The key things to know about this book, which was originally published in Irish in 1949, are explained by Alan Titley in his Translator’s Introduction. First: “In The Dirty Dust everyone is dead” (vii). And next: “It is a novel that is a listening-in to gossip and to backbiting and rumours and bitching and carping and moaning and obsessing about the most important, but more often the most trivial, matters of life, which are often the same thing. It is as if, in an afterlife beneath the sods, the same old life would go on, only nothing could be done about it, apart from talk” (ibid.).
So, right: it’s set in a cemetery, under the ground, and opens with a newly-buried woman, Caitriona Paudeen, wondering whether she’s been put in one of the expensive plots or one of the cheaper ones. “Say the same things here as you said at home,” says a woman in a neighboring plot, and Caitriona does (and so does everyone else) (6). Caitriona is bitter about having died before her sister Nell, and isn’t at all pleased about being buried near Nora Johnny, her son’s wife’s mother (she clearly sees her son as having married down). Other people go on about the things they’ve always gone on about; everyone is at the center of his or her own world. There’s a French pilot whose plane crashed; he doesn’t speak Irish and mutters in French. There’s the schoolmaster, who tells Nora Johnny stories from romance novels, and is enraged when he hears that his younger wife has gotten remarried. There’s a guy who’s convinced that his favorite team won the All-Ireland football match the year he died, and someone else who died later who keeps trying to tell him that they didn’t. People go on about how they died—the guy who was stabbed, the guy who fell from something, the guy whose heart gave out. The book is nearly all dialogue, snippets of conversation, and there are parts where everyone’s talking about the same thing, communal fixations rather than individual ones—thievery/things that got stolen, or how the postmistress steamed open everyone’s letters, or competitive banter about whose death notice/wake/funeral was more impressive, or what they would have done if they’d “lived a bit longer” (281). The graveyard has elections, and there’s talk of starting a Rotary (with a hilarious proposed list of talks, with each speaker going on about his/her personal fixation), but mostly it’s a free-for-all of conversation and argument.
While I was reading this, I kept interrupting my boyfriend to tell him about various funny bits, and at one point he said the book sounded interesting but that he doubted he would read it. I’m not really surprised: in general, he cares more about plot than I do, and this book is definitely not plot-driven. As a character-driven/atmospheric read, though, it’s a lot of fun.
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