REVIEW OF BRIAN J. SHOWERS'S GOTHIC DUBLIN

Brian J. Showers.   Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin.  Dublin: Nonsuch, 2006

(ISSN 1932-9598)

    Showers delivers a puckish salutation at the outset of Literary Walking Tours of Gothic Dublin: “I invite you to explore dear, dark Dublin” (10). This invitation not only recalls James Joyce’s famous alliteration “dear dirty Dublin” in The Dubliners, but  also foreshadows Showers’ later reminder that “‘Dubh linn’ is Irish for ‘black pool’” (112). And therein lie the strengths of this thoroughly enjoyable read: it is reader-friendly, witty, literate (without in any sense masquerading as literary criticism), and informed. Indeed, Showers, a kind of psychopompic flâneur, conducts actual walking tours through Dublin; and the pleasures of the reading experience also include the authentic discursiveness of his free-spirited, narrative voice and its implied interactions, both dialogic and logistic, with its guided tourist-readers.    Naturally blending biography with topography and architecture, Showers features pilgrimages to the various Dublin shrines of Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker. Along the way, he provides both graphic maps and narrative directions to each stop, besides over fifty photographs of (mostly) different home sites and landmarks, particularly churches and cemeteries. Showers  also spins brief, spectral yarns about several nooks and by-ways, many of them beginning with the appearance of a mysterious stranger and concluding with the miserific vision of cloven hooves rather than boots adorning his nether limbs. Showers concludes each section with a reprinted tale, or tales, representing the localized Gothic bent of Maturin (“Leixlip Castle: An Irish Family Legend”), Le Fanu (three “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod”), and Stoker (“The Judge’s House,” by far the most riveting of the group). These tales are nicely, if sparsely, illustrated by Duane Spurlock (with a provocatively nightmarish cover illustration by Meggan Kehrli). The text concludes with further information about various Irish-Gothic societies and their publications (one misses Journal of Dracula Studies here), a somewhat idiosyncratic reading list, and a “Dublin Directory” furnishing phone numbers and websites for the referenced locales, tours, and travel opportunities.

    I have only a few quibbles with this book. Some of the material from each section is (necessarily?) redundant: for example, Maturin, Le Fanu, and Stoker all attended Trinity College--but do we really need three sets of the same directions to, besides very similar photos of, Trinity (17, 104)? Other bits of information are also unnecessarily repeated like “Stoker’s entire family had a history in the medical field”(100) and then “Medicine was practically a Stoker family tradition” (116). But my only substantive criticism may actually be a compliment. That is, on the one hand, the reprinted tales seem primarily added to provide length--over 50 pages--and proportionate coverageof each writer to this slim text. On the other hand, I so enjoyed the narrative tours that I wanted more of them and briefer interruptions by the interpolated tales.

    As someone who has written about and teaches these three authors, I can’t say that the tour’s “attempt to breathe new life into the vanishing apparitions of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s [or Maturin’s or Stoker’s] years in Dublin” (55) was really necessary for me, though it certainly may be so for the more casual reader of Irish ghost stories. The resurrected specter of Dublin past, however, does inspire one to take this tour in person. As someone who also happens to be Irish, I may be forgiven for particularly noting that there’s as much gravy, or better Guinness, as grave about these tours and that after several of the long walks among demonic spirits, Showers bestows the ultimate blessing by pointing out numerous sources of distilled spirits: “While rooms in the hotel may be a bit pricey for the thrifty tourist, there is always the Shelbourne Bar, to give visitors a taste of the hotel’s extravagance. And they don’t pull a bad pint either. Sláinte!” (123). To that benediction, the thirsty, but otherwise utterly satisfied pilgrim-reader can only respond “Amen.”

Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.