Reading in the Dark: A Novel

This book is about growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland, a very complicated place! About a child caught up in a violent history and a mysterious feud, haunted by superstition and family secrets, terrorized by the police, browbeaten by priests. It is also a mystery story--what secret is his mother hiding? What really happened to Uncle Eddie? And it has barbed humor worthy of Frank McCourt.The writing is elegant, but this is not an easy read. The subplots are complicated. Some chapters have little to do with the main plot. The reader picks up clues as they occur to the unnamed protagonist. The pieces come together slowly, like a jigsaw puzzle. In the end the reader is left with a vivid, warts and all, picture of life in Northern Ireland, past and present, on the Catholic side. It seems too real to be a novel, but at least the names are fictional. Worth reading, if you are willing to give it the time and attention it requires.

While I enjoyed this novel for its evocation of the moods of downmarket Derry in the postwar mid-20th century period, much of the plot driven by the narrator's attempts to decipher the truth about his family's involvement with the death of a man falsely claimed to be an informer and the flight of the one who was the informer failed to engage me. It's as if the whole mystery that the unnamed narrator unravels stays more locked in his head rather than leaping across into your mind. The book has an extremely hermetic quality, and therefore recalls both the memoirs of Frank McCourt and recent Irish writers as well as, inevitably, Joyce's "Portrait." The scrupulous detachment of Joyce, however, tends to enter this novel more than the sentimentality of a memoirist. There may be about the same amount of humor as in early Joyce, but much more of this work deals with demons externalized rather than internalized.Yet, this novel will not allow you to wander in your imagination through fully-realized Derry on paper. Contrasted with McCourt's Limerick or Joyce's Dublin, you will gain less of an external sense of Derry's streets; the mental demons and emotional tensions predominate. Deane wishes to place you inside a boy's growing independence from the inhibitions, betrayals, and surveillance that keep him enclosed in Derry.The phrasing Deane--often deftly-- employs pays homage to his predecessor, and like Stephen Dedalus, the young boy grows up under the tutelage of Jesuits, a working-class urban neighborhood hemmed off by sectarian divides and municipal gerrymandering from its more prosperous neighbors, and an atmosphere redolent of corruption between police and prelates. There's a chapter with a Maths teacher's madly logical recital that could have sprung, on the other hand, from Flann O'Brien, and for lighter comedy many conversations on topics as disparate as curses from returned husbands at sea, the fort Grianan's secret passage, and the film "Beau Geste" -- the latter one made me miss my subway stop, so caught up was I in the wry comedic touches reproducing recursive Irish conversation.Overall, however, this sober look back at childhood remains with you for the menacing touches-- of Crazy Jim's lubriciously leering ascetism, of a whiskey distillery exploding under police assault on an IRA squad, on the vignettes of suppressed lust and Ignatian spirituality and classroom banter. The book did rush past the Troubles and I wish this had either been left for a sequel, as it deserved fuller attention, or left out. The later decades are glimpsed, but so interesting is Deane's material here that you wish for more than the handful of pages that serve as a coda to the postwar emphasis.Two brief examples of Deane's prose, both about the same event and place but recalled in chapters separated by five years and a hundred and fifty pages, illustrate his method. The narrator's trying to piece together the past and the fate of the informer that serves as the plot, however dispersed and slowly shared. Such distension of elements that make up this novel is characteristic, and may either lull readers or entrance them. "The dismembered streets lay strewn all around the ruined distillery where Uncle Eddie had fought, aching with a long, dolorous absence. With the distillery gone the smell of vaporised whiskey and heated red brick, the sullen glow that must have loomed over the crouching houses like an amber sunset." (32) This for me recalls a story from "Dubliners."Compare: "And the distillery smouldered into the dawn, surprising the seagulls who came in from the docks to soar around it and cry away from its heat and smell." (193) This too may recall Joyce! Yet, I do not mean to place Deane within the formidable power only of Joyce. While resonances abound, the added edge of The Troubles and the Northern milieu do show readers elsewhere impressions of an bucolically placed, if often dolefully embattled, city on the River Foyle which, far less than Belfast, or even than neighboring Donegal, has earned much attention in Irish fiction.While the novel by its ambling structure fragments the telling of the narrator's maturation into gradual understanding cloaked by familial secrets, and so dilutes the impact upon the reader and the narrator, the strongest features remain the telling of the tale itself, more than the tale's contents. "Ghosts of the Disappeared" haunt a field, a child's soul remains trapped in a window, rural changelings and the urban insane mingle in the streets of Derry and the stories of its uprooted people. They enter the city, yet cannot escape rural Irish superstition and the maledictions of their ancestors. This long shadow darkens and ultimately permeates the narrator and his novel.

Death? This is surely a novel about its opposite: growing up, albeit in the politically divided environment of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after WW2. It is about life, lived under the shadow of violence perhaps, but not in the midst of it. Its unnamed hero, presumably based on the author himself, ultimately achieves academic success and independence. Yet even so, the book is haunted by death. It begins with a ghost, continues with the passing of several family members, and ends with the demise of the hero's father. But the novel is also haunted by less ordinary ghosts: men in the nineteen-twenties who died in the Republican cause, or who were executed, or who ordered the deaths of others. The way in which the young hero, a generation later, gradually becomes aware of these events, unravels their mysteries, and realizes their devastating legacy to the members of his own family, forms the central narrative of the book.I would not say that this element is entirely successful. It is difficult at first to grasp the various relationships in this large extended family. Then, as the details become clear, they hardly seem the momentous revelations that the author intends, perhaps because he has difficulty making them impact the choices and events in the present-day story. For the most part, the book is about shame, secrets, resentment, and depression, as opposed to things that actually happen.But the book is also a memoir of an Irish boyhood. Although it may not add much to others of the genre, it does have the ring of first-hand experience, especially the scenes in the Catholic classroom. But there is very little that locates this experience in the specific setting of a Catholic enclave within mainly-Protestant Northern Ireland. One thing that does, however, is the portrayal of the relationship of mutual mistrust between the community and the police. Some of the chapters describing actual encounters with the police fail to convince, but a mere page describing how the death of a boy in a vehicle accident gets transformed by sectarian myth into yet another instance of police brutality gets it exactly right. Indeed, some of the most memorable sections do not deal with fact at all, but with stories of the supernatural, half-believed but still powerful.I bought the book at the suggestion of an Amazon friend who knew I was also from Northern Ireland and an approximate contemporary of the author. But I am not sure that this helps. Having been raised on the other (protestant) side of the sectarian divide, Deane's book seems almost as foreign to me as though, as a white American, I were reading Toni Morrison (as, indeed, I have just been doing). But I do know the country, and still have the language in my ear. Deane's writing is poetic but not always actualized; there is little that specifically recalls the landscape of Derry and Donegal. Although odd phrases come through with their cadence intact, for the most part the dialogue is serviceable but generic. It is also strange to see the author describing things through the eyes of a child, while writing in the manner of a mature and sophisticated poet. I get the impression that Deane has gone too far from his childhood and his birthplace to be able to recapture it with the intensity he once felt. A pity.

Deane is an author I wish I read years ago. His rendering of Northern Ireland's violent history leaves the reader breathless with complex plot, emotional upheaval, and chilling notions of a past which doesn't stay dead, haunting the living. Writing out of personal experience, his representation of life growing up a Catholic in Derry is as true to the local reality as it is profound and relevant to the human condition as a whole. Superb narrative, and deft adaptation of Gothic elements, especially his use of nested storytelling.

Super book written about growing up in Ireland in the past. Not available elsewhere

A brilliant piece of literature by a master. Captures the depth and very essence of that hybrid existence in northern Ireland during the traumatic days of war and polarisation through the lens of republican family life. Outstanding, yet heart-breaking!

Wonderful writing. Every sentence is a gem.

The picture painted of childhood in Derry, demonstrates how the sectarian divide (protestant and Catholic) was so inbuilt into the community. It is a search for truth and understanding by a young boy trying to understand the mysteries pertaining to the grown ups around him.

A wonderful book about growing up in a divided society. Profound & witty.