Reading In The Dark - Hardcover

Deane, Seamus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224044052 ISBN 13: 9780224044059

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1996

Synopsis

"A swift and masterful transformation of family griefs and political violence into something at once rhapsodic and heartbreaking. If Issac Babel had been born in Derry, he might have written this sudden, brilliant book."
--Seamus Heaney

Already hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.

The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."

Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.

About this title

Review

The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers, and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him. And hovering over all the violence, poverty, and despair of 1940s Northern Ireland is the specter of the "Troubles." The hero of the novel is an unnamed young man whose life turns upside down when a policeman frames him. Deception becomes his only means of self-defense. But the initial lie on the part of the policeman and the narrator's corresponding trickery are only part of the tangled web Deane weaves here. Early in the novel we learn that Uncle Eddie, an Irish Republican Army gunman, was blown up in the town distillery in 1922. In addition to sorting out his own problems, the narrator seeks the truth about his uncle's death.

Reading in the Dark sounds grim, and in some respects it is, yet leavening is provided by infusions of the Irish folktales and legends that inform the characters' daily life. And then there is the language. Deane is a poet, and his prose shows it: sex is like fire, "glinting with greed and danger"; ice snores and candles are swathed in a "thick drapery of wax." Readers looking for a thoughtful, serious, and beautifully written novel will find one in Reading in the Dark.

From Kirkus Reviews

A grim, absorbing portrait of childhood in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, distinguished by a language of great clarity and vigor and by a relentless exploration of the corrupting power of secrets and fear. The narrator of this highly accomplished first novel is a small child when the tale begins, watching his mother, who is in turn watching for a ghost she believes to be inhabiting the family's house. Ghosts thread throughout here: There are the wonderfully strange, sad spirits inhabiting the stories characters tell one another. There are the ghosts of family members, dead as a result of ``the troubles,'' preserved in memories that grow more heroic, and less real, with the passing years. And there are the secrets at the heart of the story, betrayals and suspicions that come to haunt the narrator and his parents, to corrupt and largely destroy the family. Deane, a critic and poet, manages both to catch the complex reality of a child's imagination as it grapples with the world (there are marvelous passages on the landscapes of Derry as seen through a child's eyes, the pleasures of childhood games, the nature of life in a large, rowdy, poor family) and the deforming power of hatred. In the 1950s, Catholics in Northern Ireland were still a voiceless minority. In one of the novel's most powerful scenes, the narrator's father must stand by helpless and watch as two of his sons are beaten by the local police. Most of the action here is internal, as Deane traces the growing consciousness of his narrator, his discovery of the acceptance of ambiguity and pain that accompany maturity. There is great cumulative power in this, and the narrator's discovery of an old, potent, poisonous family secret (combining matters of political importance with timeless flaws of the human heart) is quietly shattering. A work of exceptional power and originality. One of the year's most notable debuts. (First printing of 35,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0224044052
• ISBN 13: 9780224044059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220