The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Breakfast in Babylon by Emer Martin
Eamonn Wall

Emer Martin. Breakfast in Babylon. Mariner Books (Houghton Miffiin), 1997. 321 pp. $12.00.

Emer Martin’s first novel, the winner of a major award when first published last year in her native Ireland, is as brutal as it is beautiful. Set primarily in Paris, with interludes in London, Munich, Amsterdam and Israel, Breakfast in Babylon traces the progress of Isolt, a young Irishwoman, through a European underworld inhabited by punk junkies, beggars, and criminals. She hangs out by day at the Pompidou fountain in Paris and by night in squalid and dangerous squats. Martin writes of this underworld, where drugs and alcohol are the only comforts and where life is short, in a spare, matter-of-fact prose. Isolt, as a woman, is an outsider and her status, or lack of one, allows her to stand outside and observe. One senses that she will retreat from this world as earlier she had retreated from an unhappy childhood in Ireland; that she hopes to arrive at wisdom through extreme experience, but not to succumb to it.
Despite the grim material, Breakfast in Babylon is often a very funny book and shows that Martin possesses in abundance the classic Irish gift for the absurd and the comic so evident in the fiction of Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. It is her light and sure touch which renders the novel so remarkable. Also notable is Martin’s sure register of place and her ability to trace Isolt’s development as a woman as she trudges through the underworld. Breakfast in Babylon also represents a completely new departure for the Irish novel. Martin is the first Irish writer to represent the underside of Irish participation in Europe—a continent not of riches, but of addiction, abuse, nihilism, and despair. An explosive debut. There has never been an Irish novel like it. [Eamonn Wall]