Source:
https://scmp.com/article/192866/haunted-mutual-hatred

Haunted by mutual hatred

Although Seamus Deane has written this story of Northern Ireland as fiction, Reading in the Dark has the dark, tender feeling of good autobiography.

It starts in 1945 with a ghost only the narrator's mother can see, a shadow halfway up the stairs.

And it continues through to 1971, after The Troubles, with his mother again pausing at the turn of the stairs, thinking of how much she had lost, of how many, many secrets she had kept.

It is the story of a childhood, but it is also an account of how legends of mutual hatred can grow - have grown - in Northern Ireland, and of how some people have tried to change the course of a history based on revenge and distrust, while others have perpetuated it.

The book is inhabited by ghosts as much as by the living: a dead sister who appears in the graveyard, a field in which 'the disappeared' live, a warrior called Fianna who presides over the Sun-fort of Grianan where boys play and men go mad.

And then there are the people whose names and stories haunt the family, whether or not they are dead. Most vivid is Uncle Eddie, a newspaperman who killed a policeman in revenge and then disappeared. Perhaps to Chicago, perhaps he died in a great fire, or an earthquake, wonders the boy, until he is undeceived.

We are made aware, again and again, of the way that stories change over time. How facts, once in the past, begin to look like fiction. How truth, lies and secrets can combine to let us comprehend a complicated world.

Each person has a story, but when these are retold by other people, Deane shows they can take on an electrical charge of magical fiction.

There is Crazy Joe, who meanders around the public library looking at the nudes in art books: he uses ghost analogy to tell the story of a man haunted by his sense of sexual inadequacy.

Then there are the boy-girl twins Francis and Frances whose alleged ability to change genders at will is the reason given for a country girl, their nanny, going mad.

There is humour: we meet the algebra teacher whose classes are a jumble of rules and illogic, where punishment is meted out to those who least deserve it, according to rules that no one can possibly understand.

And there is plenty of tragedy, in the stories of IRA soldiers who die still angry, in the account of the British soldier who is shot on the doorstep, ungrieved, until his father arrives from Yorkshire, to have tea and learn whether his son died in pain.

Deane recreates the very sensual nature of children, their intuition, their understanding of other worlds and strange spirits. And he translates the world into children's own awkward angles: a sister's death is seen from under the table, the family members' grief revealed through the movements of their feet, through sentences that are half understood.

Rats, being hunted with fire in a field, are described as leaping like salmon. The boy narrator imagines the living rats remaining in their holes, 'breathing their vengeance in a dull miasmic unison deep underground', because this is what the boy himself is learning to feel.

It is luscious imagery that Deane gives us, of great white winters piling up against red fires, of distress reaching out 'airborne, like a smell'.

He uses beautiful-ugly words like moiling, snib, corrugate, soutane, asperge - words you want to say aloud, with precious sounds that have a sense of their own.

Like one of Deane's poems, Reading in the Dark is structured into many layers, rewarding several readings.

It is hard to describe the book in a more articulate way than Deane himself, when his narrator explains the feeling created by his parents' secretiveness: 'It appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it.' READING IN THE DARK Seamus Deane Jonathan Cape, $235