Reading in the dark
By Seamus Dean
Vintage, 1996. 233 pp.
Review by Suneeta Peres da Costa
This is a book of haunting and beautifully rendered childhood revelations. In their subtle evocation of a youth burdened by a terrible family secret, these small, episodic fragments expose the intricate and messy character of Northern Ireland's modern political history as experienced by one Catholic family from Derry.
The modesty and precision of Dean's narrative, told from the perspective of a child whose wisdom costs him his youth and whose shouldering of his mother's pain necessarily alienates him from her, disturb and cry out in terms that are inimitably his own.
I have not read for some time a book that slips so easily between the descriptive clarity of childhood observation and the wisdom and gravity of adult knowledge. Nor one that locates the experience of family tragedy so genuinely in the sustained and desperately personal encounter with the inexorable, if accidental, erosion of innocence by a child's own parents.
Dean's prose is sharp and melodic; it engages almost effortlessly with the cadence of speech, the idiosyncrasies of character and the experience of poverty into which the protagonist is born. Whole passages press upon you with the weight of an incalculable sorrow that returns, like memory itself, to haunt and inflict its losses over and over.
This description of the protagonist's mother is one example: "My mother moved as though there were pounds of pressure bearing down on her; and when she sat, it was as though the pressure reversed itself and began to build up inside her or feint at her mouth and her hands ... I would come in to find her at the turn of the stairs, looking out the lobby window, still haunted, but now with a real ghost crouched in the air around her. She would come down with me, her heart jackhammering, and her breath quick, to stand at the range and adjust the saucepans in which the dinner simmered, her face a rictus of crying, but without tears."
Charged remembrances of political violence — his family home being stormed and searched in the middle of the night because of his father's suspected links with the IRA ("The linoleum was being ripped off, the floorboards crowbarred up, the wardrobe was lying face down in the middle of the floor and the slashed wallpaper was hanging down in ribbons") — are juxtaposed with memories of the more banal, yet no less enthralling, passage through a Jesuit-educated Irish childhood.
Dean's depiction of Catholicism is a great deal more irreverent than Joyce's, particularly in its wicked exposure of the Church's incapacity to provide any certainty for, or to respond practically to, the pain of its people.
This point is conveyed also through Dean's frequent invoking of popular myth and legend as explanation for the macabre events in the lives of the characters. A man is castrated by a nymph in the guise of a textile worker; orphaned twins terrorise their governess in a way reminiscent of the two children in James' The Turn of the Screw.
Dean has a striking gift for weaving the mystical and sacred with ordinary, secular domestic cruelty. Within this kind of economy, there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that it is the village crazy who seems most astute at counselling the naive protagonist, and who becomes the confidant of the protagonist's despairing mother.
The most heartbreaking aspect of the book is the way in which the narrator unwittingly becomes the receptacle of a truth which divides his whole family. The paradox of familial love is tested in what seem Shakespearean proportions.
His ultimate recognition is that to leave may well be the only way to extricate himself from the stranglehold of his knowledge, and that to remove himself from the possibility of her love, the only way to provide his mother the peace she needs for her own sanity. These are, despite their familiarity, expensive realisations.