Peter Costello
Hidden City: Adventures and Explorations in Dublin
by Karl Whitney
(Penguin Ireland, €21.75/£19.99)
This book ends with an image of a black labrador – a rare stray dog in Dublin, the author observes – urinating on a lamppost as it goes along. Karl Whitney sees this as old Dublin passing judgement on the new. But this is to misunderstand the dog, I think. He is actually marking out his territory, stating in a very direct way, “This is me and this is my place”.
The trouble with Whitney’s first book is an uncertainty of purpose. Hidden City does not say “This is me, this is my place” quite strongly enough. There are strong hints in places of a very different book that could have been. His description of his education at an Opus Dei school sums up everything about it in a brief passage: he left it clinically depressed, discovers Dublin and becomes a writer.
Later he invokes the name of Georges Perec and Guy Debord and their literary explorations of Paris life. But Hidden Dublin does not compare with, say, Aragon’s Paris Peasant, Julien Green’s Paris or Jacques Yonnet’s Paris Noir, though in places there are flashes of the same kind of insights. Oddly for a book about Dublin, there are not all that many Dubliners, though those that are there have biting comments to make.
But for the most part, this is description of the present city, the new Dublin rather than the old Dublin which that labrador and this reviewer enjoy rather more.
Actually, Whitney puts his finger on what happened to the city when he describes his treatment at the school where he had to relearn an accent. An anonymous middle-class accent was required by his school mates. Anything that smacked of a Dublin accent was sneered at. Their parents had come from elsewhere. They were not Dubliners in any real sense; they just lived in the city, rather than with it, like that labrador.
So this book is very much a reaction to the developments of the last quarter of a century rather than a real exploration of the hidden city. This city is also the too obvious one, for we hear a lot about developers all through the book and what they wrought.
About Ballsbridge, with which I am familiar, he writes of Sean Dunne & Co. and how the planners rejected the plans initially as they went against the “established character of the area”.
Yet some chapters have a different effect. The chapter on playing the “bus game”, in which he travels across Dublin by bus, choosing the routes by chance, and the account of the murder of Toyosi Shitta-Bey in Tyrrelstown, are again hints of something more literary, more penetrating and even more humane.
But on the whole the Dublin accent, the established character of the city is not there. It is striking that as a UCD graduate he passes TCD, with Joyce’s silly remark about the college being “a dull stone set in the ring of the city” on his mind; he never goes inside to see if it is true.
Still there are enough good things here to make the book worth reading, but if Karl Whitney can cast off the spectre of investigative journalism and strike out as a writer by returning to his schoolboy self, his next book may very well be something else again.
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