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SCHOLAR AND POET SEAMUS DEANE TACKLES JAMES JOYCE ON HOME TURF IN HIS HAUNTING, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FIRST NOVEL, "READING IN THE DARK." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Reading in the Dark
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BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | These are the glory days for Irish writing, even if the tiresome burden of Irish history -- as reflected in a "peace process" that sometimes looks like the prelude to civil war -- is no more manageable than ever. These facts are not unconnected; the rich tradition of Irish storytelling has long served as therapy and consolation, as imaginative salve, for a people nursing a generations-old sense of defeat and ineradicable loss. If this permanent mourning has itself become an addiction whose evil consequences are all too evident, it has also borne extraordinary fruit: a transcendental, mythically charged and unashamedly melodramatic literary vision, without parallel in the world.
In Seamus Deane's dazzling first novel, "Reading in the Dark," the atmosphere in the dank Northern Ireland city of Derry (no Irish person uses the 17th century, English-imposed name Londonderry) is so thick with stories it's a wonder the inhabitants can breathe. The unnamed narrator, a boy raised in a working-class Catholic family in the late 1940s and '50s, absorbs these stories the way a growing plant absorbs sunlight. He learns of a legendary exorcism, a loyalist policeman thrown off a bridge, a housekeeper trapped in a remote country house with two changeling children (one of the most hair-raising ghost yarns you will ever read), an IRA gun battle in a burning whiskey distillery, a field where birds disappear and wailing souls return from the dead and a prehistoric fort where the "warriors of the legendary Fianna" lie waiting for an intruder to "rouse them from their thousand-year sleep to make final war on the English and drive them from our shores forever." Beneath this dense weave of fact, fiction and fantasy is the boy's sense that his own family's story remains unsatisfyingly incomplete. This frustration is connected, of course, to the messy, unfinished quality of history itself. He is told that his Uncle Eddie, his father's brother, joined the IRA, only to disappear at the time of the aforementioned distillery fire, during the 1922 Irish Civil War. Perhaps Eddie died amid the exploding whiskey vats; perhaps he was seen years later in Chicago or Melbourne. But somehow his absence has sparked an endless family feud; the mystery of Eddie's fate has multiplied, breeding others more deeply buried. "So broken was my father's family," the narrator tells us, "that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire ... I felt we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it." NEXT PAGE: WHEN HATRED BECOMES IDENTITY - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Photograph: Children playing around a bonfire, N.I., by Ed Kashi |
