creating a fiction in these streets.

Dublin is in some ways very different from the rest of the country’s open country vibe. But it’s still small enough to represent the attitudes of the rest of the nation. Dubliners are still Irish and keep the culture alive and strong (sometimes more so than the rest of land if you’ve been in Gogarty’s pub in Temple Bar – actually well worth a night if you’re a tourist for Irish songs and music, but expensive).

I, and a number of my friends, lived in or around Rathgar, what estate agents would describe as a “leafy suburb”. I never lived on the main Rathgar Road, but I did for a while have a place on Leinster Road (it’s almost compulsory to live for even a short time on either of the two streets if you are going to have a studio in the Dublin 6 postcode). Rathgar is a really good place to live, as the three protagonists keep saying. You can walk to the Liffey (the very centre of Dublin) in about twenty minutes; but full of cafes and bookshops, pubs and parks (along with Rathmines) makes itself a good location in its own right. There is the full sweep of human life in these roads; from the millionaires in the refurbished and stunning homes, to the students and others squashed in the houses that have been converted to small studios. There are many stories here told to large audiences, some talked about between friends, others still waiting to find their voice. I just wanted to add my tiny piece to the flow.

Buy The Informer by Liam O’Flaherty
Buy Framed Of Rathgar by Arthur Hofn (Me!)

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