Concealement and Escape in Contemporary Fiction

Secret Passages: Concealment and Escape in
Contemporary Fiction from Northern Ireland.
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the

University of Western Australia.
2010
Caitlin McGuinness
Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Dip. Ed.
Discipline of English and Cultural Studies

School of Social and Cultural Studies
ii
Abstract
In this thesis I contend that the culture and practice of secrecy is widespread in
Northern Ireland, in both public and private life, and that secrecy is a dominant topic in
much contemporary fiction from that country. The term “secret passages” in my title
brings to mind both architectural structures – hidden spaces or tunnels that can be used
as a means of escape in difficult or dangerous circumstances – and textual passages: texts
containing meanings which are cryptic, elusive and open to varying interpretations. The
title has a further resonance, in reference to the importance of space and place in each
of the novels, where the protagonists are very aware of living in neighbourhoods marked
into safe, no-go and neutral zones. It also suggests, more broadly, the pressure to keep
silent on taboo or controversial subjects that still retains force in Northern Ireland. In
the thesis I closely examine four works of contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland:
Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own, Anna
Burns’ No Bones and David Park’s Swallowing the Sun in order to highlight what I read
as striking and innovative fictional responses to a culture of secrecy. The historical
backdrops to these four novels span the years from 1948 until 2001. The novels survey
events leading up to the renewed outbreak of the Troubles in 1969, the most heated
years of the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s, and, in two cases, the beginnings of peace
and the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
I read in these four novels manifestations of secrecy that shed light on underlying
social, institutional and familial traumas. I argue that one of the most predominant
forms of the secret in these works, and in Northern Ireland public life, is the secret as
spectacle, a phenomenon where knowledge held by the Self is put on partial display to
the Other. The Self is constantly defined and redefined in relation to the Other at the
same time as the secret is passed on, opened and even reinvented.
iii
In each of the four novels I examine, children are recruited into battles for local,
familial and national ascendancy. At the heart of many of these battles are unspoken
family secrets, which are in turn interwoven with the secrecies and injustices of public
institutions including religious organisations, the police force, the army and government
bodies. Children and parents can become both colonised and coloniser, in a personal
and intimate reflection of the larger struggles taking place in the societies in which they
live. Examining the secret within the four novels in this thesis provides illuminating
insights into aspects of the nature of consciousness in contemporary Northern Ireland,
as well as each writer’s subtle suggestions for change.
iv
Contents
Abstract iii
Table of Contents v
Publications generated from this thesis vii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction: Surveying the Shadows 1
Chapter One: Reading in the Dark 63
Chapter Two: Burning Your Own 111
Chapter Three: No Bones 161
Chapter Four: Swallowing the Sun 202
Conclusion 248
Bibliography 255
Cover Image: “Imagining secret.”

http://www.homeaccentstoday.com/articles/blog/1960000396/20080401
/secret-space.jpg
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vi
Publications generated from this thesis
This thesis contains a chapter that derives from my published work. The published
work has been extended and revised to form a thesis chapter. The biographical details
of the works and where they appear in the thesis are outlined below.
Chapter Four
McGuinness, Caitlin. “Domestic Espionage: David Park’s Swallowing the Sun as Troubles
thriller.” Irish Studies Review Vol.17, Issue 3 (August 2009) 331-345.
vii
viii
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this work to my husband, Paul Callery and daughter, Roisín. They have
been an invaluable support during the writing of this thesis. I love them both very
much, and simply could not have done it without them
I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Andrew Lynch. His thoughtful guidance,
creative insights and keen eye as an editor, writer and teacher have been indispensable.
Andrew also provided support through offers of teaching and research work, alerted me
to relevant grants, institutions and organisations, and always took the time to read and
discuss my work thoroughly and perceptively. It has been a great pleasure to have you
as my supervisor.
I also wish to acknowledge the support of the Australian – Irish Cultural Foundation,
who awarded me an Education Grant that enabled me to carry out valuable research in
Dublin and to the International Association of Studies in Irish Literature who also
awarded me a grant, facilitating the presentation of a paper at their conference in
Dublin in 2007.
Thanks must also go to the staff of the School of Social and Cultural Studies at The
University of Western Australia (UWA). In particular I wish to acknowledge Assistant
Professor Shalmalee Palekar, Associate Professor Kieran Dolin, Winthrop Professor Bob
White, Winthrop Professor Brenda Walker, Associate Professor Tony Hughes d’Aeth
and Professor Judith Johnston, who all provided me with professional and friendly
support. I also want to acknowledge the patient and skilful assistance of Ines Bortolini,
Linda Cresswell and Hui Chuin Poa.
ix
Thanks also to Mrs Lyla Forte, my daughter’s school principal, who recorded an
authentic Belfast reading from one of my chosen novels, which was then delivered
as part of a presentation at the Canadian Association of Irish Studies Conference
in Canada, 2007.
I wish also to thank my friend, Lesley O’Brien, both for her excellent and
professional eye as a proofreader, and for her constant and loyal friendship.
Thanks must go to my extended family, which provided encouragement, laughter,
child-care, emotional support, and much needed prodding to get the thesis
finished. Thank you to Ardan and Wendy McGuinness, Alex McGuinness and
Young-Mi Cho, James McGuinness and Sarah Peisley and Kimberly and Drew
Reeder.
Thank you also to my friends Tanya Crewe, Jesse Ussi, Scott Calamel, Natalia
Lizama, Alison Jacquet, Duc Dau, Sue Morris, Tessa Murray, Janelle Ryan,
Duncan Barnes, Richard Martin, Cathryne Sanders, Wendy Grace, Zoe
Templar, Jessica McLeod and Rebecca Rey for helping to make this journey an
enjoyable and rewarding one.
x
xi
Introduction: Surveying the shadows
Secret a. & n.
1. (to be) kept private, not (to be) made known or exposed to view, (secret treaty,
understanding, errand, door, sin, process, influence).
2. given to or having faculty for secrecy.
3. close, reticent; (of place etc.) secluded, retired.
4. N. thing (to be) kept secret; thing known only to a limited number (in the secret, among
the number of those allowed to know it; open secret, thing secret only to those who do not
trouble to learn it); mystery, thing of which explanation is sought in vain…separate, set
apart].1
(The) alien within results from the gap produced in us by the concealment of some part of a love
object's life…the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.2
The context of silence, which existed…for most of the years of the Troubles (1969-1998)
when Northern Ireland was characterised by sectarian violence, cannot be underestimated.3
The trope of the secret is a central, compelling feature of contemporary fiction from
Northern Ireland. The strange and secretive behaviours that arise from clashing
interpretations of the incidents of daily life there have lent themselves naturally to works
containing secrets in multiple forms. I do not subscribe to a view of Northern Ireland as
irredeemably caught up in conflict, mired in old patterns of recurring violence, or
unique in the forms of conflict that have been associated with it. What my readings of
both history and fiction from Northern Ireland have told me, without the experience of
living there at length, is that it is a place where forms of connection with the Other
frequently take the form of a secretive spectacle. These spectacles often contain both
desire for connection with the Other and an accompanying fear or hatred. This
complex process works to make the everyday strange and unsettling in a manner that
while not unique, does have a pronounced force in Northern Ireland, with its own
distinctive manifestations of the uncanny. The blending of the everyday and the
1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

2 Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom: a Complement to Freud’s
Metapsychology” in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the
Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis Vol. I. ed. trans. and with an introduction by
Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 171.
3 A Healey, “A different description of trauma: A wider systemic perspective – A
personal insight,” Child Care in Practice, Vol.10, No. 2 (2004), 167-184. [167].
1
fantastical is also often the means by which protagonists in contemporary fiction from
Northern Ireland react to the unnerving nature of the societies in which they are living.
Characters project internal fantasies onto external sites, escape into story, dream or
hallucination, or combine received facts and histories with their own, often highly
personalised, interpretations of events.
This thesis examines the power of secrets found in four works of contemporary
fiction from Northern Ireland: Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Glenn Patterson’s
Burning Your Own, Anna Burns’ No Bones and David Park’s Swallowing the Sun.4
These novels were chosen for their vivid stories, range of narrative styles, and moving
and provocative insights. They are all also replete with secrets, which often function as
doorways into complex social and political issues. Each novel contains a blend of
specific historical detail with elements of the bizarre, mythic, or otherworldly, although
in very different ways.
The historical backdrops to these four novels span the years from 1948 until
2000. They survey events leading up to the Troubles, the most heated years of conflict,
and, in two cases, the beginnings of peace and the aftermath of the Good Friday
Agreement. In my analysis of these works I investigate how the tropes of secrecy and
spectacle provide valuable insights in the nature of contemporary fiction from Northern
Ireland, and compelling commentary on life in that province.
The title of the thesis: “Secret Passages: Concealment and Escape” was chosen as it
provides a fitting visual and imaginative template for both the content of the novels and
the approaches I have taken in my investigation. For the immediate purposes of this
introduction the secret is broadly defined as that which is hidden, repressed, concealed
4 Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), Glenn
Patterson, Burning Your Own (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), Anna Burns,
No Bones (London: Flamingo, 2002), David Park, Swallowing the Sun (London:
Bloomsbury, 2005). Subsequent references to these works will be cited in
parenthesis in the body of the text.
2
or withheld. The term “secret passage” brings to mind both architectural structures –
hidden spaces or tunnels that can be used as a means of escape in difficult or dangerous
circumstances – and textual passages: texts containing meanings which are cryptic,
elusive and open to varying interpretations. The title has a further resonance, in
reference to the importance of space and place in each of the novels, where the
protagonists are very aware of living in neighbourhoods marked into “safe”, “no-go”
and “neutral” zones. The term “secret passages” also suggests, more broadly, the
pressure to keep silent on taboo or controversial subjects that still retains force in
Northern Ireland.5
The frequent use of the trope of secrecy can be found in all four novels I
examine closely, although the roles and manifestations of the secret differ greatly in each
work. Each novel is also replete with references to actual historical events and locates its
narrative firmly against the backdrop of the Northern Ireland Troubles. For these
reasons, along with the richness of their prose, plots and thematic concerns, these four
novels seemed to stand out as fitting texts for the exploration of secrecy in contemporary
fiction from Northern Ireland.
I read each of these novels as filled with secrets, taboo or hidden subjects, and
allusive layers of meaning, but as also offering escape routes or “secret passages” by
which the protagonists can navigate their way through the complex plots in which they
are entangled. The destination reached at the end of each novel is not necessarily always
5 “The other phenomenon, however, is more specific to the conflict situation within
Northern Ireland. It has been referred to as a collective ‘conspiracy of silence’ and
is summed up most aptly by the phrase borrowed from Seamus Heaney that,
‘whatever you say, say nothing’. It has been written about widely by health and
social service professionals, who rightly recognise themselves, as individuals, as
being part of the same conspiracy. It has been an important characteristic to
possess in that it protected us from potential conflict with others with who we
might be in contact. Unfortunately, it has also meant that we feel unable openly to
address the conflict which impinges on our work.” Martin Murphy, Childrens
Services Manager, NOVA, Barnardo’s (N. I.), “When Trauma Goes On,” Child
Care in Practice Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 2004), 185–191, [187].
3
one of conventional enlightenment or liberation, but usually provides for the
protagonists a greater understanding of self and of the places in which they live.
Each work also raises the importance of establishing spaces for private secrets
that are not damaging or traumatic. Privacy, time for contemplation, the quiet
establishment of the self, collections of personal treasures and memories, are some of the
elements lost in environments where secrecy is tied to violence, anxiety and fear. All
four of the novels make gestures to such private acts, and examine their usurpation by
larger, damaging, repressions.
These four works contain inconsistencies and contradictions in terms of what I
read as approaches to the secret. Yet the secret is a dominant, and striking subject in all
four works. Each author’s treatment of the secret reveals differing insights into the
impact of secrecy upon life in Northern Ireland during differing periods in recent
history, and offers differing, but equally fascinating, avenues for coming to terms with
and in some cases partially overcoming, the strangle-hold of that culture. The strongest
position taken in all four works towards secrets is generally that to speak out is better
than to remain silent. Nevertheless each author also negotiates the question as to
whether there is ever any harm in disclosure. Speaking out can be liberating, in each of
these novels, but it also often exacts a price. At times the best alternative offered is a
thoughtful mediation between openness and reticence.
The formal structures of each work also complicate issues of secrecy and
revelation, which adds another layer to questions about how much one can ever really
know about anything. It is part of the nature of the novel that it has to be written to say
things that aren’t normally heard. One of the arguments I stress in my thesis is the
importance of space for both personal privacy and public accountability. But the fact
that the reader is given access into the character’s inner worlds provides a level of insight
into lives that does not exist outside the pages of a novel.
4
The inter-relationships of secrecy and spectacle in all four of the novels
examined illuminate the particular fit of the spectacular secret to the experience of living
in Northern Ireland. I should qualify this statement by acknowledging that the settings
of each work, in Derry and Belfast, provide intense versions of what could be read as
wider problems in Northern Ireland overall, and that there are many areas and
communities in Northern Ireland which have not experienced anywhere near the levels
of violence and dysfunction depicted in these novels.
The rest of this introduction is divided into three sections. The first section
outlines my ideas on the importance of secrecy, with an emphasis on secrecy as spectacle
or partial display, as a central and recurring feature of public interaction in Northern
Ireland. The second section examines the main theoretical frameworks used throughout
the thesis, which I read as being particularly useful to any study of the secret. The final
section summarises the four novels examined closely in the rest of the thesis. In this
summary, I outline briefly the various manifestations of secrecy in each novel, and the
functions these manifestations perform, both in terms of the works themselves and as
fascinating components of public and private life in Northern Ireland.
Secrecy and spectacle in Northern Ireland public life.
This section examines the roles and manifestations of secrecy and spectacle in Northern
Ireland public life, for while my thesis concentrates on contemporary fiction and is not
an anthropological study, the novels I read closely are all obviously informed by the real
cultural, political, and historical circumstances in which they are set. I think it is also
fair to argue that while authors from Northern Ireland strive to make their works more
than a simple reflection of life there, the intensity of the years of the Troubles has
ensured that Northern Ireland itself has consistently been a prominent factor in the
5
development of plot and theme, and in some cases is almost a character in its own
right.6
The interaction of the personal and the political within troubled societies, and
the hidden spaces that exist within and behind these interactions often results in the
experience of living in two worlds at once: the familiar and the unfamiliar. This
phenomenon is sharpened in Northern Ireland, with its repertoire of personal, political
and historical troubles. The divisiveness of its foundation and the ongoing conflicts
about sovereignty, nationality and history in Northern Ireland have established secrecy,
and secretive practices, as common in both daily lives and state institutions. In his study
of political terror in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman has stated “[s]ecrecy is the
creation of centres in peripheries deprived of stable anchorages”.7 Signs of a culture of
secrecy can be traced through the increase in subversive paramilitary activity and siege
mentalities found in trouble-spots like Ardoyne a year after the arrival of British troops
into Northern Ireland in 1969. Secrecy can also be found in Northern Ireland in the
structures, laws and attitudes of the centre or the state. Varying manifestations of
centralised secrecy can be traced through the UK Broadcasting bans placed upon
proscribed groups (primarily Sinn Féin and the Ulster Defence Association) between
1988 and 1994:
ITV companies, television and radio organisations were forbidden from carrying
interviews or direct statements from proscribed paramilitary groups in NI, from
6 See, for example Colin Bateman’s books featuring the Belfast journalist Dan Starkey
such as Divorcing Jack (Harper Collins, 1995) and Belfast Confidential (UK:
Headline, 2005).
7 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political
Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p.
11.
6
representatives of Sinn Féin, Republican Sinn Féin or the UDA and from those
who support or invite support for these.8
A culture of secrecy can also be associated with the years of internment without trial, in
the state employment of double agents like Denis Donaldson, who worked as an
informer for MI5 and the Special Branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and
in the deliberate evasions of the 1972 Widgery Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.9 A culture
of secrecy also manifests in Northern Ireland in the form of material structures which
continue to enable the presence of the secret, or at the very least, the unfamiliar, such as
the Peace Walls.10
Frequent legacies of such institutionalised secrecy are deeper social divisions as
well as individual suppression of the particulars of traumatic situations. Living with
constant conflict also created situations of watchfulness, where the need to be careful
about what you say and where you say it is integrated into the mundane: “[t]he need to
‘keep your head down’, to ‘keep your mouth shut’, ‘to say nothing’, ‘to say nothing to
offend another religion’ was repeatedly emphasised by the young people…when talking
about their daily experience”.11 Survival strategies in such situations include the
maintenance of silences and secrets in response to traumatic acts. Unspoken but widely
8 Ed Moloney,“Closing down the Airways, the Story of the Broadcasting Ban” in The
Media and Northern Ireland ed. Bill Rolston (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1991).
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/media/moloney.htm
9 “In April [1972] the Widgery report into Bloody Sunday was published, largely
exonerating the army.” David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of
the Troubles (Penguin, 2001), p. 78.
10 The first barricade was erected by the British army to separate Republican and
Loyalist communities in Unity Flats, Belfast in 1969. Over time such barricades
were strengthened and made more permanent in nature. There are now 53
Northern Ireland Office maintained peace-lines. See: Arthur Strain and Peter
Hamill, “Forty Years of Peace Lines,” BBC News Channel (1 July 2009).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8121362.stm
11 Sheena McGrellis, “Pushing the Boundaries in Northern Ireland: Young People,
Violence and Sectarianism,” in (A Report) Families and Social Capital ESRC
Research Group (London: London South Bank University) May 2004, p. 16.
7
accepted narratives, the codes of behaviour and belonging that guide communities, also
serve as a form of protection: “mental maps produced modes of consciousness that were
consolidated via the telling of fear, victimhood, and risk”.12 This is particularly true for
those communities situated at the interface.13 Silences and secrets function as a means
of managing the continual assaults upon the psyche that constitute living within a
conflicted and violent society. However they are also a barrier to the healing of personal
or community trauma, not just within the individual witnessing or experiencing that
traumatic act, but also to future generations who may be affected by the earlier trauma,
even when it is unspoken:
In therapeutic work it is evidenced that trauma is both personal and
inherited…civil unrest, riots, protests, police raids, injuries and deaths…can either
be experienced directly or indirectly. What often compacts the trauma is the
indirect experience, when adults speak about events and are obviously disturbed
by them…what is often missing is an empathetic understanding by the adult of
how the child has been affected by events…the gaps in a child’s knowledge…are
filled by a child’s fantasies.14
These inherited silences can in turn become as unsettling as the violence they were
originally intended to contain:
The process of not talking about or actively forgetting traumatic experiences
12 Peter Shirlow, “Ethno-sectarianism and the reproduction of fear in Belfast,” Capital

And Class Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2003), 77-93, [82].
13 According to Shirlow, interface areas have been defined as: “arenas that are
predominantly socially and economically deprived, which are separated by both
physical and mental constructions…(places) where violence between Catholic and
Protestant communities is ongoing.” p. 78.
14 Paula Hanratty, Regional Manager, “Improving Relations in Northern Ireland,” in
Northern Ireland NEWPIN”S response to the consultation p.1.
http://www.asharedfutureni.gov.uk/newpin.pdf
8
means that the felt experience of the event is passed to the next generation
without a cognitive verbalised framework for making sense of themselves in
the world…where this is generalised across a whole community, then the child
learns to expect a particular response to the environment as normal.15
I read these patterns and practices as heightened manifestations of a widespread culture
of secrecy that, while certainly found in many other places and situations, is
exceptionally evident in Northern Ireland. Remaining silent after witnessing violent acts,
speaking in codes or forms of only partial disclosure, and passing on, often unwittingly,
the gaps and silences that stem from repressing trauma to subsequent generations, are
all examples of the consequences of living in a society where secrecy has been and is still
widely encouraged. These practices can be read as part of an inward-turning response
to living with violence, where the unspeakable is signed through gaps and omissions.
These forms of the secret are woven throughout the novels I examine. Children
live in households threaded with tension, which often relates to acts from the past to
which only their parents are privy. In an effort to release or at least confront some of
these issues, they undertake a number of stratagems. In Reading in the Dark, the boy
narrator investigates his family’s past, digging up long-buried family secrets, and
incurring in the process anger and eventual alienation from his mother. In Burning
Your Own, Mal forms an illicit friendship with a boy who lives in the town dump, in an
effort to find a space for himself plotted on different ethical grounds from his home and
increasingly sectarian neighbourhood. Faced with continual, and often horrific, episodes
of violence in both her family home and Ardoyne neighbourhood, Amelia Burns in No
Bones attempts to escape the surreal and unspeakable world in which she lives by
making secret the only thing she has control over – her body. She attempts this through
15 Rosie Burrows and Brid Keenan, “Bearing Witness: Supporting Parents and Children
in the Transition to Peace,” Child Care in Practice Vol. 10, No.2 (April 2004),
107-125, [112].
9
starvation, alcoholism and eventual mental breakdown. Finally, in the book that
concludes my study, Swallowing the Sun, the relationship between parent and child is
reversed, as a father sets out to avenge his young daughter’s death, a process that
involves the unlocking of secrets from his own traumatic childhood.
Inward turning secrets are not the only ones to feature in these works, or in
Northern Ireland as a whole cultural and historical entity. In Northern Ireland what is a
matter of secrecy also often takes on a particular form distinctive to places where conflict
has been both localised and long-standing: the secret as display. In this form what is
secret is put on show, as a part of identity formation, a means of antagonising the enemy
or simply because that has long been common practice. Within these displays, revelation
or disclosure is only ever partial. Such terms of disclosure always signal that something is
being withheld. The display of secrecy to the Other, in parades, murals, stories and
rituals, is a gesture that underlines the Other’s difference at the same time as it
acknowledges the Other’s ability to read or understand at least some of the performer’s
secrets through an unspoken but shared set of experiences and understandings. In this
sense I concur with Eamonn Hughes’ statement: “within Northern Ireland…identity
must always be formed on terms of intimacy with whatever one chooses to regard as the
other”.16
The opposing community in Northern Ireland has been, and still is,
overwhelmingly figured in terms of identification as either Catholic or Protestant,
though these terms encompass a great deal more than simple religious identification.
Within and alongside this figuring, there are of course many other oppositions and
points of tension: between extremists and those seeking the middle-ground; within
Unionist and Republican aligned neighbourhoods and organisations; against Travellers;
16 Eamonn Hughes, Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press, 1991), pp. 3-4.
10
and also against those who identify themselves as gay or homosexual,17 and in recent
years, against newly arrived minority groups.18
Displays towards the Other in Northern Ireland vary a great deal in terms of
disclosure, impact and intent. While they contain similar elements of performance in
relation to spectacle and secrecy, I certainly do not mean to suggest that they are
comparable on any ethical, political or affective level. The masks of riflemen at IRA
funerals testify to their position as subjects alien to the state, at the same time as their
salutes create a public spectacle of that alienation. Racist graffiti targeted at newly
arrived immigrant groups in Belfast often employs loaded and intensely racist images
such as swastikas, but rarely contains the identity of the person or groups responsible for
the graffiti. The Orangemen who march through Republican areas to commemorate
events such as the Battle of the Boyne, carrying banners bearing distinctively loyalist
insignia, know that their Others, the members of the Republican communities that they
march past, are privy to some of the historical background that is being paraded before
them, but are also shut out of the inner workings of the Orange order. The Orange
parades display signs and traces of Debord’s “generalised secrecy”, that which “stands
behind the spectacle, as the decisive complement of all it displays”.19 However, while
17 Henry McDonald, “Equality Commission finds increase in respondents expressing

concern over gay people and Travellers.” Guardian.co.uk (June 2009).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/24/homophobia-racism-northern-
ireland
18 “Although race crime is not widespread, nor has Belfast proven to be a safe haven for
immigrants… the bottom line is that gangs of lawless youths can still seriously
blight the lives of migrant families” “Northern Ireland Unites against Racism,”
David McKittrick Belfast Telegraph (18 June 2009).
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland-unites-
against-racism-14342686.html
19 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle trans. Malcolm Imrie
(London: Verso, 1990), p. 12.
11
Debord argues for the ultimately alienating effect of the spectacle,20 I read spectacles like
these as more ambivalent, constantly and uneasily shifting between displays of alienation
and a need for the Other’s attention. Repeated, ritualised displays are made to the
community constructed as Other to the Self. Symbolic representations of tribal
membership, intensely felt and closely-guarded interpretations of the past, and myth
and story-telling within sectarian frameworks, all indicate a need for partial connection
with the Other, however damaged that connection might be.
These spectacles of the secret seem to me to be strikingly symbolic of Northern
Ireland’s much debated position within the field of post-colonial studies. They epitomise
an ambivalent mixture of loathing and attraction to the Other, a
diverse but nevertheless identifiable movement into what might be called the
‘liminal spaces’ of colonial discourse; marginal areas, where the ultimate
opposition of coloniser and colonised breaks down through irony, imitation and
subversion.21
I need to qualify this argument by noting that terms such as coloniser and colonised are
obviously complicated in the examples I have cited above – who exactly is the coloniser
in each case – the British state, the Loyalist marcher, the IRA rifleman? The position of
Northern Ireland as a post-colonial state has been much debated for several years.. I
believe that Northern Ireland cannot be seen as historically post-colonial in the same
way as India, the United States or even the Republic of Ireland can be argued to be.
These countries share the simplest of common denominators in this context by having
20 “The alienation of the spectator…works like this: The more he contemplates, the less
he lives…The spectator’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the
fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own, they are the gestures of
someone else who represents them to him.” Guy Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle. trans. Ken Knabb. (Oakland, CA.: AK Press, 2006), Thesis 30, p. 16.
21 Colin Graham, “‘Liminal Spaces’: Post-Colonial Theories and Irish Culture,” The
Irish Review Vol.16 (1994), 29-43, [32-33].
12
all once been part or total members of Britain’s colonial empire, albeit in very different
ways, but Northern Ireland is still officially recognised as part of the United Kingdom.
In this thesis, the term post-colonial will apply instead as a rhetorical device. It is useful
as a means of describing a place where current political and cultural practices reveal
patterns of behaviour and systems of division that were established during colonial rule
in the past. I agree with David Lloyd’s critical position highlighting the links between
past practices and present conditions in Northern Ireland:
The phenomenon of violence [should] be understood as constitutive of
social relations within the colonial capitalist state, whose practices
institutionalize a violence which, though cumulative, daily and generally
unspectacular, is normalized precisely by its long duration and chronic
nature.22
I agree in particular with Lloyd's emphasis upon the connections that can be made
between ongoing violence and the strictures that have been or are still put into place by
the colonial powers. I also agree with his arguments noting the hidden nature of these
practices:
Unlike insurgency, which is usually represented as sporadic and of the nature of
a temporary crisis, the violence of the state operates through its institutions
continuously, producing the material effects of poverty, unemployment, sickness,
depopulation, and emigration. That these phenomena are generally not seen as
state-mediated effects of capitalist and colonial violence forces us to recognize
that the violence of the state belongs in its capacity to control representation23
22 David Lloyd, “Ireland After History”, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed.

Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), p. 379.
23 Lloyd, “Ireland after History,” p. 379.
13
The one area where I do differ from Lloyd here is in his reading of “the violence of the
state” as being primarily responsible for “the material effects of poverty, unemployment
and sickness”. I read “the violence of the state” and “the material effects of poverty,
unemployment and sickness” as existing in a close and complex inter-relationship in
Northern Ireland, rather than one leading directly to the other. The Northern Ireland
depicted in the novels I examine is a place where many individuals’ experiences of daily
life and national history jar against the official version of what those experiences should
constitute. This jarring produces in turn a constant, underlying anxiety along with the
desire for a less oppressive fit between the individual’s reality and the conditions under
which that reality must make its way.
There are many readings of literature from Northern Ireland underpinned by
post-colonial theory, in which the secret grows out of repression and disorder, and can
be seen as a weirdly empty locus or centre-point for the various conflicts that divide
Northern Ireland.24 In these readings the colonised or oppressed group strives to express
what has been repressed or negated by the ruling hegemony through a number of
subversive strategies, including acts of violence, the manipulation of language and the
creation of counter-hegemonies that challenge those systems of identity and power that
have been put into place by the controlling powers. My analysis acknowledges the
represed and repressive nature of the secret in the Northern Ireland text but also
emphasises its function as a complex site of desire. In this way the spectacle of the secret
in Northern Ireland can be read as a striking mutation of the post-colonial concept of
ambivalence: “the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the
24 See: Liam Harte, “Postcolonialism and Reading in the Dark,” Irish University
Review Vol. 30, No.1 (2000), 149-162; Klaus-Gunnar Schneider, “Irishness and
Postcoloniality in Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own,” Irish Studies Review
Vol.6, No.1 (1998), 55-62; Michael Storey, “Postcolonialism and Stories of the
Irish Troubles,” New Hibernia Review/Iris Eireannach Nua Vol.2, No.3 (1998),
63-77.
14
relationship between coloniser and colonised”.25 The secret here is a double agent,
symbolic of the ongoing tug between repulsion and attraction to the unknown, a marker
of what is repressed as well as what is encouraged in relation to the Self and the Other.
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin note in their definition of the terms Self and Other that:
“the existence of others is crucial in defining what is ‘normal’ and in locating one’s own
place in the world”.26 Two models of interpretation are provided within their analysis of
the terms, wherein the ties between the Self, Other, coloniser and colonised can be
figured in terms of parent-child relationships:
Subjects may be interpellated by the ideology of the maternal and nurturing
function of the colonising power…on the other hand the Symbolic Other may
be represented in the Father…The ambivalence of colonial discourse lies in
the fact that both these processes of ‘othering’ occur at the same time, the
colonial subject being both a ‘child’ of empire and a primitive and degraded
subject of imperial discourse.27
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin also note that “the construction of the dominant imperial
Other occurs in the same process by which the colonial others come into being”.28 In this
thesis, the Other is defined as that which is different from the Self, yet also irrevocably
related to the Self. The terms Self and Other are open to a constant shift in relation to
ideas of power and dependence, whereby the Other may be seen as the enemy, the
unknown or the site of desire, contingent to the particular circumstances that are in
operation at any time and strongly tied to the relationship of the subject to the secret at
25 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial
Studies (New York: Routledge, 1980), p. 12.
26 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, p. 169.
27 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, pp. 169-171.
28 Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, p. 171.
15
that particular moment. The Self is thus constantly defined and redefined in relation to
the Other at the same time as the secret is passed on, opened and even reinvented.
Exchanges of power and dependence can of course also operate within the self,
particularly in the case of children living within societies where the struggles for identity
and power are played out on a daily basis. In each of the four novels I examine, children
are recruited into battles for local, familial and national ascendancy. Children in these
works do not always have loving relationships with their parents. Linda Leith has noted
the predominance of strained and even abusive familial relationships in contemporary
fiction from Northern Ireland: “…relations with actual parents are often distant and
clumsy, when not openly hostile.”29 The family dynamics in these four novels frequently
revolve around struggles for power. The use of children as narrators and protagonists,
and the placing of those children within threatening and even violent surroundings
establishes in each text a powerful metaphor, in which children and parents can become
both colonised and coloniser, in a personal and intimate reflection of the larger struggles
taking place in the societies in which they live.
In Reading in the Dark poverty and emigration are both masked by and
interwoven with the operations of the governing forces. The death of a young child from
tuberculosis is overshadowed within the novel by the political ramifications of a much
earlier death within the family. Domestic violence in David Park’s Swallowing the Sun,
leads to the protagonist’s participation in brutal sectarian activities. The material and
political underpinnings of sectarian conflict in Burning Your Own are brought to light
in its dramatic finale. In No Bones domestic breakdown is linked to sectarian violence,
but is also presented as springing from pre-existing psychological dysfunctions. These
factors all complicate a purely sectarian-based cause for trauma in Belfast.
29 “Subverting the Sectarian Heritage: Recent Novels of Northern Ireland”, Canadian

Journal of Irish Studies, (December 1992), 88-108.
16
In all of these novels agency and power shift and change. In alignment with
Homi Bhabha’s models of the legacy of colonial rule, different groups at any point in
time hold power, and continually affect or re-inscribe the position of the Other, at the
same time as they are themselves being re-inscribed. A Catholic family falls victim to the
machinations of a corrupt policeman in Reading in The Dark. But a straightforward
reading of the family as representative of the colonised state, and the policeman as the
colonising power, is complicated by the fact that the policeman, like the family, is
Catholic, and also by the narrator’s subsequent manipulation of the coercive powers of
Church and State to outwit him. The family, in all of these books, is a complex site. It is
the place where the struggles for agency, control over history and identity, so often
synonymous with colonial struggle, are played out in miniature. A recurring effect of
these struggles is the spectacular secret – the family traumas that refuse to stay hidden
but which keep reappearing in partial and distorted forms.
A scene from Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark encapsulates many of these
tensions and concerns. In the scene the young narrator (who is obviously a version of
Deane himself as a boy, but who is never named in the novel)30 is locked inside the
ancient Irish ring fort Grianán by his friends. Inside the walls of the fort he feels
disconnected from his external surroundings, while still being aware of the Donegal
coast that stretches out beyond the walls of the fort. He imagines the figures of the
heroic Fianna sleeping beneath him, ready to wake and “fight the last battle” (57). He
is attracted to the place, wishing to make contact with these mythical Irish warriors,
30 In an interview with John Brown, Deane was asked:” Is Reading in the Dark a factually
accurate autobiographical account of your family background?” Deane
responded: “Reading in the Dark is as accurate as can be when speaking of fiction,
however autobiographical.” John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from
the North of Ireland (County Clare: Salmon Publishing, 2002), p. 97. (Interview
between John Brown and Seamus Deane.)
17
lulled by “the underground waters whispering; that was the women sighing” (58), yet
also frightened by the darkness that engulfs him. His friends finally release him and he
crawls out into the sunshine. As he walks home he feels that “the sky and hills around
seemed so high and wide that the dark passageway felt even worse in retrospect, more
chilling and enclosed” (58).
The boy narrator visits Grianán often in the course of the novel. In Reading in
the Dark it is a site for secretive and subversive acts, and an imaginative medium; the
central place where the narrator’s thoughts and anxieties in regard to his family’s secrets
are worked through. The narrator discovers his family’s darkest secret: that his uncle
Eddie was mistakenly shot as an informer by his mother’s father. In his broodings over
this terrible story, the narrator reconstructs the shooting as having taken place in
Grianán’s secret chamber. What was once associated with mythic renewal, the rise of
the Fianna and the subsequent expelling of the English from Ireland, becomes, in his
imagination, a place of betrayal and trauma. Whether or not the execution actually took
place at the fort is never made clear, though the possibility that the narrator’s vision
comes close to the truth is hinted at in later anecdotes in the novel. Other strands add to
the rich complexity of the passage. The “sighing of the women” the narrator imagines
as he sits within the fort have been earlier associated with sexual desire (57).
This fantastical scenario creates associations of both pleasure and fear for the
narrator, although, significantly, the latter is felt most strongly after he leaves the scene:
“the dark passageway felt even worse in retrospect” (58). What is unknown, in a telling
refraction of other experiences in the novel, possesses an ambivalent quality, which is
subsequently forced into more linear and socially acceptable readings. Truth and
imagined projection intermingle, in a dramatic fictional exposition of Deane’s earlier,
politicised, statement on Northern Ireland:
18
When a secret is revealed it has this strange ability to alter the world. It makes
the real world seem phantasmal. Where the real and the phantasmal coincide
with one another, that's a mark of a colonised society.31
The narrator’s gradual discovery of the truth about Eddie’s death changes everything
for him, making “phantasmal” what had previously been relatively stable, so that he
finds himself living in a world where nothing is really certain, and the simplest activities
are fissured with the possibility of further conflict. His new understanding of his world
can be read as similar to the experience of the colonised subject:
…in literature at least, no colonized subject had the illusion of speaking from a
place of plenitude or fullness. The colonial subject was a kind of split-subject and
‘knew’ it both phenomenologically and historically.32
The narrator’s means of communicating become more difficult: “I could never talk to
my father or my mother properly again” (126) and he is drawn to worry about the truth.
His mother falls apart, becoming almost “phantasmal” in her grief and guilt at her own
part in the tragedy: “‘Oh, Jesus,’ my father would say under his breath… ‘Where have
you gone, love?’” (142). These collisions between “the real and the phantasmal”33 are
informed by the abuse of power and deformations of justice that are threaded through
the narrator’s wider social and political circumstances, familiar features of the colonised
society that he inhabits in Northern Ireland. The oppressive by-products of colonisation,
including the need for secrecy among groups opposed to the colonising powers, are
31 Seamus Deane in interview with Nicholas Patterson, “Different Strokes 1: An

interview with Seamus Deane,” The Boston Phoenix (June 1998), p. 2.
http://weeklywire.com/ww/06-08-98/boston_books_1.html
32 Homi Bhabha in conversation with John Comaroff, in Relocating Postcolonialism
eds. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), p.
21.
33 Seamus Deane, “Different Strokes 1: An interview with Seamus Deane,” p. 2.
19
linked in Deane’s book to the circumstances that bring about Eddie’s execution. His
experience of the world as “phantasmal” is thus a direct consequence of living in a
society where secrecy has become irrevocably interwoven with reality, a strange pairing
that unsettles what is perceived and how it is presented to the world. Encapsulated in
the image of Grianán, with its hidden passages and multiple psychic uses, the secret in
Reading in the Dark is that kind most familiar to Northern Ireland, one that is as
spectacular as it is cryptic, drawing attention to itself even as it refuses to reveal its full
meaning.
The post-colonial symptoms that remain most clearly applicable to Northern
Ireland involve the breaking down of oppositions through irony, imitation and
subversion, although I would argue that ultimately, in Northern Ireland, these
oppositions are not so much broken down as re-negotiated and given new forms
through that most unsettling act, the secret as spectacle.
Theoretical frameworks and points of reference.
The secret, as a textual strategy, interpretative tool and even psychoanalytic term
appears in a vast body of critical and psychoanalytic theory. It is impossible to survey
those permutations in detail here, partly because the indeterminate nature of the secret
lends itself to a multiplicity of applications. Nevertheless a few key areas or associations
with the secret seemed particularly pertinent to this study, both in their interpretations
or usages of the secret and in the consequences for literary studies those interpretations
have had. Psychoanalytic interest in repression, and inter-generational trauma provided
a highly suggestive field of reference for this study34. I also draw upon Homi Bhabha's
merging of the psychological with the historical in his work as a critic within the field of
34 Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria trans. James and Alix
Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, Vol. XI (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), and 34
Sigmund Freud, “ The Uncanny,” in Collected Papers Vol. IV. trans. Joan
Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 368-407.
20
post-colonial studies;35 Jacques Derrida’s linking of the term spectre with the inheritance
of past traumas;36 and Fredric Jameson’s concept of the “political unconscious”.37
These ideas all inform and direct the work that I have undertaken here. Before
summarising each of the four novels chosen, and their employment of the secret, it
seems worthwhile therefore to briefly examine aspects of these theories and in particular
their relevance to concepts of the secret, the spectacle, and the spectacular.
The first of these theoretical underpinnings stems from psychoanalytic
approaches to the text. It seems essential in a study of the secret within literature to
acknowledge Freud and Breuer’s work on repression, and the legacy of the insights,
arguments and counter-arguments to which this term has given rise. The stilling and
burying of unacceptable ideas, sensations and experiences is an essential aspect of their
work on the secret, though in the case of repression, the secret is that which is hidden
and not perceived to be so. In this sense, it differs from the secret that is held with the
knowledge and on some occasions, even pleasure, of those who are its possessors. This
difference raises questions of interpretation – if you are unaware that you are preserving
a secret – are you in possession of a secret or possessed by it? In an essay intriguingly
titled “The Topography of Reality: Sketching a Metapsychology of Secrets,”
psychoanalysts Abrahams and Torok provide the following definition of “Reality” in
relation to the repressed:
Reality can then be defined as what is rejected, masked or denied precisely as
‘reality’; it is that which is, all the more so since it must not be known; in short,
35 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern
nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge,
1995) and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
36 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
37 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
21
Reality is defined as a secret. The metaphysical concept of Reality refers to the
place, in the psychic apparatus, where the secret is buried.38
The macabre lexicon that is employed here results in the figuring of the secret as that
which is non-living yet still strangely present, a zombie-like force that seems to take
over the lives of those it possesses. Many of the characters in Anna Burns’ No Bones
display obvious signs of living with repressed traumas. These traumas return to haunt
their subjects in the form of repetitive and damaging behaviours, which call attention to
and circle around the original traumatic experience while simultaneously preventing it
from ever being brought fully to light. In the other three novels secretive content is not
repressed by the psyche so much as by other members of the protagonist’s family or
community, who do not wish for it to be made public knowledge.
Homi K. Bhabha’s work on compensation for lost histories is also useful when
contemplating the intersection of national, familial and personal traumas, and the
secrets these produce. Links can be drawn between the depiction of the site of the
repressed as a burial ground and Bhabha’s reading of the nation as the residue and
replacement for lost relationships: “The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of
communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor”.39 In Bhabha’s
definition of the nation there is an underlying hint of repressive forces at play, as the
sense of loss experienced by members of disrupted communities is transformed or even
displaced into the construction of a new national identity. Such displacement raises the
question of whether this new identity can be seen as a totally healthy one, situated as it is
upon a void of past experiences that can no longer be openly acknowledged. Bhabha
also alerts the reader to the acts of translation and suppression that occur as a part of the
38 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and The Kernel: Renewals of
Psychoanalysis, Vol. I, p. 157.
39 Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation,” p.
291.
22
process of assuming a new national identity, whereby differing, past histories are
converted into “…the language of metaphor”. The secret histories of the past return to
haunt the present; they are just cloaked in different guises.
Variations upon this theme are found in all four of the novels in this study.
Traumatic events from the past (usually the results of crises in personal and national
identity) return in different forms, are alluded to but never spoken about directly, or are
only referenced through story or metaphor. In the four novels examined here the
central characters all suffer from repressive acts that are executed by family members
and other figures of authority in their immediate circles. How each character chooses to
react to those situations is inextricably tied into their ability or inability to see that they
are not privy to the whole picture. They must recognise the burial grounds of the past
for what they are before they can begin to face and engage with the things that disturb
the picture of community and cohesion into which they have previously been bound.
Just as Bhabha’s lost histories are converted into “the language of metaphor” so too
these figures disperse their acquired insights into new ways of relating to their
communities. The nameless narrator in Reading in the Dark uses Irish, a language
familiar only to some members of his family and not others, to confess a discovery about
his past that cannot be stated openly. In Burning Your Own the protagonist, Mal
Martin a member of a Belfast family with staunch Unionist affiliations, is drawn towards
the freakish, Catholic dump-dweller Francy Hagan. In No Bones Amelia Burns
organises a day trip to Rathlin Island with a group of fellow survivors of trauma. The
trip can be read as a parody of her previous experiences within the troubled streets of
Ardoyne, but ultimately becomes a form of tempered liberation. Martin Waring, in
Swallowing the Sun, creates an unauthorised instillation at the museum where he works
in an attempt to draw attention to forgotten loss.
23
Another form of the return of the secret can be found in the third major
theoretical influence upon this thesis, Jacques Derrida’s work on the revenant.40 For
Derrida, anachronism, or the essential reminder that life is both order and disruption, is
often tellingly found in the form of ghosts, spectres, or, in the French terminology that is
favoured in the translation of his work, the revenant, that which comes back. The
revenant “begins by coming back” and in so doing fundamentally disrupts an ordered,
linear sense of time and origin.41 The revenant represents all that does not fit neatly into
place, the event or situation that jars and refuses a set pattern. It is a sign of the past, yet
appears in the present. It refuses to be pinned down and serves instead to remind the
viewer that time is out of joint, and that the present is as inescapably interwoven with
the past as our interpretations of the past are affected by our experiences in the present.
In this way, the revenant functions as a kind of textual wake-up call, a warning to both
spectator and reader about the dangers of passive reception and an unsettling reminder
that we cannot package time up into orderly capsules:
Ghosts are anachronism par excellence, the appearance of something in a time to
which they clearly do not belong…anachronism also draws attention to the part
that rhetoric plays in the construction of histories…42
This does not just happen once, as Derrida emphasises, but many times, with the result
that the disruptive, the illogical and the out-of-kilter become strangely familiar. This
process seems to be magnified in situations where the need to present a particular view
of events is particularly strong, underpinned by forces that often remain
40 See for example, Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International.
41 Derrida, Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International, p. 11.
41 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, “Introduction: a Future for Haunting,” in Ghosts:
Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, p.14.
24
unacknowledged, such as fear of the unknown or insecurity over territory. The
inevitable outcome of such conflict seems to be the increase of all that is ghostly, a
concept that has striking parallels to Deane’s definition of the “phantasmal” nature of
the colonised state.43 The spectre can be read as the persistent return of the secret in
forms that unsettle society. Derrida argues that it is only by acknowledging the return of
the spectre, or that which does not belong, as well as by identifying the specifics of each
return, that we may arrive at a more satisfactory understanding of history: “According
to Derrida, the history and politics of a text can be properly found in its iteration and re-
inscription, not in the imagined fecundity of its origins”.44 Ghosts appear and disappear
throughout Reading in the Dark, haunting traces of earlier events, reminders of stories
that refuse to be silenced. The narrator gradually realises that they represent not so
much a means of unlocking or understanding the past, but the fact that the past is
always with us, it is just up to us to decide which bits of it we choose to remember. In
Swallowing the Sun, the Egyptian mummy Takabuti, re-entombed in the Ulster
Museum, is the revenant that haunts Martin Waring, yet she is also a ghostly signifier of
colonial theft and appropriation. Takabuti is a symbol of “that which begins by coming
back”45, a reminder that the sense of alienation Martin understands as life in Belfast
after the death of his daughter has both immediate meaning and larger historical
echoes.
The last of the major theoretical paradigms that this thesis draws upon is
grounded in the work of Frederic Jameson. Jameson argues that Derrida’s presentation
of the spectre fails to engage fully with the “class issues that direct our interpretations of
43 Deane, “Different Strokes 1: An interview with Seamus Deane,” p. 2.

44 Buse and Stott, p.16.
New International, p. 11.
25
the world, and which cannot be ignored in any discussion of the spectral.”46 Class, for
Jameson, is not simply social division based on access to material goods, but an all-
encompassing network of social codes that guides the way we interact and that shift
according to circumstances, acting “… according to a formal rather than a content
orientated dynamic”.47 Jameson supports this idea by citing the differing roles high art
has played in the United States and Europe. He suggests that high art in the United
States is associated with wealth and privilege,” despite the oppositional and anti-
bourgeois stance of ‘high art’ in Europe”.48 Jameson also argues that through
recognition of the role class plays in any configuration of our relationships with others,
we can also extend the role of the spectral to include future possibilities for change.
These possibilities must contain an acknowledgement of the ill-fitting moments Derrida
has so artfully captured, but also an answer or form of change in the way we read the
world, so as to allow for a more conscious, and thereby more inclusive future:
The messianic is spectral, it is the spectrality of the future, the other
dimension, that answers to the haunting spectrality of the past which is
historicity itself…Perhaps we need…a wandering signifier capable of keeping
any number of conspiratorial futures alive.49
Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious lurks behind these views. This ideal calls
for a greater awareness of the sets of economic and social determinants that affect the
46 Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” New Left Review Vol. 209 (1995), 75-
109, [86-87].
47 Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” p. 86.
26
ways in which groups of people conduct their affairs, and in particular, the ways in
which writers have represented those groups. The political unconscious is configured as
an extension of the personal acts of repression and unthinking repetition into the realms
of the political, and must be acknowledged as one of the key tenets of Marxist-
influenced literary criticism within the last century. The way in which I use the term
within this thesis is most closely aligned with readings of the political unconscious as a
form of political statement, one that insists on the importance of the critic’s awareness of
historicity as an essential step towards greater social change, both in textual appreciation
and in the world itself:
What is so often problematical about psychoanalytic criticism is therefore not
its insistence on the subterranean relationships between the literary text…and
the unconscious fascination…it is rather the absence of any reflection on the
transformational process whereby such private materials become public.50
I have included in my readings of the four novels an awareness of the social and
historical conditions that lie behind the content of these texts, the unspoken as well as
the spoken secrets that inform each novel. I also examine each writers’ allusions to the
various forms of political unconscious that exist in Northern Ireland. I frequently
highlight the importance of the political unconscious in any discussion of texts from
Northern Ireland and the extent to which anxieties over form, property and possession
lie beneath the sectarian acts of violence they depict.
These theoretical underpinnings, and their pertinence to the secret (and the
spectacle of the secret), are woven through all four of the texts that this thesis will
examine in detail, where what is secret is both hidden and displayed. I have also drawn
50 Fredric Jameson, “ Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the

Subject,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 33.
27
at length upon the following: writing on heterotopias, surveys of the Gothic and Irish
Protestant literary traditions for my reading of Burning Your Own51; Allen Feldman’s
work on the relationship of the body to space and place in Northern Ireland52,
Bakhtinian theories of the carnival53, Susan Stewart’s work on the souvenir and Julia
Kristeva’s writings on the abject for No Bones 54; and Derrida’s work on the archive for
Swallowing the Sun.55 These works, along with historical and anthropological studies of
Northern Ireland, inform my close readings of the key texts. I have chosen this three-
pronged approach as the central subject matter seemed to require a number of levels of
interpretation, each of which was enriched when read in relation to the others. In each
of the four novels, the truth is half-spoken, disclosed in fragments, flaunted through
dysfunctional behaviours and repetitive returns to sites of trauma.
Contemporary fiction in Northern Ireland and the proliferation

of secret passages.
Personal and political, private and inter-generational secrets feature in an extraordinary
number of novels published in Northern Ireland in the last few decades. They range
from the kinds of secrets that propel the plots of numerous Troubles thrillers –
mysterious murders, set-ups, double-crossings and underground organisations – to the
51 Fred Botting, “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture,” in A Companion to

the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000.), pp.3-14;
Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Diacritics Vol.16. No.1 (1986) 22-7; and
Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Houndmills: The
Macmillan Press Ltd, 1988).
52 Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political
Terror in Northern Ireland.
53 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984).
54 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection (London: The John Hopkins Press Ltd, 1984), Julia Kristeva,
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Colombia University Press, 1982).
55 Derrida, “Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne,” (Paris: Galilee, 1995),
http://www.hydra.unm.edu/derrida/arch.html
28
more intimate family secrets that are slowly unpicked in novels such as Seamus Deane’s
Reading in the Dark, and Deirdre Madden’s The Birds of the Innocent Wood56 and
One by One in the Darkness.57 So many works of contemporary fiction from Northern
Ireland contain secrets that the argument can be made that the place in which these
works are set lends itself to the writing of subject matter revolving around what is
secretive, withheld or silenced. Secrets feature in the border writer Eugene McCabe’s
gothic Victorian novel, Death and Nightingales58 and in his short story collection
Heaven Lies About Us,59 in Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence,60 and in Bernard
MacLaverty’s novels Cal61 and Grace Notes.62 They are found in novels from Northern
Ireland featuring friendships that cross religious and social barriers, such as Jennifer
Johnston’s Shadows on our Skin,63 the category in which sits Glenn Patterson’s Burning
Your Own.
Secrets are interconnected with sectarian and state brutality in Eoin McNamee’s
novels Resurrection Man64 and The Ultras,65 and in several of David Park’s works,
including The Big Snow66 and Swallowing the Sun, as well as in the very large group of
books that fall within the Troubles thriller mode. Robert McLiam Wilson’s renowned
novel Eureka Street contains what could be termed a “secret chapter”, in which a bomb
explosion in a sandwich bar is narrated in terrible, poignant, detail, in sharp contrast to
56 (London: Faber and Faber, 1988).

57 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
58 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).
60 (London: Bloomsbury, 1990).
61 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
62 (London: Vintage, 1998).
63 (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1977).
64 (London: Picador, 1994).
65 (London: Faber & Faber, 2004).
29
the blackly humourous tone found throughout the rest of the book.67 Secrets enable the
interweaving of radical political commentary to a highly experimental narrative form in
Ciaran Carson’s Shamrock Tea.68 They also feature in novels examining the plight of
victimised, bullied or marginal individuals such as Tara West’s Fodder69 and Anna
Burns’ No Bones.
There has also been a sharp increase in the publication of critical works on
contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland in recent years. These works include
examinations of fiction published in Northern Ireland over the last three decades. These
critical surveys attest to an increasing critical and popular interest. The first of these full-
length critical works was Eamonn Hughes’ Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland
(Ideas and Production)70 that included references to Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your
Own, first published in 1987. This was followed by several full-length works of literary
criticism on contemporary fiction, as well as chapters specialising in that fiction within
larger works on Irish literature as a whole, and many related journal essays, working
papers and monographs. Linda Leith’s 1992 article in the Canadian Journal of Irish
Studies alerted readers to what she argued was a sharper “interrogation of history” in
recent fiction from Northern Ireland.71 One of the first books to survey fiction from
Northern Ireland that had been published after 1985, as well as the numerous debates
surrounding cultural and literary critical practices in Northern Ireland was Richard
Kirkland’s Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of
Danger.72 This work employed the term “interregnum” as a central means through
67 ( London: Secker and Warburg, 1996).

68 (London: Granta, 2001).
69 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2002).
70 (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991).
71 Subverting the Sectarian Heritage: Recent Novels of Northern Ireland”, Canadian
Journal for Irish Studies, Dec 1992, 88-108, [2].
72 (Essex: Longman, 1996).
30
which to understand what Kirkland perceived to be the current state of affairs, in terms
of both cultural and critical practices and the historical moment in Northern Ireland.
The term “interregnum” has also been further explored in John Brannigan’s recent
chapter on fiction from Northern Ireland, “Northern Irish Fiction: Provisionals and
Pataphysicians.”73 1996 also saw the publication of Joe Cleary’s influential essay on the
relationship of politics to form in narratives from Northern Ireland.74 These works
werefollowed by Laura Pelaschiar’s 1998 monograph Writing the North: The
Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland.75 In 2000 Liam Harte and Michael Parker’s
edited collection of essays: Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories was
released. It contained one of the earlier post-colonial readings of Reading in the Dark,
as well as an essay by Richard Haslam warning against the aestheticisation of violence
in some contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland.76 The following year, Gerry
Smyth’s Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination77 contained an extended close
reading of space and place in relation to Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark. 2001
also saw the publication of Patrick Magee’s book, Gangsters or Guerillas:
Representations of Irish Republicanism in Troubles Fiction78 which provided an
extensive survey of works of fiction set against the backdrop of the Troubles, and came
to the persuasive conclusion (particularly, though not solely, in relation to popular
fiction from Northern Ireland) that there was a “demonstrable bias of the genre towards
73 This chapter is found in A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, ed.

James F. English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.)
74 “Fork-Tongued on the Border Bit”: Partition and the Politics of Form in
Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict”, in The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 95,No. 1,1996.
75 (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso,1998).
76 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2000).
77 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001).
78 (Belfast: Beyond the Pale).
31
the British discourse on the conflict”79, though he also looked forward to a time when
“the genre in a transformed mode will contribute to the creation of a fresh, more
tolerant and inclusive subjectivity”80, a hope that I believe is fulfilled in the four works
that are my primary field of study. Other critical works include Linden Peach’s The
Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings81 Heather Ingman’s Twentieth-Century
Fiction by Irish women: Nation and Gender82 which included a chapter focusing on
writing by women from Northern Ireland, and Shane Alcobia-Murphy’s Governing the
Tongue in Northern Ireland: The Place of Art/The Art of Place.83 Elmer Kennedy-
Andrews brought out his critical overview in 2003, Fiction and the Northern Ireland
Troubles since 1969:(De-) constructing the North84 and has subsequently edited the
collection of essays titled Irish Fiction Since the 1960s: A Collection of Critical Essays.85
In the last two years Michael Parker has also written the two-volume Northern Irish
Literature 1956-75 and Northern Irish Literature, 1975-2006: The Imprint of History86
and edited, along with Scott Brewster, the collection of essays titled Irish Literature since
1990: Diverse Voices87 which contains the most recent essay on this topic, Neal
Alexander’s “Remembering to forget: Northern Irish fiction after the Troubles”.
These works range in their focus and approaches to contemporary fiction from
Northern Ireland. Several of the authors and editors of these works have made
79 Magee, 217.
80 Magee, 221.
81 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
82 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
83 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005).
84 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003).
85 (Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe Limited, 2006). Ulster Editions and Monographs:
13.
86 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
87 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Neal Alexander’s essay is on pages
272-283.
32
comments about the gradual introduction of post-modern structural forms and devices
in recent fiction:
In the contemporary period, Irish fiction – with significant exceptions – has been
remarkable for the conventionality of its formal procedures. But while there
may be no wholesale embracement of an experimental postmodern aesthetic
practice, it is impossible to escape the wide sweep of the postmodern novel.88
Such comments are often tempered with an acknowledgement of the persistence of
realism in recent fiction “[c]ontemporary writers are still participating in the realist and
modernist struggle for truth and vision, not adopting the postmodernist preoccupation
with mere style”.89 I agree with this view, having found in all the novels I examined the
use of non-realist forms and devices as a means to an end. Elements such as
interchanging points of view, switches between varying registers, moods and tones, flash-
backs and the insertions of dreams, anecdotes and reveries are almost always framed by
substantial sections of text narrated in the realist mode, moving the story forward
chronologically and with a fairly linear development of the major themes in each case.
In critical works upon contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland there are
also varying methodological approaches. These include Michael Parker’s linking of the
fiction to detailed historical contexts, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews’ examination of form
and genre shifts and Linden Peach’s psychoanalytically informed readings.90 My
approach is closest to that of Linden Peach, particularly in regard to his interest in the
88 Kennedy-Andrews, Irish Fiction Since the 1960s: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 9.

89 Kennedy-Andrews, Irish Fiction Since the 1960s: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 9.
90 Michael Parker, Northern Irish Literature 1956-75 and Northern Irish Literature,
1975-2006: The Imprint of History and Irish Literature since 1990: Diverse
Voices; Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles
since 1969: (De-) constructing the North and Fiction Since the 1960s: A
Collection of Critical Essays; Linden Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel:
Critical Readings.
33
secretive and the haunted in contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland, his use of
Bhabha and Freud, and in his application of Derrida’s concept of the crypt as a context
for reading certain elements in Reading in the Dark.91 I share several of his attitudes
and interests in relation to contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland, and in
particular to Reading in the Dark. Where I differ from Peach is in the methodological
approaches I combine with psychoanalytic rhetoric’s relating to the secret, which in my
case includes writings on the spectacle and in an emphasis on the social and economic
conditions influencing many of the traumas depicted in the four novels that are my
main objects of study. John Brannigan proposes that the Peace process itself is a
“fictional space”, a contradictory rhetorical field that is “open to imaginative
transformation, and yet continually haunted by the narratives of loss, trauma and
elegiac desires”.92 Brannigan links this idea to innovatory approaches to subject and
forms in recent contemporary fiction from Northern Ireland: “the paradoxical state of
affairs which characterises the interregnum is refracted critically and imaginatively in
Irish fiction as a whole”.93 I agree that the writers of Northern Ireland literary fiction
written in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement have chosen an increasing
tendency to take risks with their work in terms of style and form. They have also often
blended an awareness of the traumas of the past with a recognition of the compelling
hold those traumas still have over both writer and reader. Nevertheless, I would also
argue that other factors need to be taken into consideration when thinking about the
possible influences behind a particular writer’s approach to the subject of the Troubles
in fiction from Northern Ireland, including personal experiece, political leanings and
other writers that have influenced their work. Three of the fours novels I read closely
were published after the cease-fires of 1994, and two of them were published after the
91 Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings, pp. 38-58.

92 Brannigan, 144.
93 Brannigan, 146.
34
Good Friday Agreement. There is a noticeable difference in the mood and atmosphere
established in Burning Your Own, which was written in the mid to late 1980s, to that
found in Reading in the Dark and Swallowing the Sun, which have, respectively, more
self-reflexive and elegiac responses to their subject matter. In Burning Your Own, the
increasingly insistent rise in hostilities of the years 1968-1969, in which the book is set, is
expressed through the relatively short time-span that the book covers, and the rapid
introduction of violent and frightening events, as the reader, like the protagonist, young
Mal, is swept along towards the violent conclusion. Yet even this earlier work, written
and published as it was in the middle of the Troubles, drew its inspiration from a
number of sources, and not just the Patterson’s experiences of life in Northern Ireland.
Patterson does remark in a 1998 interview that one of the key concerns in writing
Burning Your Own had been to explore “how a particular section of society that I knew
quite well had changed…to something quite sectarian in its outlook”94, but in the same
interview he talks about the miners’ strike of the 1980s, and the influence these also had
upon his writing. For Patterson, the strikes provided
…a way for me to understand what had happened in my childhood…there are
moments in our history when everything becomes pressurised and extreme and
people make choices they wouldn’t normally make…95
When interviewed about Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane repeatedly emphasised
the links between his personal history and political history in Northern Ireland: “I don’t
suppose that there was any point at which I ever felt that there was a visible gap
94 Glenn Patterson, in interview with Esther Aliaga, Interviews with Writers and
Academics, eds. Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa González, Ines Praga and Esther
Aliaga, Vol. 115 of Costerus (Amsterdam: Rodopi: 1998), p.98.
95 Interviews with Writers and Academics, p. 98.
35
between what people call politics and my personal life.”96 Deane’s political positions, in
particular his argument that “the political system [in Northern Ireland] is based on
various forms of coercion and colonization”97 make it difficult to see Reading in the
Dark a straight-forward example of a post-ceasefire novel. Brannigan argues that in this
work “ History, it seems, has the last word.”98 Anna Burns’ No Bones was written post
cease-fire, (the cease-fire is mentioned in the last chapter of the book), and published
after the Good Friday Agreement. It sharply illustrates Brannigan’s argument that the
Agreement created a space “open to imaginative transformation…yet haunted by the
narratives of loss, trauma and elegiac desires” in its deeply troubled relationship to the
past, that is the same time expressed through blackly comic, parodic and playful writing.
Yet the overwhelming feeling you are left with after reading the book is one of terrible
sadness. The shocking experiences of Burns’ characters stay in your mind more
persistently than the tempered ending. In this way No Bones, despite being a post-
agreement publication, maintains an intensity of mood, atmosphere and subject matter
that could only have been created by someone like Anna Burns whose formative years
were continually punctuated by moments of extreme violence. Brannigan’s argument
that the distinctive political and historical circumstances surrounding the years of the
peace process or “interregnum” have been “refracted critically and imaginatively in
Northern Irish Fiction as a whole”99 are perhaps most evident in David Park’s novel
Swallowing the Sun, and in his comments on the processes that inform his writing. In an
interview related to his most recent book, The Truth Commissioner, Park made several
observations that could be equally applied to the central concerns of Swallowing the
96 Deane, “Irish Secrets and Lies,” Salon Interview (April 1997),

http://www.salon.com/april97/deane970411.html
97 Deane, “Irish Secrets and Lies.”
98 Brannigan, 150.
99 Brannigan, 146.
36
Sun, namely that “the conundrum for us [people living in Northern Ireland] is how do
we deal with the past without damaging and destablising the present?”100
Secrets appear in multiple forms in each of the four novels I examine. Their
contents and means of manifestation are related, in each case, to the experiences of the
central characters and their family histories, but also to the distinctive set of social,
political and historical circumstances in which each story is encased. Sometimes these
secrets are established in the course of the characters’ childhoods; in other cases they
have begun decades earlier. The way in which they are revealed often also speaks a
great deal about the extent of a culture of secrecy in Northern Ireland, and the issues of
agency and control that are tied into this culture.
In Reading in the Dark, the first events relating to the boy narrator’s many
family secrets are revealed to have occurred during the 1920s in Derry, during the Irish
Civil War. He first hears the story of these events in 1948, from one of the Brothers at
his school, who narrates the tale in a deceptively off-hand manner, saying at the outset
“[s]ome of you here, one or two of you, perhaps, know the man I am going to talk about
today. You may not know you know him, but that doesn’t matter” (22). What the
narrator comes to realise is that the opposite of these words is true. It matters a great
deal that he does not know he knows him. He discovers, through a classmate, that the
man at the centre of the story, who pushed another man to his death over a bridge, was
his grandfather (26). The Brother’s admonishments to the boys to stand apart from the
violence and injustice of the world is undermined by the fact that he told the story to the
class, many of whom would have known the true identity of the perpetrator, and thus he
indirectly (but probably knowingly) punishes the boy for a family secret of which he was
previously unaware.
100 David Park, The Arts Show interview on “The Truth Commissioner”, Monday, 2nd
November, 2008. RTÉ Ten.
http://www.rte.ie/ten/2009/1102/impac,html?TB_iframe=true&height=650&w
idth=850.
37
In Burning Your Own, Mal’s main secret is one of his own creation, as he makes
friends with a boy who has been vilified by many others in the town, and who now
spends most of his days at the town dump. Yet even this secret is informed by the
domestic troubles at Mal’s home, and by the tense atmosphere and outbreaks of rioting
in the summer of 1969 in Belfast. In this case the way in which his secrets come to light
is tragically spectacular, as the various secrets and disturbances in the town, both
domestic and sectarian, find their most dramatic outcome in the death of a young man.
The secrets in No Bones are multiple and almost continuous, springing from the
experiences of a child growing up in an extremely violent family during the equally
violent years of the Troubles in Ardoyne from 1969 until 1994. The means of their
revelation are frequently as disturbing as the origins of the secrets themselves, returning
to haunt their possessors in the forms of hallucinations, self-damage and mental
breakdowns.
Swallowing the Sun, set in the years following the 1998 Good Friday agreement,
contains secrets from the past and the present that merge haunt the protagonist, Martin
Waring. They are movingly brought to light through a highly personalised museum
installation in which Martin seeks to bring to the attention of the public eye the private
traumas that have been overlooked or unheeded in Northern Ireland.
The last section of this introduction provides brief overviews of the writers in
question, as well as the particular places into which each novel fits into their respective
writing careers. This section also outlines the positions taken by the writers in regard to
social, economic and political issues in contemporary Northern Ireland. The overview
also includes some of the inter-textual sources that I read as having strong influences
upon the books, or that provide useful prisms through which to read them. The
overview is intended to provide historical and cultural glosses to the experiences, both
public and private, that the authors explore in these four novels.
38
Seamus Deane
The sense of bringing something into possession of which you’ve lost possession, or which has
been taken from you in some way (not always by someone else, sometimes by yourself) – that’s
what writing is really about. Not a therapy, not an act of redemption but an act of possession,
an act of understanding.101
Seamus Deane was born in 1940 in Derry, Northern Ireland into a working-class,
nationalist, Catholic family. He was one of the early beneficiaries of the 1947 Education
Act, winning a scholarship that enabled him to attended St Columb’s College in Derry,
where Seamus Heaney was a friend and fellow student. He went on to attend Queen’s
University Belfast and Pembroke College at Cambridge University. He produced three
poetry collections: Gradual Wars, Rumours, and History Lessons102 and was an early
member and director of The Field Day Theatre Company. The Field Day enterprise
has played a pivotal role in shaping critical and creative culture in Northern Ireland.
Initially staging plays by playwrights from Northern Ireland, in the hope of establishing
a major theatre company there, Field Day went on to expand as a publishing company,
publishing several pamphlets on aspects of political and literary culture in Northern
Ireland as well as the massive enterprise embodied in the Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing.
The Anthology (now in five volumes) has also played a huge role in the literary
culture of Northern Ireland. Deane was the General Editor of Volumes I to III of the
Anthology. It is an invaluable archive, including extensive writing from and about
Northern Ireland, and has also been the centre of extensive debate about what such a
collection should contain.103 Deane also wrote or introduced several other early Field
101 Seamus Deane, taking to Carol Rumens, “Reading Deane,” Fortnight (July/August
1997), p. 30.
102 Gradual Wars (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), Rumours (Dublin: The
Dolmen Press, 1977), History Lessons (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1983.)
103 The debates surrounding the Field Day Company up until 1984 have been best
surveyed in Marilynn J Richtarik’s Acting Between the Lines: the Field Day
Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (Oxford English
39
Day Pamphlets including Civilians and Barbarians and Heroic Styles: The Tradition of
an Idea.104 He then went on to publish many works of non-fiction including: Celtic
Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980, A Short History Of Irish
Literature, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790,
and Foreign Affections: Essays On Edmund Burke.105 Deane’s first novel, Reading in
the Dark was published in 1996. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won
The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and The Irish Literature Prize in 1997. He
is currently the Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame,
Indiana, and a co-editor of Field Day Review, an annual Irish literary journal.106
As a poet, editor, critic and novelist, Deane has played key roles in relation to
cultural and critical readings of Northern Ireland and Irish literature. Deane’s insight
into the particular discourses that have operated within the framework of Irish writing
and culture contributed enormously to a re-mapping of cultural territory and literary
identity in Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is worth briefly surveying a few of his
substantial achievements as a cultural and literary critic and key member of the Field
Day enterprise in Northern Ireland, as I believe many of the strands of his research and
writing in these fields find new expression in Reading in the Dark.
Monographs) (Oxford University Press, 1994). Criticism and debate over the
publication of Volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology was also heated.
These volumes, and some of the debate surrounding them, are examined in
Roisin Higgins, “‘A drift of chosen females?’”: The Field Day Anthology of Irish
Writing, Vols 4 and 5,” Irish University Review Vol 33, No.2 (2003), 400-406.
104 Field Day Pamphlet no. 3 (Derry: Field Day, 1983), Field Day Pamphlet no. 4
(Derry: Field Day, 1984).
105 (London: Faber & Faber, 1985); (London: Hutchinson, 1986); (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997); (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004.)
106 Field Day Review: A Journal of Irish Studies (Dublin 2005-). Seamus Deane is co-
editor with Breandán Mac Suibhne.
http://www.fielddaybooks.com
40
In setting out the general agenda of The Field Day Anthology Deane wrote of a
desire to find a new way of representing Ireland. Deane’s introduction claims for the
Anthology an all-encompassing role, that contains within itself a central story or
narrative that shelters and in some ways directs smaller versions of Irish literature:
There is a story here, a meta-narrative, which is, we believe, hospitable to all the
micro-narratives that, from time to time, achieved prominence as the official
version of the true history, political and literary, of the island’s past and
present.107
I am interested here in Deane’s phrase “hospitable to all the micro-narratives that, from
time to time, achieved prominence as the official version of the true history”. This
hospitality to micro-narratives is central to the formal structure and underlying
ideologies of Reading in the Dark, which questions the notion of one central truth or
way of understanding history, and stresses the importance of listening to and taking into
consideration multiple narratives and versions of singular events.
The secret in Reading in the Dark is the central means through which this
process operates. Secrets pose a challenge to ideas of fixed and essential truths through
their very nature. Partial, half-disclosed, open to change with each telling, they are the
means through which Deane explores the narrator’s gradual realisation of the
importance of micro-narratives. The narrator’s insistent attempts to find the real story
are also revealing of his wish for a comforting “meta-narrative” by which to organise the
confusion and gaps in his world.
In the Field Day Anthology Deane also advocates an increased awareness of the
ways in which different communities or social groups, often with completely different
107 Seamus Deane, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol. I, General Editor:
Seamus Deane, Associate Editors: Andrew Carpenter, (Derry: Jonathan Williams,
1991), p. xix.
41
aims, will share a need for myth as a means of expressing these aims:
What is to be understood here is the felt need for mythologies, heroic
lineages, dreams of continuity; in short, the need, expressed by different
generations in individual ways, to colonise historical territory and repossess
it.108
This statement seems to pinpoint a central tenet in Deane’s critical thinking. Deane’s
critical writing has frequently addressed the ways in which cultural myths are created
and the dangers inherent in turning those myths into unquestioned versions of history:
Each society has its own regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is,
the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the
mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false
statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and
procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who
are charged with saying what counts as true.109
Yet Deane is not immune to the lure of the mythic. While he warns of the dangers
inherent in accepting myths about Irish literary history as fact, he also critiques an
overly prosaic view of history. In Strange Country his repudiation of revisionist history
employs terms that honour a sense of life loved beyond the economic and mundane and
in doing so, recalls a romantic vision of Ireland:
Revisionism legitimates those Irish cultural formations that wish to adhere to the
British system, even if by violent means; it refuses legitimacy to those who wish
to break from it, especially if their means are violent…the possibility that a
108 Deane, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol. I, p. xxiii.
109 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(London, Penguin Books, 1991), p.73.
42
community might actually surrender economic well-being for something less
boring, might ignore the quiet life for the sake of ‘freedom’…while it is
something to be lauded in other parts of the world, is not at all to be welcomed
in Ireland.110
Deane’s weaving of myth and history in Reading in the Dark brings many of these
insights into play, performing the mutually interrogative work that Richard Kearney has
defined as the most fitting application of these two paradigms:
Without mythology, our hopes and memories are homeless…[But] we must
never cease to keep our mythological images in dialogue with history; because
once we do we fossilise. That is why we will go on telling stories, inventing and
re-inventing myths, until we have brought history home to itself.111
Whether or not the nameless narrator in Reading in the Dark manages to bring
“history home” is a matter for debate, but what is consistent with Kearney’s model is
the notion of myth and history in constant dialogue with one another. This interchange
is reflected in the novel’s formal structure and approach to its subject matter. Although
it is ordered chronologically, events and memories loop back upon each other
throughout the book. Stories are narrated in a number of ways, differing according to
their tellers. Fixed meanings and historical certainties are undermined and broken open.
All of this lends a post-structuralist flavour to the novel, which has been described as a
text that “engages with the ideology and identitarian politics of its own represented
context”112 formally mirroring in its plot, repeating stories and organisational principles
110 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” p. 193.

111 Richard Kearney, “Myth and Motherland,” in Ireland’s Field Day (London:
Hutchinson, 1985), p. 80.
112 Eóin Flannery, “Reading in the Light of Reading in the Dark,” Irish Studies Review
Vol. 11 (2003), 71-80, [78].
43
the questions over identity and history that informed Deane’s childhood. Secrets and
hauntings can also found in relation to the publication history of the novel’s subject
matter113, and in the many other works featuring concealment and ghosts that the novel
alludes to.114 John Brannigan has observed that Reading in the Dark is
…a self-consciously haunted narrative, not just in its treatment of haunting as a
theme, but in that it is, in so many ways, a ghosted text itself, haunted by its
many intertexts and precursors.”115
These elements, along with Deane’s evocative prose, result in an uncanny
narration. The felt experience of the everyday swings between placid familiarity and the
intimation of more unsettling associations. After playing handball in the street, the
narrator dodges “between the strokes of the rain” (39). His sister Ena, in the last stages
of tuberculosis, coughs up “crimson sparks” (40) and the town he lives in, Derry, “lay
entranced, embraced by the great sleeping light of the river and the green beyond of the
border”(36). Reading in the Dark is marked by an intriguing yoking of socialist realism,
(with an accompanying criticism of social and economic inequity) with an original and
provocative interest in the mythic as a medium for expressing the buried traumas of a
deeply conflicted society.
Within this matrix, the secret in Reading in the Dark is a complex site of
freedom and containment. Secrets may be twisted to serve individuals in positions of
113 “The earliest extract from what would become Reading in the Dark was published in
Granta magazine in Spring 1986; subsequent extracts appeared there in 1988,
1991 and 1994”, Liam Harte, “History Lessons: Postcolonialism and Seamus
Deane’s Reading in the Dark”, Irish University Review Vol. 30, No.1 (2000), 149-
162, [149].
114 These include Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and James Joyce’s Portrait of
the Artist as A Young Man as well as numerous traditional Irish folk tales, myths
and superstitions.
115 “Northern Irish Fiction: Provisionals and Pataphysicians” in A Concise Companion
to Contemporary British Fiction, ed. James F. English, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
141-163, [147].
44
influence, but are also frequently associated with places of mediation for the outsider or
misinformed, spaces in which the mythic can be used to come to terms with social,
historical and personal alienation.
Derrida’s image of the crypt containing buried and repressed psychic content
and guarded by a keeper who is unaware of the true nature of that content,116 also finds
a haunting resonance in many episodes in Reading in the Dark. It is this resonance,
along with Deane’s engagement with the roles of myth and rumour in forming identity
that indicated to me most obviously the book’s connection to all that is secret. Within
this investigation, I use the Derridean concept of the crypt in a slightly different way
from Linden Peach, who has also drawn connections between the novel and Derrida’s
famous foreword.117 Where he focuses upon Derrida’s use of the term “topoi” in
relation to the crypt – “the grounds in which the crypt is situated, are intended to hide
at least as much as hold the crypt”118 – my main interest lies in another striking image
Derrida employs in the same piece of writing; the image of the crypt guardian or
keeper.119 In my close reading, I draw parallels between Derrida’s crypt keeper and the
seanchas or oral storytellers found in the novel. I argue that while the various seanchas in
the novel play an important role in offering alternative versions of history to the young
narrator, they often prevent him from exhuming the contents of the crypt – the ongoing
Reality (in Abraham’s and Toroks’ terms)120 of repressed family and communal trauma.
116 Derrida, “‘Foreword’ Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicholas Abraham and Maria
Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: a Cryptonymy,
trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. xxxv.
117 Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings, pp. 43-54.
118 Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings, p.44.
119 “For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and
old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of
repression.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 394.
120 “Reality can then be defined as what is rejected, masked, denied precisely as ‘reality’:
it is that which is, all the more so since it must not be known; in short, Reality is
defined as a secret.” Abraham and Torok, “The Topography of Reality: Sketching
45
The image of the crypt guardian functions as a striking visual emblem of the
secretive in combination with the spectacular – his presence turns others, including the
self, away from the contents of the crypt. But he also draws attention to the crypt’s
existence, participating in a continual parade of attention and refusal. In Reading in the
Dark the protagonist needs to work through the various devices that his family’s crypt-
keepers have put into place, in order to discover the true contents of the family crypt. It
becomes the task of the narrator to tell the kind of story that opens the crypt, a task ably
completed in the novel’s framing story.
Glenn Patterson
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961. He grew up in a housing estate on the
outskirts of the city that was originally partially integrated, but which became more
segregated and Unionist in nature after the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969. He went
to school at the Methodist College Belfast, and then completed the Creative Writing
MA at the University of East Anglia. At East Anglia he was taught by Angela Carter,
who was instrumental in helping him publish his first novel, Burning Your Own.121 He
returned to Northern Ireland in 1988. He is the author of several novels. The first,
Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award
and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Fat Lad (1992)122 was shortlisted for the
Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award. This book contains the clearly autobiographical
device of a young man returning to Northern Ireland after being away for ten years.
a Metapsychology of Secrets,” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of

Psychoanalysis, p.157.
121 “She phoned the managing director of Chatto and said to her, ‘I’ve seen about half
this book, and if the second half is as good as the first half then I recommend it to
you.’ The managing director read it and accepted it.” Glenn Patterson talking
with Richard Mills, “Nothing has to Die: An Interview with Glenn Patterson,” in
Writing Ulster, ed. Bill Lazenblatt [Northern Narratives], no. 6. (1999), 113-139,
[122].
122 (London: Chatto & Windus).
46
Fat Lad is a medium for exploring the various political and ethical tangles that
constituted life in Northern Ireland at the time. This was followed by Black Night at Big
Thunder Mountain (1995),123 set on the Euro Disney construction site. It is one of only
two of his novels not primarily set in Belfast. The International (1999)124 is set in a
Belfast hotel in 1967. It explores the arbitrariness of history, using as its background
material the shooting of the four barmen from The International in 1967. These men
were the first official victims of the Troubles. Number 5 (2003),125 depicts the various
occupants of a house in a suburban Belfast street over 45 years. In the novel the
Troubles are referred to only obliquely, as Patterson aims to demonstrate that the small
daily activities and rituals of the inhabitants occupy their thoughts to a much greater
extent than the background of political and sectarian violence. That Which Was
(2004),126 is also set in Belfast and features a Presbyterian Minister, new to the Church,
who is visited by a man who says he remembers doing a terrible deed during the early
years of the Troubles. This novel has several resonances with David Park’s Swallowing
the Sun, in the form of its investment in the nature of memory, and the power of
unresolved issues from the past to trouble the present. His latest work of fiction, The
Third Party, set in Japan, was published in 2007.127 Lapsed Protestant, a collection of
his non-fiction, containing several illuminating essays on his childhood, attitudes
towards politics and political culture in Northern Ireland, and his own position as a
writer in relation to these things, was published in 2006.128 A memoir, Once Upon a
Hill: Love in Troubled Times was published in 2008.129 It uses archival material from
123 (London: Chatto &Windus).

124 (London: Anchor).
125 (London: Hamish Hamilton).
126 (London: Hamish Hamilton).
127 (Blackstaff Press).
128 (Dublin: New Island).
129 (London: Bloomsbury).
47
the period of his grandparents’ lives, as well as on the town in which they lived and
where he was born, Lisburn, as a rich source for exploring issues of loyalty and betrayal,
and how the period in which one lives forms values and allegiances.
! Patterson has also been Writer in Residence at the Universities of East Anglia,
Cork and Queen’s University, Belfast, where he currently teaches on the MA in
Creative Writing. In 2006, he was elected on to Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish Artists.
In various interviews over the last decade Patterson has maintained an ambivalent
stance in relation to his commonly cited position as a “Protestant Northern Irish
Writer”.130 He sees identity labels, in general, as constricting and false:
I really dislike the term ‘two communities’…It’s just a lie. What does it
mean, ‘the Protestant community’? What does it mean to me? I was born
Protestant and I went to a Presbyterian church, but what ‘the two
communities’ connotes is that, if you know what the religion of birth is,
you can know their politics. And it’s just not the thing that defines me or
most people.131
Patterson has acknowledged the extent to which the Troubles impacted upon his
childhood and formative years:
I think that my entire life from the age of eight until the age of well,
whenever it stopped, was completely dominated by the fact that there
was violence occurring there. It wasn’t that you couldn’t live a normal
130 “All I was trying to do with it (writing Fat Lad) was, not to understand Ulster
Protestants, but to use its particular place and that particular identity to look at
what to me is a universal. People’s lives are impacted upon by political
decisions…I think it is unfortunate, but true, that I have been branded as someone
who is only interested in Ulster Protestantism.”Glenn Patterson, “Nothing has to
Die: An Interview with Glenn Patterson,” p. 122.
131 Patterson speaking in an interview with Clare Dwyer Hogg, “Glenn Patterson:
Alternative Ulster,” The Independent on Sunday, Books (March 26, 2004).
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/glenn-
patterson-alternative-ulster-567608.htm
48
life. You could live a kind of normal life but people worked out new rules
by which to operate.132
He has also acknowledged the manner in which his experiences of living in Northern
Ireland, and in particular the city of Belfast, have informed and shaped his works
I think that everybody, all writers, are affected by the place that they live
in…Even if I was to stop writing novels set in Northern Ireland, they would still
in some way be informed by the experience of growing up and living here, and
some of the concerns would be the concerns of a person living here, even if the
characters were doing something completely different. 133
A reading of his works reveals several common threads that underline his interest in
recuperating lost moments and figures from the past. These include a preoccupation
with the relationship of character to setting, an attention to the specific details of a short
period of time and a narrative investment in presenting the values and concerns that
were relevant to people living in the second half of the twentieth century in Northern
Ireland. 134
Patterson’s novels draw upon, but also trouble, the Protestant component of his
literary reputation. Several of his novels, including Burning Your Own, Fat Lad and
That Which Was contain central figures who are openly identified as Protestants, but
these identifications are often used as much to disturb pre-conceived ideas about
Protestant and Catholic identities in Northern Ireland as to reinforce them. A reading of
132 Patterson, interviewed by Esther Aliaga, in Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa González, Inés
Praga and Esther Aliaga, Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and
Academics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) Volume 115 of Costerus Series, p. 94.
133 Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics, p. 93.
134 For further biographical material on Glenn Patterson see the relevant British
Council Contemporary Writers webpage:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=101.
49
his works reveals several common threads that underline his interest in recuperating lost
moments and figures from the past. His works reveal a desire to combine the intimate
details of a certain time, event or place with allegorical elements that operate to link the
events within the novel to a broader world picture. Even his novel featuring a
Presbyterian minister, That Which Was, is more interested in individual responses to
historical trauma than programmed orthodoxies.
Patterson’s ethical stance in relation to the Troubles and to Northern Ireland is
deeply connected to what is secret in Burning Your Own. In this novel he is primarily
concerned with the words and activities that take place out of sight of the front lines of
conflict as well as the unspoken assumptions upon which conflict rests. In my close
reading of Burning Your Own I examine several forms or manifestations of the secret.
The first of these I read in the use of locale as a signifier for what is suppressed or
dislocated in sectarian identity structures. Other forms include the inter-relationship of
fear of and desire for the Other, and the inversion of dominant theological and symbolic
codes. Finally, I examine what I read as Patterson’s use of spectacle as a means of
giving voice to shared experience.135 I draw upon aspects of the Gothic in my discussion
of the narrative style and imagery found within this novel, which combines an almost
photographic realism with a Gothicism that centres upon decay, burial and
confrontational resurrections.
The Gothic in Burning Your Own is given a contemporary twist. Inversions of
reality are situated in the town dump, domestic spats lead to premature burials of
household pets, and the return of the repressed is narrated in a matter-of-fact manner.
135 John Goodby, “Bhabha, the Post/Colonial and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your
Own,” Irish Studies Review Vol. 7, No.1 (1999), 65-72 and John Goodby,
“Reading Protestant Writing: Representations of the Troubles in the Poetry of
Derek Mahon and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own,” in Modern Irish Writers
and the Wars, ed. Kathleen Devine, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe Limited,
1999), pp. 219-244.
50
In my examination of the subversion of theological discourses in the novel, I am
indebted to previous works on Protestantism and literature by John Wilson Foster,
Victor Sage and Barry Sloan.136 Finally, I employ post-colonial literature and criticism
in my reading of Burning Your Own. In this field I draw upon the work of Homi
Bhabha in particular, applying his work on the mingling of loathing and desire in
relation to the Other in Burning Your Own. I also refer to Bhabha’s work upon the
colonial subject’s use of mimicry as a means of unsettling dominant discourses.137
Anna Burns
Anna Burns was born in Ardoyne, Belfast in 1962. Ardoyne is a staunchly Republican
and Catholic area of Belfast. She attended school at Holy Cross Girls’ School, Ardoyne.
This school features in No Bones though it is not named directly. In 2001 this school
was at the centre of a series of attacks upon students, an episode that Burns has
commented on in the press.138 Published in 2001, her first novel No Bones won that
year’s Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in
2002.
136 See: John Wilson Foster, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Dublin: Gill &
Macmillan, 1974), Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition
(Houndmills: The MacMillan Press, 1988); Barry Sloan, Writers and
Protestantism in the North of Ireland: Heirs to Adamnation? (Dublin, Ireland:
Irish Academic Press, 2000); and Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family
Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999) p. 199.
137 Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” Ch
4, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
138 “Last week I deliberately avoided all news about this Holy Cross primary school
debacle…This was because of the fear and shame of the rage – the big giant rage
– that Northern Ireland always brings up in me… [w]hen I was asked to do this
piece, though, I got up my courage and turned on the television… So how dare
those loyalists and, how dare those Ardoyne parents? Think of the terror that must
grip adults that they would put children through something like that. It ought to
be about the children, oughtn’t it? Unfortunately, though, it’s still about
deprivation, it’s still about the belief that there’s not enough to go around, and it’s
still about that grim, tribal, base-of-the-spine determination that one’s own reality
has to be the reality that prevails.” Anna Burns, “School of tears and terror,” The
Sunday Times (9 September 2001).
http://global.factiva.com/ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/ha/default.aspx
51
Little Constructions followed No Bones in 2007.139 Little Constructions charts
the twists and turns in the lives of the members of another extremely volatile family, the
Does. Little Constructions is even more surreal than No Bones in terms of its plotting,
tone and stylistic devices. It also differs in its use of place. While the events of the book
take place in the fictional town of “Tiptoe Floorboard”, reviewers have variously placed
it in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and provincial England,140 suggesting
that Burns is experimenting with a broader canvas than that found in No Bones, the
events of which take place obviously and predominantly in Northern Ireland. Little
Constructions explores similar themes to Burns’ first novel including the inter-
relationship of sexuality and violence, the re-emergence of trauma and the strange
behaviours people put into place to manage life under very violent circumstances.
In No Bones text and character engage in multiple processes of subterfuge,
erasure and transformation. No Bones is set primarily in Ardoyne, Belfast, a Troubles
hot spot for many years. It spans the years from “Thursday 1969”, with the arrival of
British soldiers in Belfast, to 1994, the year before the first IRA and Loyalist ceasefire.
The novel is strongly tied to real historical events and issues. It contains references to
sectarian and Royal Ulster Constabulary violence, peace initiatives, the Shankill
Butchers141 and the eventual ceasefires. Each chapter is titled with a year from the
Troubles, linking the daily trials of the characters of the novel with the larger conflicts
taking place at the time. The setting in time and place of the book in the middle of the
139 (London: Fourth Estate).

140 For example: “Set in an Irish town a few decades past… what it’s really about is
1970s Northern Ireland…” Lottie Mogach, “Little Constructions Review,”
Financial Times (August 2, 2007), p.40, and “Burns serves up a gloriously off-
kilter and surreal riff on the English village genre…” Jean Hanna Edelstein,
“Little Constructions Review,” in Books, The Observer (April 27, 2008), p.27.
141 The Shankill Butchers were a loyalist gang, who carried out a number of extremely
violent and often grotesque, beatings, tortures and murders in Belfast during the
1970s. While primarily targeting Catholics, a number of Protestants were also
included amongst their victims.
52
Troubles also means that the characters live within a very small and enclosed world that
has its own distinctive social norms.
Burns has stated in interviews that the novel has many autobiographical
elements, a moving statement considering the extent of the violence, pain and suffering
that fills its pages.142 Events are narrated through the eyes of a number of characters
living in Ardoyne, but primarily through those of the central figure in the work, Amelia
Lovett. Significant sections are narrated through Amelia’s eyes as a child, in order to
create a world of intensely felt experience, and to convey the mindset of a child living in
a state of continual anxiety. These processes are a reflection of the chaos of the years
1969 to 1994 in Belfast. They are also a reflection of a national mindset in which the
practice of once necessary and secretive acts became habitual and inseparable from
daily activities. Anorexia, self-mutilation, alcoholism and a child’s hoarding of rubber
bullets become signs of a trauma that refuses to stay repressed, literal demonstrations of
“how hard it is for some people to let go of pain, to let go of something that is familiar,
even if it is killing them, and why that would be”.143
The links between the world inside No Bones and the real community from
which it draws its inspiration are made manifest when the novel is considered in relation
to the report published on deaths in Ardoyne during the Troubles: Ardoyne: The
Untold Truth.144 Published in the same year as No Bones, the report is a testimony to
the 99 inhabitants of Ardoyne who lost their lives due to political violence during the
Troubles. Based on extensive interviews with victims’ families and friends, the report
142 Q: ‘How far does No Bones mirror your own experience of growing up in Belfast?’
(Anna Burns): “Closely. However, this is fiction. The book reflects the feeling
reality rather than necessarily what happened.” Anna Burns Interview with Lisa
McGee, Author Interviews, Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.
http://www.orangeprize.co.su/opf/author_interview.php4bookid=119
143 Anna Burns interview with Lisa McGee,
http://www.orangeprize.co.su/opf/author_interview.php4bookid=119
144Ardoyne Commemoration Project, Ardoyne: The Untold Truth (Belfast: Beyond the
Pale Publications, 2002).
53
sets out to “tell the story of 99 ordinary people, living ordinary lives, who became
victims of political violence in a small close-knit, working class, nationalist community in
North Belfast”.145 In a fascinating intersection of history and fiction, a close comparison
of No Bones and the report reveals the extent to which Burns’ work makes use of real
figures and events from the period. Local landmarks, such as the burnt-out “Logues”
bar feature in both publications, and the manner of death of several characters in No
Bones bear a strong resemblance to those recorded in the report. No Bones also mirrors
the sense of living under a state of siege that comes across clearly in the report. There
are a few interesting associations – it is highly possible for instance that James and
Gerard McDade, both of whom died while participating in active service for the IRA,
and who feature in the report, merge into the sinister “Jat McDaide” character in No
Bones. Nevertheless, the novel is not offered as a direct replication of life as it was
experienced in Ardoyne during the Troubles, but rather an amalgamation of events and
images from the period in order to create a vivid sense of what life was like there.
One striking difference between the Ardoyne report and No Bones is that despite
the plethora of references to events and figures from the Troubles that fill this book, a
strong feature of No Bones, unlike the report, is Burns’ refusal to lay the blame for all
violence in Ardoyne at the feet of the sectarian conflict. Domestic violence in Ardoyne
in particular is depicted as a having a powerful life of its own. Indeed, as one reviewer
commented, “[t]o the fighting Lovett family, into which Amelia is born like some
peaceable changeling, the turf wars erupting in 1969 between Catholic and Protestant
militants only provide new scope for their rage”.146 While the Troubles certainly impact
upon the people who live in Ardoyne, the depiction of the readiness with which many of
the characters embrace a new context for violent acts suggests strongly that the place
145 Ardoyne: The Untold Truth, p. 1.

146 Judith Grossman, Women’s Review of Books Vol 20, No. 1 (Oct 2002), 10.
54
was dysfunctional even before the Troubles began. This is certainly true for the Lovett
family. As Burns herself has said, the book
is much more about Amelia surviving her own family than surviving the
Troubles… [t]he outside society is very much a reflection of the inside family,
and of the self-destructive warring parts of Amelia herself. Nothing exists in
isolation.147
The chapter in the book titled “Troubles, 1979” refers not to any external political
event, but rather to the attempted rape of Amelia in her home by her brother and his
wife. In this sense, No Bones shares with the other novels in my discussion an interest in
the matrix of public and private life in Northern Ireland, and questions of responsibility
and blame. Burns is critical of the tendency for all problems in Northern Ireland to be
excused under the banner of Troubles conflict. The Troubles certainly exacerbated
violence in Ardoyne, but other factors such as blinkered educational systems,
unemployment, a culture without space for reflection and simple anger and neglect also
play very large parts in the damage children in particular suffer during the course of the
novel. In the novel the secret signals a rift between the realities of Ardoyne and those of
the outside world, a rarely acknowledged distortion between what life could or should
be about and what is actually being experienced.
In this chapter, as with my previous extended readings, I have divided my
examination of the manifestations of the secret into a series of smaller sections. These
sections include a discussion of the treatment of space and place. I coin two terms of
discussion in my reading of No Bones: “gothic carnival” and “souveniring.” These terms
encompass a number of narrative strategies I read Burns as employing. They also
147 Burns, “Author Interview,” Harper Collins Publishers, p.3.

http: www.harpercollins.co.uk/Authors/Interview.aspx?id=450&a…
55
encapsulate her disctinctive brand of social and historical critique. Finally, I read Burns’
depiction of the “Troubled” female body as the ultimate signifier for trauma.
David Park
David Park was born in Belfast in 1953, and lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.
He has written several novels and a collection of short stories. His short story collection,
Oranges from Spain, was published in 1990.148 The title story is the last one is the
collection and is about the relationship between a young man and a fruit shop owner,
who is shot at the end of the story. Stories in the collection are told from either
Protestant or Catholic perspectives, and often survey individual reactions to moments of
extreme violence.
Park’s first novel, The Healing (1992),149 won the 1992 Authors’ Club First
Novel Award and the University of Ulster McCrea Literary Award. It has a third person
narrator but is primarily focused through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy called
Samuel. Samuel witnessed his father’s murder, an event that rendered him speechless.
The narration shifts between Samuel’s viewpoint and that of an old man who lives next
door to him in Belfast. The old man, Mr Ellison, believes that Samuel has been sent to
him to help him with the healing of Belfast’s sick inhabitants. He keeps ledgers of the
victims of the Troubles as evidence of this sickness. The book explores differing
responses to loss and the role of religion as a mediator of meaning in Northern Ireland.
One of its central concerns is with the role of language as a means of overcoming
trauma. In its interest in reactions to loss and in its expressed wish for connected and
open mourning, this book most strongly resembles Park’s Swallowing the Sun. As in
that book, the notion of the archive – the dead, binding conservation of the past – is
148 (London: Cape,1990).

149 (London: Cape).
56
seen as a suffocating and negative force. In both books there is a tempered
transformation of those negative materials into something more life giving.
His second novel, The Rye Man (1994), follows a year in the life of John
Cameron, the new headmaster at a rural Protestant primary school in Northern
Ireland.150 The title refers to the novel The Catcher in the Rye, and the figure of the
catcher is a prominent inter-textual trace. An episode from his past, when he discovered
a six-year-old boy who was being kept in a barn, haunts Cameron and directs many of
his actions and attitudes towards the children in the school. The novel combines
meditative passages on the countryside surrounding the school with a thriller-style plot.
John Cameron’s involvement with the various children in his life can be read as an
examination of the vulnerability of children in Northern Ireland, as well as a statement
about living in a state of suspended anxiety. Other themes include the role of memory in
affecting the present, cultivation and community life. The Rye Man was followed by
Stone Kingdoms in 1996, Park’s only novel to date that has been partially set in places
outside of Northern Ireland.151 Stone Kingdoms focuses on the experiences and a kind
of coming to wisdom of Naomi, the daughter of a Protestant minister, in both Donegal
and Africa. In this novel, Park uses the African setting, where civil war and famine force
Naomi to confront many of her previously held humanistic values, as an oblique means
of examining the Troubles, and the nature and consequences of widespread national
trauma.
Park’s next work, The Big Snow, was published in 2002.152 Set in 1963, it can be
seen as a series of loosely inter-connected vignettes, including a murder mystery and a
revisitation of Dickens’ Miss Havisham. All of the stories in the book take place during
one of the heaviest snowfalls Northern Ireland has ever experienced, which also
150 (London: Cape).

151 (London: Phoenix House).
57
functions as an extended metaphor for the emotional states of many of the characters in
the book. The Big Snow was awarded the Belfast Arts Award for Literature.
Swallowing the Sun (2004) was shortlisted for both the Kerry Group Irish
Fiction Award and the Irish Novel of the Year Award. It was also shortlisted for the
Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.
Park’s latest novel, The Truth Commissioner (2008), is set in an alternative
Northern Ireland.153 A South African style Truth and Reconciliation process has been
established there in order to account for, and begin to come to terms with, the legacy of
the Troubles. The novel is plotted through the accounts of four people involved in
different ways in the Truth and Reconciliation Process, who are interconnected through
their pasts. It also won the Christopher Ewarts-Biggs Memorial Prize, which recognises
works that promote peace and reconciliation in Ireland.154 In June 2008, he was
awarded the American Ireland Fund Literary Award for his contribution to Irish
Literature.
Swallowing the Sun shares with Park’s earlier work an investment in individual
responses to trauma, and an examination of personal guilt and suffering within larger
contexts of dysfunctional behaviour. In his short story collection, Oranges from Spain,
and in the five novels that succeeded it, Park has consistently interrogated the
construction of the self under the combined strains of personal doubt and societal
fracture. All of his novels, with the exception of The Stone Kingdoms, have been set in

154 For further biographical information on David Park see the relevant British Council
Contemporary Writers webpage:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth5694A7060ceac1DB0E
YTum32DF2E
58
Northern Ireland, yet while Park plays close attention to the geographical specifics of
setting and atmosphere particular to that province, the recurring themes of these works
– adjustment to loss, self-realisation, the role of memory in affecting the present and the
cost of violence – have more universal applications. Several of the characters in his
works draw upon his own experiences as a school teacher, and their plots contain
political and social issues relevant to Northern Ireland: sectarian shootings, the role of
education and religion in influencing personal decisions, and the inter-relationship of
place and people.
In Park’s work, nature and individual character are frequently linked through
close identification and the construction of narrative passages so as to bring people and
place into a particular relationship with each other. This is often extended into a
metonymic identification where the constitution of a character’s surroundings to be read
as a mirror of their internal disposition. Setting often becomes a kind of puzzle to be
solved or at least worked through in Park’s books, adding to the sensation that his
characters are living in places that are shrouded, or misleading, and which must be
approached with caution. The works are narrated through or by primarily Protestant
characters, although several of the short stories in Oranges from Spain were narrated
from a Catholic perspective. Religious and political identifications are usually less
important in Park’s writing than connections to family and work. While the Troubles
and their aftermath form the backdrop to many of his books, which examine the
conduct of daily life amongst violent or sectarian situations, there is a focus on individual
rather than state solutions to changes.
Preservation of the past, its release and re-narrativisation are central concerns in
David Park’s novel, Swallowing the Sun. Each of these concerns revolves around secret
acts. Secrecy, and in particular the kind of secret that does not move its audience to
action, becomes a metaphor for the collective state of arrest that Park associates here
with contemporary Belfast. It is set in the years following the final release of prisoners
59
from the Maze prison, around 2001, but includes several flashbacks to earlier and more
volatile periods of the Troubles. The novel charts a series of traumatic events, and the
various ways in which these are received by individuals and by society as a whole.
Park’s themes of preservation, consumption, exhumation and display form a
commentary on Northern Ireland society’s inability to see new ways of reading history.
Swallowing the Sun can also be read as a re-working of the conventional
Troubles thriller, in which the interdependent nature of private and state violence in
Belfast is clearly established, and cultural and material inequities are highlighted as
causes of ongoing violence and trauma. In this work Park employs many of the set
conventions of the popular thriller: a hidden weapon, the death of an innocent victim,
subterfuge, and the pursuit of the master criminal, but refuses the ending conventional
thrillers often provide, in which a return to the established order of the day is advocated.
Here, Park subtly employs the form and conventions of the Troubles thriller while
arguing that the demand to be quiet in the face of suffering is the real enemy to both
individual and state welfare.
The depiction of Northern Ireland in Swallowing the Sun complicates what
critics have read as previously static and limiting accounts of that place:
in dominant accounts of the conflict …the ideologeme of the ‘Troubles’ seeks to
establish the North as a previously ordered (and potentially stabilized society in
the future) once the criminal agent is removed. Such an account seeks to remove
the conflict and its problematics not only from History but also by implication
from its connection to the rest of this idealized, ordered society.155
155 Aaron Kelly, The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned
Terror (Studies in European Cultural Translation Series.), (Hampshire: Ashgate,
2005), p.17.
60
In Swallowing the Sun the Troubles are interwoven with economic inequity and
poverty, rather than as a weird and self-sustaining phenomenon. Secrecy comes to stand
for a particular kind of relationship to the past, in which injustices are remembered and
internalised, rather than confronted.
The topics I explore in my reading of Swallowing the Sun have parallels to those
found in my other readings. The secretive gaze, found in a different form in the taboo
relationship between Mal Martin and Francy Hagan in Burning Your Own, I read here
in terms of silent watching, and emotional arrest, as individuals gaze but frequently fail
to take action, frozen by fear and anxiety. I discuss the depiction of memory and loss in
Swallowing the Sun, (which were also predominating concerns in both Reading in the
Dark and No Bones) through the concept of the archive, particularly in relation to
Derrida’s work.156 The archive, and all that it represents within Swallowing the Sun,
seemed a particularly fitting trope to apply to a novel that features the Ulster Museum
as one of its key settings. From a discussion of the archive I look at other associations
with what is secret or hidden in the novel, including secretive consumption and secretive
display.
Each of the four novels in this study contains different strategies for coping with,
and in some circumstances finding release from, the violent and repressive conditions
that frequently constituted life in Northern Ireland in the periods in which they are set.
The writers of these novels primarily employ realism as the staple mode for examination
of the emergence of the uncanny in such conditions, but also use non-realist stylistic
devices as a means of conveying their characters’ confusion and alienation from their
surroundings. Within each work, secrecy can be read as an over-arching metaphor for
the nature of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but also functions as a tool
61
for survival. Examining the secret within these novels provides illuminating insights into
the nature of consciousness in contemporary Northern Ireland, as well as each writer’s
subtle suggestions for change.
I have divided the following chapters into a number of smaller sections. Each
chapter opens with a section subtitled “Text and Context”, which introduces the novel
in question and outlines some of the inter-textual materials that I brought to my
reading. This section is followed in each case by a series of explorations on what I read
as secret or hidden in that novel. These explorations can be viewed as subsets, or
smaller tropes, within the overarching trope of secrecy in contemporary fiction from
Northern Ireland. Through these explorations I unpick the nature of the secret in each
work, and how it relates to the wider issues in the novel as a whole. I also consider
whether there is ever a possibility of complete disclosure in violent and traumatic
environments, and if so, what price is exacted as a result.
62
Chapter One: Reading in the Dark
Text and Context
The secret in Reading in the Dark is all-pervasive. In this novel, Seamus Deane
explores both local anxieties and wider notions of subjectivity through a text that draws
upon elements of detective fiction, folklore and realist narrative. The novel highlights
the extent to which what is suppressed or only partially revealed haunts Northern
Ireland. Politically motivated violence and family intrigues press upon the narrator of
the novel, who seeks to make sense of his history, which in such difficult circumstances is
a form of reading in the dark. Underwriting these explorations is the narrator’s sense of
being alienated on a number of levels – from his family, the local police and ultimately,
and as a kind of unspoken determinant within the novel of all other forms of alienation,
from the government that sets the terms by which his family is viewed.
The plot of Reading in the Dark follows a boy’s quest to re-trace the events
surrounding his uncle Eddie’s disappearance in the 1920’s. The formal structure of the
plot is organised on three levels. It is initially divided into three larger ‘Parts’, which, if
Deane’s actual birth-date is taken to be the same as the boy-narrator’s, survey the boy’s
life in Derry from the ages of 5-10, 10-14 and 14-31 respectively, with the events of a
final chapter, “After” – “July 1971” taking place ten years after the preceding chapter.
The three ‘Parts’ can also be read as charting different stages in the boy’s investment in
unlocking the secrets of his family’s past, and in his relationships with his mother and
father. The ‘Parts’ divide into two chapters each, which are in turn broken into a series
of vignettes titled with a key term and the date in which the narrated event occurred,
such as “Pistol” – “January 1949”. These vignettes in Reading in the Dark are
chronologically ordered but contain frequent flashbacks and interruptions in the form of
other stories and re-visitations of key events in the boy-narrator’s search for the truth
about his Uncle Eddie’s disappearance.
63
Reading in the Dark is set primarily in Derry and Donegal in the years between
the end of World War II and the renewed outbreak of the Troubles in 1968. It is
differentiated from the other novels in this study by being primarily about these years,
and the political and cultural climate that constituted them, rather than the Troubles
themselves. It is interesting to read the novel as a counterpoint to works such as Robert
Harbinson’s No Surrender: An Ulster Childhood, in which Harbinson relives his
childhood as a Protestant living in Belfast in the 1930s157, Polly Devlin’s memoir of her
childhood in rural County Tyrone in the 1950s158 and Carlo Gébler’s memoir charting
his troubled relationship with his father.159
Catholics living in Northern Ireland in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were subject
to many acts of discrimination. These include the unfair and inadequate allocation of
public housing, high levels of unemployment, with work in areas such as the civil service
very difficult for any Catholic to attain, and little, if any, real representation on local
councils or in State government: “Catholics and nationalists were clearly regarded as
second-class citizens, as intrinsically dangerous to the state, and as being less deserving
of houses and jobs than their Protestant neighbours”.160 The narrator’s family are
clearly identified as working-class Catholics, who must live with a legacy of past
involvement in IRA activities as well as internal family strife. This positioning provides
distinctive viewpoints of both local activities and larger events that take place within the
novel, such as the boy’s father’s support of a young German sailor during world War II,
who had been held in a hut by the docks where his father works. Deane has clearly
stated that his life in Derry in the decades preceding the renewed outbreak of the
157 Robert Harbinson, No Surrender: An Ulster Childhood (Belfast, Northern Ireland:

Black Staff Press, 1987).
158 All of Us There (London: Nicholson and Weidenfeld, 1983).
159 Father and I: A Memoir (London: Little, brown, 2000).
160 David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of
the Conflict in Northern Ireland (Chicago: New Amsterdam Books: 2002), p.16.
64
Troubles is accurately presented in Reading in the Dark:
I grew up in the working class area now called the Bogside. It was a Catholic,
Nationalist, Republican area. The police were hated; and with good reason. The
priests were respected, but without good reason…I was aware of Derry as a
series of small, interlocked, concentrically widening territories as I got older. But
it was always a ghetto.161
Reading in the Dark alludes to many of the social inequities that would eventually spark
off the Civil Rights marches in Derry and Belfast in the 1960s. In a reflection on Derry
as “a city of bonfires”, the boy-narrator notes “[t]he Protestants had more than we
had”(33) and that ‘our celebrations were not official, like the Protestant ones”(33). After
the demolition of the World War II air-raid shelters in 1950, the neighbourhood is over-
run with rats, but “[t]he City Corporation did nothing”(78). The boy’s family is also
exposed to police brutality, in part due to his grandfather’s activities within the IRA in
previous decades. The episodes in Reading in the Dark that involve the police, and in
particular the family nemesis, the Catholic Sergeant Burke, vividly capture the anger,
frustration and helplessness that must have often been felt by Catholics who were the
victims of violence at the hands of the police during this period:
Then they beat him on the neck and shoulders with rubber truncheons, short
and gorged-red in colour. He told them, but they didn’t believe him. So they
beat us too, Liam and me, across the table from him. I remember the sweat and
rage on his face as he looked (29).
Deane has emphasised the veracity of these recollections, openly acknowledging in
161 Deane, speaking in an interview with John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with
Poets from the North of Ireland (Salmon Publishing: 2002), p. 97.
65
interviews his family’s connections to the IRA as well as their experiences with the
police-force:
Well, as the book indicates my father’s brother, Eddie, was in the Irish
Republican Army – the IRA as it’s called. And so too, though to the full extent
of which I’m not sure, so too was my grandfather on my mother’s side. And
probably one or two other cousins. And this has extended up to the present day
where one of my, I have a first cousin who was murdered by the Secret Air
Services of the British Army in the late ‘80s. And a number of cousins have been
jailed. So it’s a continuous history.162
Negative images of life in Derry in Reading in the Dark are balanced with other images
to give a slightly more complex picture of the family’s situation, both in public and
private terms. The boy’s father works as an electrician at the British Naval Base, and
one summer the family is able to go on holiday as he works overtime in the docks.
Family tensions stem not just from police brutality and discriminatory governments, but
also, as Michael Parker has noted, from cruelties and neglect within Deane’s family
itself: “there are plenty of instances of nationalists harming their own.”163 The priests
who teach at the boy’s schools are often sadistic or prejudiced and his father’s family is
split by a feud that seems to stem from greed and selfishness, rather than any overt
external circumstances. Yet even this event is complicated in the novel by its possible
connection to the shooting of the boy’s Uncle Eddie as an informer, the central tragedy
at the heart of the family’s secrets. The shooting, ordered by the boy’s grandfather in the
mistaken belief that Eddie was an IRA informer, interweaves both public and private
162 Deane, speaking in an interview with Mary Gray Davidson, “Ireland’s Ghosts,”
Common Ground Radio (June 9, 1998),
http://www.commongroundradio.org/shows/98/9823.html
163 Parker, Northern Irish Literature, 1975-2006: Volume 2: The Imprint of History,
p.191.
66
misdeeds. The real informer was the caddish McIlhenny, a man whom the boy’s mother
had earlier helped to escape to America, despite the fact that he jilted her for her sister.
His mother’s realisation that Eddie died in McIlhenny’s place, and that the execution
was ordered by her father, sends her into a spiral of depression and increasing
speechlessness. The grandfather’s membership of the IRA, and his dedication to
protecting it from informers at all costs, is informed by his experiences of police brutality
and injustice. Human weaknesses and state corruption combine to create an
atmosphere of constant secrecy, which leads to a tragic and unnecessary loss of life.
Reading in the Dark aroused a certain amount of controversy when it was
nominated for the Booker prize. Was it a novel or a memoir? Deane has noted in
interviews that its protagonist, a Catholic boy growing up in the Bogside in Derry, is
loosely based upon himself but has also emphasised a wish for the book to be read as a
way of understanding the times and place in which he grew up, rather than as straight
autobiography.164 Edna Longley has suggested that autobiography is a motivating
element in all of Deane’s work, linking his literary criticism, poetry and fiction.165
Longley argues that Reading in the Dark “implicitly conflates…personal history with a
narrative of Ireland” focusing attention on “the local and psychological intensities which
Deane has sought to generalize as the state of Ireland”.166 I would like to extend this
argument by suggesting that it is not just the content, or “local and psychological
intensities” that link Deane’s works, but also the various approaches that Deane has
taken throughout his writing career, as part of his ongoing role as a writer from
164 Deane, “Irish Secrets and Lies,” Salon Interview (April 1997),
165 Longley, “Autobiography as History,” Fortnight (November 1996), 34.
166 Longley, “Autobiography as History,” p. 34.
67
Northern Ireland, and as a critic and theorist seeking to address, in some measure, the
violence and social disconnections that exist in that part of the world. 167
Deane’s interest in autobiography and its particular appropriateness at a
medium for writing about Irish concerns and anxieties can be charted elsewhere in his
work as a critic and collator of Irish literary history. In the Editorial prefacing the
“Autobiography and Memoirs” section of the Field Day Anthology, Deane examines
the construction of self and other in autobiography: “[a]utobiography is not just
concerned with the self; it is also concerned with the “‘other’”, the person or persons,
events or places, that have helped give the self definition.”168 Deane reads in all Irish
autobiography “ a sense of radical privation” as the subject is torn between constantly
contrasting political, historical, and personal images of the Self.169
The search for a means of defining yourself against the Other while
simultaneously trying to come to terms with what is perceived as alien to the Self, Deane
sees as being “[inevitable] in a colonial or neo-colonial country like Ireland, [where] the
forms of ‘otherness’ available are multiple and blatant.”170 In Northern Ireland, as I
have earlier argued, questions of identity are intensified, as constructions of personal
subjectivity are tested by divisive and strongly contested claims for the province’s
national status.
Deane concludes his introduction to “Autobiography and Memoirs” with a
tribute to Louis MacNeice’s The Strings Are False. Deane commends MacNeice both
for his ability to “…understand the personal in terms provided by the culture and then
(reconvert) the cultural back into the personal” and for the ways in which “he creates
167 Longley, “Autobiography as History,” p. 34.

168 Deane, “Autobiography and Memoirs,” in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
Vol III. General Editor: Seamus Deane, Associate Editors: Andrew Carpenter,
Jonathan Williams, Derry, 1991, pp. 380-383, [380].
169 Deane, “Autobiography and Memoirs,” p. 383.
68
the self through that conflict rather than by an avoidance or an overcoming of it.”171
These comments can be read as a kind of inter-textual blueprint for Reading in the
Dark, a novel in which concerns about identity within Northern Ireland are examined
through the narrator’s attempts to bring about “creation of the self through that
conflict.”
Nevertheless, the ways in which Reading in the Dark differs to The Strings are
False signal Deane’s beliefs in the difficulty of bringing about a complete sense of self
when you are living within a “phantasmal state”.172 In the Editorial, Deane also
discusses the ongoing trope of escape and return that is found in autobiographical works
by Irish writers and notes the ways in which this dynamic both troubles and energises
their stories:
To the extent that the world, especially the world of childhood and youth, is
restored in writing to its full presence, there is a corresponding sense of its
inadequacy…But there is no other place that can be as fully realised, most
especially no other place in which the self and the other can be met so
frontally.173
Deane has remarked in an interview that his own view of Reading in the Dark “is that
it’s about a young child who never earns a name.”174 This has echoes in his earlier
statement on Irish autobiography, “[n]one of these autobiographies or memoirs can
avoid the sense of a missing feature or energy.”175 Both the outcome of Reading in the

172 Deane, “Different Strokes 1: An interview with Seamus Deane,” p. 2.
173 Deane,“Autobiography and Memoirs,” p. 383.
174 Carol Rumens, “Reading Deane,” Fortnight (July/August, 1997), 29.
69
Dark and its form suggest to the reader that this is a novel in which the flaunting of the
secret is a large feature of life in Northern Ireland.
Two recurring aspects of Deane’s critical work – his interest in the role of myth
in relation to historical discourses, and his firm conviction that literature is inevitably
intertwined with politics – suggest that the novel can be read in a number of ways. It can
be read both as an investigation of the particular myths and stories that Deane
associates with his childhood in Derry, and as a commentary on the ways in which the
creation of secrets and the manner in which they are revealed can shape the lives of a
society’s inhabitants. Reading the novel within the context of Deane’s wider body of
work supports both Liam Harte’s argument that Reading in the Dark is a “postcolonial
theoretical paradigm”176 and as Longley has suggested, “Derry Autobiography”.177
These readings intersect and overlap at various points, demonstrating the
interrelationship between global, local and personal perspectives in any reading of a
text. The desire for the mythic as a means both of dealing with past trauma and
negotiating future change is interwoven with the narrator’s search for meaning. This
desire is most evident in the references to the ancient stone fort of Grianán; it acts as a
repository of various community secrets but is also associated with Irish legend and
heroic deeds.
Myths, in Reading in the Dark as in much of Deane’s critical essays, occupy an
ambivalent position in relation to identity construction, for they may be used as
alternative spaces of social discourse but also as re-enforcers of more conventional and
176 Liam Harte, "History Lessons: Postcolonialism and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the
Dark,” Irish University Review Vol. 30, No.1 (2000), 149-162, [149].
177 “Autobiography links Seamus Deane’s excursions into the genres of literary
criticism, poetry, and now fiction. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
(whatever its other editors may think) is most persuasively read as Derry
autobiography to set along-side Eamon McCann’s War and an Irish Town.(In
writing Reading in the Dark ) …he has made his most illuminating contribution
yet to the collective autobiography of our times.” Longley, “Autobiography as
history,”p. 34.
70
restraining ideologies. Myths, like secrets, have a kind of limitless potential. They often
contain coded references to what cannot be spoken out loud and can be used as a tool
for speaking about terrible crimes that can not be spoken of directly.178 Myth can also
be used to bind transgressing members of the community back into patterns of silence
and concealment that prevent change and even allow for those crimes to continue.
In various interviews and discussions of Reading in the Dark Deane has
remarked on the role of the tales, legends and stories in the novel, and how the narrator
increasingly comes to see them as being more relevant to his search than the education
he is receiving elsewhere:
There was the previous generation, uneducated, who derived their stories from
folklore, from legend, and those stories are very subtly coded ways of dealing
with trauma and difficulty. He doesn’t recognize at first how these stories
actually deal with the very thing that he was trying to pursue.179
The impact that these stories must make upon a child, as he becomes increasingly aware
of the parallels between the events in the tales and in his own life, tempers this
recognition when it occurs. Myths and stories are important alternatives to the
propaganda dished up at the narrator’s school, but they can also be disorientating. The
revelation of a previously hidden ideal or history can lead the subject to a disturbing
realisation that the world that they thought they knew is not the one they are living in.
In an essay on ideas of place and exile in Irish writing, Deane analysed Stephen
Dedalus’ revelatory walk through Dublin. Deane argues that Stephen’s sudden
understanding here, his new vision of Ireland, is “of a place that recedes away from the
178 See also Angela Bourke, “Reading a Woman’s Death: Colonial Text and Oral
Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” Feminist Studies Vol.21, No.3 (Fall,
1995): 553-86.
71
Ireland of history…an interstitial absence”.180 What was once familiar has become
strange and uncanny:
Previous to this his walk through the city, from north to south, had been an
exercise in the rhetoric of familiarity; now this is replaced by the rhetoric of
estrangement. Neither cancels the other. They subsist together. A territory is
possessed and then the possessor of it is dispossessed. Exile is the other side of
home.181
These ideas are taken up in Reading in the Dark. The narrator perceives that he has
been “exiled” not only by an oppressive government but also by the versions of history
that his Irish educators have chosen to present to him. The stories and fairy tales told to
him throughout the novel by figures such as his Auntie Katie and Crazy Joe are an
attempt to ameliorate this sense of exile, but often serve to further distance the narrator
from the community he previously felt a part of. Deane has commented on this sense of
alienation in interviews about the book:
Inevitably, what you do with a secret is betray it, reveal it, and the problem
about betrayal, which I tried to work into the double-narrative, is that, if you’ve
known someone, or some people for a long time, and you think the world is this
way, and then a secret is revealed that suddenly exposes you to this recognition
that it’s all been different, you get this double effect… Violence has that effect
…It’s got that kind of ferocity which lies at the heart of things, but because it
180 Deane, “Territorial and Extraterritorial: Moments from Irish Writing. A Note,”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1994), 83-92, [85-86].
181 Deane, “Territorial and Extraterritorial: Moments from Irish Writing. A Note,” p.
86.
72
makes the actual questionable, because suddenly the actual and the phantasmal
are seen not as opposites but as comrades, it has a very disturbing effect.182
The continual slippage of fantasy into reality within the book serves to highlight the
boy’s confusion and the sense that those around him strive to maintain a world of
hidden things: half-truths and the whispered remnants of stories. Deane argues that the
novel is not concerned with how a writer grew up, but rather with notions of reality and
fantasy – and what happens when the two collide.183 The need to escape from a cycle of
false experience reverberates throughout the novel and is played out in various ways.
The subterfuges and deceits practised by the narrator’s family as part of a larger system
of institutionalised oppression and sectarianism are brought into question by the young
narrator, who, as a result, is shunned and ostracised by both family and community for
having transgressed against the unspoken natural order. The boy needs to find a way to
work within the system to find re-acceptance, to be brought back in from the moral cold
and re-situated in a less confronting position. He becomes increasingly aware during
his searches of what he is undertaking. He is faced with the knowledge that once he has
gained a form of repossession, he may no longer be in the same country where he began
his search.
For much of the novel the boy narrator is situated in a kind of no-man’s land,
belonging neither to the strict spatial boundaries set out within his family’s history or to
the world of the intimidating outsider. The ways in which the narrator goes about his
researches and the accompanying questions these actions raise refuse to allow a
comfortable reading of the text, with an easy alignment of “civilians” and “barbarians”,
but instead challenge the reader to see in individual actions complex responses to living
within societies where ownership of history, language and identity is constantly
182 Rumens, p. 29.

183 Rumens, p. 30.
73
undermined. The novel conveys the difficulty of ever finding the perfect audience for
the stories you have discovered. Can you only tell the complete story to yourself? Can
you ever even do that? The narrator personifies a search for a complete, a priori
meaning, a search that must be doomed to failure in some way due to the impossibility
of its aims. In this way Reading in the Dark encapsulates Deane’s arguments about the
ways in which both nationalism and colonialism perpetrate a false reading of history.
The tales and oral folklore that the narrator is exposed to sit alongside the more publicly
prominent discourses of empire, republicanism and Catholic doctrine scattered
throughout the novel and can be read as way to escape these larger discourses through
less overt and less manipulative readings of local history and human behaviour:
I really tell two kinds of stories throughout that novel; one is if you like a secular
detective, investigative story, and the other is a story that is dominated by folk
tale and ghost story and hauntings and such like. And I weave these together
partly to demonstrate that the old kind of story that of course is coming to him
from the earlier generation – Grandfather, Aunt Katie, people like that – that
that’s a story which is even more sophisticated…than the kind of story he’s
trying to produce. It’s a story – the ghost stories and such, haunting stories – are
ways of dealing with trauma. But they’re ways of dealing with trauma by
bringing the trauma away from an individual back into a communal embrace.
But the young boy doesn’t recognize that these are heavily coded stories.184
The message of so many of these alternative stories in the novel seems to be: here is
what we know, but you must keep quiet about it. The narrator’s community, and in
particular his family members, shun him not so much for what he knows but the fact
184 Seamus Deane and Mary Gray Davidson, “Ireland’s Ghosts,” Common Ground,
p.6.
http://www.commongroundradio.org/transcpt/98/9823.html
74
that he wishes to share that information. By the close of the novel, his strongest desires
– reunion with his mother and a strong sense of his own identity – are marked by his
attempts to use the unveiling of the secret as a means of fulfilling those desires. Yet his
refusal to stay silent, and his wish to remember and to retell the stories he has heard,
produces a narrative that ultimately stands for the importance of speaking out.
Mapping
From the beginning of Reading in the Dark, the conflicts that divide Northern Ireland
inform and colour the text, writing the reader into a world where location is
synonymous with personal heritage. The reading of Northern Ireland, and Derry in
particular as a place twisted into odd shapes by the imprint of the colonial thumb and
family secrects shadows any possible reading of the novel as a straightforward exemplar
of formative locales. Streets and neighbourhoods relate to political affiliation and
religious belief and wrongdoers are exiled into foreign lands or hidden spaces, locked
away both literally and linguistically. In a reflection of the bigger picture tools of
location and language are used by and against the protagonists as part of a struggle for
self-determination. Location forms one of the key instruments in the novel for the
exploration of the development of the self and informs the narrator’s passage into
adulthood. The novel is set in two distinct locations – the Northern Ireland city of
Derry, with a particular focus on the Bogside, a Catholic ghetto lying outside the city
walls –and in the countryside lying along the border between Derry and Donegal.185
These two locations and the role of language in the novel are interwoven with the
185 One of the debates synonymous with life in this area is that over the name of the city
in which the narrator resides. Marked on maps and in “official” documents as
Londonderry, it is referred to as Derry by many of its inhabitants and other
groups within Ireland. The two names could once have denoted
Unionist/Nationalist orientations but the issue of the name now seems less clear-
cut. For reasons of clarity I have chosen to use the term ‘Derry’ throughout this
thesis.
75
development of the plot. Reading in the Dark is narrated through a series of set pieces
or mini-episodes, in which location and language position the narrator and the reader
within a specific set of markers in relation to the notions of truth, authority and identity.
Specific sites are marked by both psychological and historical associations and form a
textual map, which the narrator must encode or at least navigate in order to come to a
clearer sense of himself and his family’s past. The setting of the novel demands from the
reader an awareness of the notions of loss and repossession in relation to language.
One of the key locations, the doubly-named city of Derry/Londonderry
epitomises the extent to which place and history in Northern Ireland are continually
contested. Derry is a city synonymous with decisive events in Northern Ireland, two of
the most pivotal being the 105 day siege of the city by Jacobite troops in 1689 and the
riots of 1968, when the Civil Rights Association attempted to parade in defiance of a
ban by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The sharing of a sense of struggle from behind
walls or boundaries against hostile external forces, despite the very different interests
and causes that these two events represent, demarcates Derry in a particular way within
the complex constructions of place in Northern Ireland: “The city has been, as (former)
Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume points out, a
‘microcosm of the Irish problem’”.186 The city of Derry is carefully charted in the novel
as known terrain – the home of the protagonist and the site of the political and historical
violence that plagues his family. This Derry, as seen through the eyes of a Catholic child
living within a household with IRA affiliations, is at once both comfortingly familiar and
threatening in its ability to shock. Streets are marked off in childhood rituals of
territorialism, a mirroring of the adult sectarian establishment of “safe” and “no-go”
areas within Derry for Catholics and Protestants. Yet even these simple acts of naming
186 Marilynn J. Richtarik quoting John Hume, (foreword, in Frank Curran, Derry:
Countdown to Disaster (Dublin, 1986), Acting Between the Lines: the Field Day
Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics, 1980-1984 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. 12.
76
and marking seem slightly sinister, local streets leading inexorably towards destinations
associated with brutality:
To reach the ruins of the distillery, we had only to cross Blucher Street, go along
Eglinton Terrace, across the mouth of the Bogside, with the city abattoir on our
left, the street stained by the droppings of the pigs, cows and sheep that were
herded in there from the high lorries with their slatted sides. There, vast and red-
bricked, blackened and gaunt, was the distillery, taking up a whole block of
territory (35).
The narrator is often constructed as a young soldier of fortune, venturing out from his
home into various contested sites and engaging in battles of wit and action as part of his
quest – to solve the riddle at the heart of his parents’ concealed pasts. Within this
scenario the narrator’s home is often figured as a domestic no-man’s land; territory that
should be the realm of his mother yet which remains eerily silent about its affiliations,
sitting uneasily between the rural and mythic Donegal sites associated with his father
and the immediacy and violence of the Bogside. The construction of his home as a place
that is haunted by others, yet often hostile towards the narrator, is established in the
opening pages of the novel:
On the stairs there was a clear, plain silence. It was a short staircase, fourteen
steps in all, covered in lino from which the original pattern had been polished
away to the point where it had the look of a faint memory. Eleven steps took
you to where the cathedral and the sky always hung in the window frame. Three
more steps took you on to the landing, about six feet long.
“Don’t move,” my mother said from the landing.” “Don’t cross that window.”
I was on the tenth step; she was on the landing. I could have touched her.
“There’s something there between us. A shadow. Don’t move.”
77
I had no intention. I was enthralled. But I could see no shadow (5).
This passage establishes the notion of silence as a powerful presence within the house.
From the viewpoint of the narrator the house seems to engulf its surrounds, as an eerie
sense of distorted perspective is achieved with the phrase “the sky always hung in the
window frame” (5). The external world is framed and neatly displayed while the house is
marked off in steps as repetition and routine play key roles in the child’s world. This
security is challenged by the boy’s mother who feels there is an unhappy shadow waiting
on the stairs. Later, he notes that the house was “…all cobweb tremors. No matter
where I walked it yielded before me and settled behind me” (6). Reality and concrete
surfaces seem to have slipped away, to be replaced by a sense of insubstantiality and
fragility. His mother is presented as the thwarter of these strange hauntings, yet in the
boy’s eyes, she seems to have paid a price. “She came down after a bit, looking white”
(6).
The “shadow” seen by his mother thus operates on many levels. Signalling fear
and misery within the house it also seems to hint at things of which the boy is unaware;
private knowledge of the way unhappiness functions that only his mother is privy to.
Her announcement of the shadow can be seen as a curious mixture of a wish to protect
her son and a desire to speak what is troubling her. However this speaking out cannot
be complete. Only fragments of information are given and her position as a carrier of
what is troubling is carefully established:
“How’ll you get down?”
“I’ll stay a while and it will go away.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll feel it gone.”
“What if it doesn’t go?”
“It always does. I’ll not be long” (5).

78
The text here operates as a Carrolian looking glass as both the boy narrator and the
reader try to analyze the messages offered up in order to make meaning of events. These
attempts are frustrated by the figures that lie beneath and behind the surface of the
mirror. An unacknowledged past blocks the boy from reaching his mother and will now
influence his own actions as he steps between different locales and histories. He too will
now be haunted by hidden figures and gradually distanced from those he is close to.
This process of distancing through circumstances beyond the boy’s control can be
understood as its invisible Machereyan “condition of existence”: “Analysis confronts the
silences, the denials and the resistance in the object…that condition which makes the
work possible, which precedes the work so absolutely that it cannot be found in the
work.”187
Resistances and denials frame Reading in the Dark, as they do the narrator.
“That condition which makes the work possible” and to which the novel continually
alludes yet never openly states can be read as the way in which the Self can become the
Other and the enemy becomes that which is “frighteningly familiar”.188 This occurs as
part of a process of alienation that results not only from external forces but also from the
Self’s own actions and decisions – the forces, unconscious or otherwise, which drive us
to act in conflict with the desires and dictates of those around us. The narrator, whose
most obvious desire is for reconciliation and connection with his family, impedes that
desire through a deeper need for individuation; his identity is constructed through the
disturbing investigations and questions that will allow him to gain a greater sense of self
as well as a sense of control over the ways in which that self is formed. The fact that this
process is mirrored in the novel on many unspoken levels points to Deane’s insight into
187 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London:
1978), p. 150.
188 Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 368.
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the difficulties of arriving at narratives that are open and readily acceptable to all; near
the end of the novel the narrator remarks “now I had become the shadow” (217).
After his sister Una’s funeral the narrator goes up to the bedroom where his
sister had lain and buries his face in her pillow. He tries to inhale “something of her but
only finding the scent of cotton, soap, of a life rinsed out and gone” (16). A few weeks
later the boy takes flowers to his sister’s grave and sees his sister coming down the path
toward him. In the act of naming her, Una vanishes and the boy is left frightened,
running from the “gloomy hillside and its heavy burden of dead” (18). The boy
considers telling his mother what he has seen but is angrily stopped by his brother who
tells him “You saw nothing. You say nothing. You’re not safe to leave alone” (18). The
family code of silence is reinforced at the same time as the branding of the boy as that
most dreaded miscreant, a possible informer, who is not to be trusted. Thus the boy’s
desire to help his mother and relieve a little of her suffering is deflected by an unspoken
code of adherence to particular ways of acting, ways that once again he does not seem
privy to: “All night, I lay thinking of her and hearing again the long wail of agony from
my mother halfway through the family rosary…It was like standing in the wind at night,
listening to her” (18).
The family’s inability to discuss Una’s death acts as another silent presence in
the house and the text. While it is never directly stated it is possible to argue that this
omission is one of the most important in the novel. Later reactions to deaths from the
past seem to be informed by this small shadow which encapsulates one of the saddest
phenomena associated with the Troubles; the repression of personal grief in the service
of a larger code of suffering.189
Another way in which the novel confronts the difficulties surrounding agreement
over history and place is through its distinctive treatment of place-names. Grianán, The
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Field of The Disappeared, The Farm-House, Derry and Donegal reverberate
throughout the text and carry with them multiple associations. Initially operating as
signposts for particular events and codes of behaviour, places and place names slide out
of these easy identifiers and become synonymous with mystery and the unexpected.
Dinnshenchas – the body of Irish lore in which place names are explained through myths,
takes on a unique form in Reading in the Dark. In dinnshenchas,
Place-names are explained by reference to legends which are linked to them by
means of pseudo-etymological techniques…Sometimes fictitious stories are
adduced to explain the existing names, with the result that some of these legends
are only to be found in the [d]innshenchas, where they serve their explanatory
purpose… It is this perception of intertwining landscape, reality and being that
underlies much of (its) continuing significance and appeal…190
In Seamus Heaney’s essay “The Sense of place”, dinnshenchas is a “lost-lore”, a means of
looking at the world about you that has become increasingly inaccessible to those
passing through it. Heaney links the stories and poems of the dinnshenchas with a
“‘sacramental’ connection to the land, which has been replaced, in part, with a more
global outlook: “[w]e are no longer just parishioners of the local.”191 Deane’s
dinnshenchas, the body stories and names given to the places in which he lived as a boy, is
constructed so that the reader can read about the same place in a number of differing
ways. The associations with place slip and slide along with the permutations in the plot.
In the chapter titled “Field of the Disappeared” dinnshenchas is used to depict
absence rather than presence. The narrator is on holiday with his family in Buncrana.
The landscape here is unsettling, peppered with disturbing remnants of family troubles.
190 Brian Lalor, ed., The Encyclopedia of Ireland (Yale University Press, 2003), p. 149.
191 Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968- 1978 (London: Faber; Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1980), pp. 132-133.
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The children are careful to avoid a site of previous family trauma, the “feud-farm”
where his father’s sisters slept in a hen house while their family possessions filled the
house of the relatives who had grudgingly taken them in. The farm is the place where
“…my father’s people seemed to hide, recessed into the hills” (52). When their father
arrives on the weekend and takes them for a walk, the narrator and his brother think at
first that he is leading them in the direction of the farmhouse. “We glanced at one
another, but said nothing” (52). The text is imbued with a sense of heavy expectation in
which a simple walk carried with it the burden of past experiences and the landscape is
linked with the subject in a kind of elemental conspiracy: “We looked blindly at the
shivery furrows the wind opened in the hissing corn” (52). The father takes his sons not
to the feud-farm, but to the “Field of the Disappeared”:
The souls of all those from the area who had disappeared, or had never had a
Christian burial, like fishermen…collected three or four times a year…to cry like
birds and look down on the fields where they had been born (53).
The Field is also a place you must never enter or the same fate might befall you. The
narrator feels that “there is something more to be told” (53) but refrains from entering
the Field after seeing the concern in his father’s face. On the way home from the Field
he feels angry, as if he has been slighted or tricked in some way. “I felt angry. He was
blocking me, he had brought us here and then he walked away, with no explanation”
(53). The Field is a site of local folklore. Its naming is an act of warning, rather than
commemoration, its mythical inhabitants associated with loss rather than presence. The
fishermen whose souls are said to cry above the field are not named; it is their loss of
identity rather than their claim upon the landscape that marks out the site. The narrator
sees in the Field a possible source of explanation for his family’s own losses: did Eddie
disappear here, he wonders? (54) His father chooses to lead the boys to the field, but
does not explain why, a choice that infuriates the narrator, for whom such sites are
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viewed as possible clues to a past filled with gaps. Deane employs the trope of the point
or place from which there is no return as a means of commenting on other absences and
gaps within the narrator’s history. The Field of the Disappeared can be read as a
metaphor for the loss of Eddie, and for the Father’s own loss of childhood security. It
also figures on a larger level within the novel as a subversion of the processes of
dinnshenchas. The Field, like Deane’s Derry, is ultimately treacherous, unknowable, a site
that declares its significance at the same time that it refuses to be pinned down. Any
visitors to such places will be struck by what is missing or at least by what eludes
definition.
The most striking treatment of place in the novel is found in its use of the pivotal
and brooding image of the sun-fort Grianán. Grianán of Ailech is a bronze-age ring
fort situated three miles from Derry in the Inishowen Peninsula that forms part of
Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland. The fort itself is made up of a series of walls that
incline gradually to reach a height of sixteen feet from the ground. There are narrow
galleries on the North and south facing sides of the fort. These are two feet wide and five
feet high. The fort has had widely varying associations and uses over time:
The site has been a cultural centre for at least 4000 years: first as a Druidic
temple at the gravesite of Aedh, the son of the Dagda, divine king of the Túatha
De Dannan of pre-Christian Ireland; then as a seat of power for the northern
branch of the Ui Neill clan, who ruled Ulster, and moved here after the chieftain
married Princess Aileach of Scotland; and finally as a Mass rock where Catholics
worshipped in secret during the time of the Penal Laws.192
192 NorthWest Ireland Travel Guide, Let’s Go.

http://www.letsgo.com/17436-ireland-travel-guides-northwest_ireland-
inishowen_peninsula-buncrana_bun_cranncha-c
83
In Reading in the Dark Grianán plays a central role, both as a marker of the narrator’s
family territory and as the focal site for the most politicised of his family’s secrets – the
death of his uncle Eddie. The narrator surmises, through a series of revelations that are
placed throughout the book, that his uncle was mistakenly shot as an informer within
the walls of the fort, and that his grandfather had ordered the execution. The original
shaming secret, that his uncle was an informer, is replaced by an even more disturbing
one, in which the boy’s family seems to be repeating the acts of oppression, murder and
deceit which have formerly been attributed to those in positions of authority,
particularly the local police force. The boy also ultimately sees this act as the key cause
of his mother’s breakdown and estrangement from her husband and son. In one of the
most chilling passages in the novel, the narrator reflects on this execution. Detailed
descriptions of the fort and its passages are interwoven with his speculations about the
ways in which his uncle may have died, reinforcing the sense of claustrophobia that
surrounds the passage and directing the readers within the walls, positioning them
simultaneously as innocent victim and awkward executioner:
They put him in the secret passage inside the walls, rolled the stone across the
entrance and sat there on the grass floor, smoking and discussing what they
would do. Then, maybe, Grandfather took out a revolver and handed it to Larry
and told him to go in and do it. And Larry crawled down the passageway to the
space where Eddie sat on the wishing-chair, and he hunkered before Eddie and
he looked at him, and maybe, said something, maybe, told him to say his prayers
and then he shot him, several times or maybe just once, and the fort boomed as
though it were hollow. How did the others hear it, sitting or standing out there
on the grassy floor of the fort? Maybe it was just a crack, or several cracks in the
air. Maybe they heard Eddie’s voice before the shot. Did they leave his body
there overnight? Did Larry make him kneel and shoot him in the brainstem
84
from behind? Did Larry tell him it was all right, he could go now, and let him
go on ahead and then shoot Eddie as he bent down to crawl down the passage?
(185).
The affinity that is established between victim and executioner is further developed on
the next page of the novel when the narrator discusses Larry’s appearance and
behaviour after this act:
You could look at Larry a thousand times, envisage him a thousand
times, and still you had to look at him again the next time you passed to
assure yourself that he was there, alive and inanimate, buried upright in
the dead air that encased him (186).
Larry, like Eddie, has been silenced, and must remain so within the Derry community to
which he returns after the execution. That this silence is attributed within the
community not to the execution, but to an encounter with a mythical, sexually
predatory “devil-woman” on Larry’s way home that night is a further example of the
ways in which myth and legend are used within the novel as accomplices in acts of
silencing and distortion. This encounter is further heightened by the fact that it takes
place just after Larry has crossed the border. The location of the event turns the story
into a modern re-working of the traditional Irish demon-lover or leannán sídhe tale. In
these tales, a beautiful otherworldly lover seduces a man. The price of such a seduction
can vary. Penalties include years of entrapment in the fairy world or the inability to
speak upon return to the human world. Larry, who “did walk into one country and
crossed back at dusk into the world he came from” (86), cannot speak either of this
experience, or of the execution he is surmised to have been a part of. The fact that the
story is flawed from a number of different perspectives – after all, if Larry could not
speak afterwards then how did Crazy Joe come to hear about it – is inconsequential to
85
the narrator, who includes Larry’s seduction and subsequent muteness in his mental re-
enactment of Eddie’s death. The sex that takes place between Larry and the strange
woman on the border is also couched in terms that problematize more conventional
“border romances”, where:
…the lovers detach themselves from their communities and politics …to escape
into an antipolitical privacy where sexuality becomes the sole domain of
authentic existential fulfilment.193
The sex here is violent and dangerous, “there was smoke around his crotch” (87),
threatening rather than reinforcing Larry’s sense of self or any “authentic existential
fulfilment.” When it is all over, the woman turns into a fox, adding to the strangeness
and unpredictability of the whole event. The border’s status as a liminal space is
consequently re-enforced within Reading in the Dark. Anyone crossing over the border
may find themselves open to the unexpected. The political intrigues and conflicts of the
recent past are merged with older narratives that warn against leaving the place you
know, or against succumbing to the temptations of immoral agents. Larry’s encounter
with the leannán sídhe is a warning about the attractions and dangers of straying,
physically, politically and imaginatively, too far from home.
Sex and violence are linked through the tale, whose singular setting ensures the
reading of the event through the lens of recent history. In an interview that took place
prior to the novel’s publication, Deane drew attention to the connections between sex
and violence in Northern Ireland, and the ways in which different types of violence
there have their own particular configurations:
193 Joe Cleary, “ “ Fork-tongued on the Border Bit”: Partition and the Politics of Form
in Contemporary Narratives of the Northern Irish Conflict”, The South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 95, No.1, (Winter 1996), 227-276, [240].
86
There are even…different kinds of violence in the North, each of them stylised
in its own way…what strikes me is that most kinds of violence have a sexual
subtext, some sexual anxiety is being stated in that violence. And everyone is
anxious to suppress knowledge of that sexual dimension.194
The “sexual anxiety” that surrounds Larry’s silence is shadowed by the other acts of
violence within the novel that have either a sexual origin or a manifestation in forms
that are sexually disturbing. The narrator’s mother betrayed her brother-in-law and
protected an informer because she desired a man who preferred her sister; his
relationship with the sexually indeterminate Joe brings about his father’s wrath; and his
first attempted dialogue with a prostitute is cut short by the appearance of a man
remembered for his “grasping hand” as “the belt came whistling off him” (170). The
distinctive treatment of place within the novel is a means by which the reader’s attention
is drawn to the proximity of sex and violence.
Place in Reading in the Dark is also often the means through which Deane
conveys the boy-narrator’s growing understanding of the aspects of his history that
cannot be explicitly articulated. Grianán; that most mythical of forts, surrenders its
former association in the novel with glorious return and heroic endeavour, to become a
place of grubby dealings and sordid death. Ironically, this final reading does not
diminish Deane’s focus on the importance of myth as an alternative source of education
or reading of history, but instead, reminds the reader that no version of the truth is
without its more unpalatable aspects. So too, in the story of Larry’s death, the binding
of victim and executioner into a shared web of silence brings to mind other discourses of
secrecy that emphasise the commonality of repression, and the operations of the
194 Dymphna Callaghan, “Interview with Seamus Deane,” Social Text No. 38 (Spring,
1992), 39-50. [42].
87
secretive as a public, as well as private concern. Fredric Jameson offers a useful link for
both of these configurations – the role of myth in relation to history and the positioning
of the subject within a wider political spectrum:
The ideological representation must rather be seen as that indispensable
mapping fantasy or narrative by which the individual subject invents a ‘lived’
relationship with collective systems which otherwise by definition exclude him in
so far as he or she is born into a pre-existent social form and a pre-existent
language.195
The particular mapping fantasy that the narrator of Reading in the Dark employs, in
order to “invent a lived relationship with collective systems” uses iconic sites in Derry
and Donegal and invests them with meanings that enable him to make connections he is
otherwise denied.
Betrayal, lies, and cover-ups are often aided and abetted by myth within
Reading in the Dark. Acts of rebellion against more easily identified enemies – the
police, British politicians, narrow-minded clergy – disguise the enemy within: cruelty
towards family members, estrangement from children and even murder. The circles of
conspiracy within the book point to the consequences of British repression within
communities such as the Bogside, while also acknowledging the role local inhabitants
have played in selecting and maintaining politically appropriate discourses of the secret
that can result in tragic mistakes. Reading in the Dark also illustrates the way in which
the endorsing of certain “mapping fantasies” or narratives of place at the expense of
others can privilege the bereavements of a more masculine, violent world over those
from less spectacular backgrounds. Eddie is shot within the walls of a bronze-age fort,
“Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the

Problem of the Subject.” Yale French Studies Vol. 55/56 (1977), 338-395.[394].
88
while Una dances quietly among the gravestones of the local cemetery. Yet myths and
stories are also a way into the truth, particularly when that truth cannot be told directly.
Teaching secrecy
The child telling a story can actively negotiate the distinctions between what is revealed and what is
concealed, between following the conventions of one’s culture and breaking those conventions.196
Often their narratives contain evidence of the emotional and cognitive conundrums they are trying to solve.
The forms of the narratives often offer clues about the kinds of solutions they have devised.197
In a number of chapters in Reading in the Dark, Deane examines the ways education
can be used as a tool to inculcate fear and prejudice and be abused by those in positions
of power. In a particularly humorous, if also unsettling chapter, “Maths Class”, the
games of a sadistic maths teacher are turned on their head by one of the students who
beats the teacher at his own game. This dynamic is repeated in the narrator’s personal
triumph against his nemesis, Sergeant Burke, as he employs the vanity of the bishop’s
right-hand man to simultaneously rebuke Burke and gain his own redemption into the
community. These small victories are marked by the fact that they are won within the
rules of the games that have been created by the boy’s tormentors. Patronised and
insulted by a man “whose father was a Papal knight” (180) and fed anti-Russian
propaganda by a priest in British army uniform, the students are aware of their situation
but given little opportunity to voice their views in public:
‘Propaganda,” said Irwin. ‘That’s all that is. First, it’s the Germans. Then it’s
the Russians. Always, it’s the IRA. British propaganda. What have the
196 Susan Engel, “Peeking through the curtain: narratives as the boundary between
secret and known,” in Secret Spaces of Childhood, ed. Elizabeth Goodenough
(Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p.154.
197 Engel, p. 156.
89
Germans or Russians to do with us? It’s the British who are the problem for us.
McAuley’s a moron (200).
One of the few religious and educational experiences that the narrator praises is his
assignment meditating upon St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. Given the Exercises as a
punishment he notes that the Dean “wearied of it long before I did” (168), finding in
them a form of neutral space in which to test his previously held convictions: “The
Exercises were clean and tonic. A man grew out of them, one whom I had never see
nor known, in all perfection, making choices in accord with that perfection” (168). The
narrator takes from this experience the realisation that life can be viewed as a series of
choices. It does not mitigate the difficulties of choosing – “I would see myself again in a
dither of light and dark…the choices hurtling faster out of Loyola’s Babylon, Jerusalem,
homing in” (168) – but does give him an awareness of his potential for self-construction,
however limited that may be.
One of the ways in which the narrator may choose an alternative form of
education is by listening to Irish myths, legends and ghost stories. These tales are passed
on to him and his brothers and sisters by various family members and are often seen to
contain hidden messages, which the narrator can choose to apply to his own situation.
The testing and appraisal of the central figures in the stories the boy hears is found
repeatedly in the novel. Establishing provenance seems central to the methods used to
unravel his family history. Where someone came from, whom they relate to and how
they came about their information are all seen to be vitally important matters in his
quest to fill in the missing pieces. Yet his first opinions often need to be revised as the
boy discovers that tellers of tales can change their versions of events without warning.
The information is also often second or third-hand, filtered through a variety of
viewpoints and agendas. His own actions and those of his inner family repeatedly
undermine his position as a seeker of truths.
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The boy’s search for credible information parallels that of the inhabitants of a
post-colonial society seeking to rewrite a contaminated history. This is a search that
must be intrinsically flawed, as the inhabitants themselves are now products of the past
they are seeking to rewrite. A striking exposition of these themes is found in the chapter
titled “Katie’s Story”, which is situated at the end of Part One of Reading in the Dark.
It is the fourth in a series of chapters in the novel in which ghosts, myths and legends
feature. These chapters seem to draw the boy-narrator and the reader further away
from 1940s Derry into another, more remote world. They are also filled with hints and
reflections of the issues that exist in the contemporary setting. In this chapter, Katie, the
narrator’s aunt, tells the children a story that seems to contain warnings and comments
on their own situation, if they are ready to hear them. The fact that the story might be
in some way dangerous or at least unsuitable is sign-posted in the opening lines: “She
would tell us stories of a different kind, downstairs in the kitchen, if we got her in the
mood and if my parents were not there” (61). Katie’s background is established carefully
as part of this process. The boy notes that she too has her own mysteries, her own
fractured family past, with a missing husband that no one wants to talk about. The story
is set in the southern part of Donegal. There is an early suggestion that the reader will
have to read carefully as Katie mentions that in these parts “They still spoke Irish, but
an Irish that was so old that many other Irish speakers couldn’t follow it” (62). Here is a
sign that the story has been subsequently translated, adapted and changed into another
language, so one cannot be sure of the veracity of what one is hearing. Nevertheless, the
credibility of the tale is reinforced when Katie mentions that the key figure in the story,
Brigid McLaughlin, “had been brought up there before coming to Derry, so language
was no problem to her” (62). The fact that she could speak the “correct” language is
essential to her suitability as a figure of authority in the story.
Katie’s story reads like an Irish version of Henry James’s story The Turn of the
Screw. It contains many of the same plot devices and character types. There is the
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fraught, alienated and suspect governess figure, an absent male uncle and two young
children whose behaviour and appearance manifest themselves in increasingly
disturbing ways with the passing of time. In the story a young woman is sent to mind
and educate two young children in a remote part of the country. Their parents are both
dead, and are buried in a field behind the house. Initial problems are created when the
children insist on visiting the grave, despite bad weather. This event leads onto a series
of bizarre changes in the children which only Brigid, their minder, seems party to.
Tension between imagination and experience propels the story forward, producing
multiple levels of meaning and interpretation. In “Katie’s Story”, Brigid turns to the
local priest in an effort to find a higher authority that can help her deal with the strange
behaviour of the children in her care. This action falls in line with other, earlier sources;
Irish folk tales in which children are spirited away and parents and townspeople call
upon the local Catholic priest or constable to help them in their troubles with the
unknown.
The priest in “Katie’s Story” is disbelieving, unable to see what Brigid sees and
suspicious of her intentions towards the children in her care. When the children finally
vanish, despite Brigid’s attempts to ward off evil with a crucifix, she goes again to fetch
the priest, in a desperate plea for help. The priest, like many other religious figures in
Reading in the Dark is accusing and quick to allocate blame: “He began to accuse her
of having made off with them and was going to get the doctor …to go to the next town
for the police” (71). Brigid is only able to convince the priest that other forces have been
at play when he sees the grave for himself and hears the children’s voices coming from
the light that surrounds it. This sighting is not enough to save the children or remove
suspicion from Brigid. She becomes a doomed figure for whom speech becomes
meaningless. Her attempts to tell her tale are thwarted along with any hope of
redemption or reacceptance into the community:
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She talked to anyone who would listen for maybe six months after her return,
she went completely strange in the head and people used to bless themselves
when she appeared and hurry away. Then Brigid stopped talking (70).
The community now sees Brigid, the apparent victim of supernatural elements, as
outside the realm of acceptability, otherworldly and thus untouchable. In a final ironic
twist, the only words she is heard to speak after this point are those of the transgressors,
words “none could understand” (70). Unable to make herself understood in her own
language, the only choice left is to take up the language of those who have acted against
her, to become part of the very thing that she feared. The inevitable price of this final
action is rejection by her people.
This powerful story can be read as a metaphor for both the boy’s own history
and that of Derry as a whole. Patterns of fear and alienation are established. These are
followed in turn by unsuccessful searches for means both to enunciate misfortune and
find solutions, or ways out of the troubles. These attempts are repeatedly denied and
turned in upon themselves in a labyrinth of false endings. Halfway through the story
Katie pauses and remarks: “Some families are devil-haunted” (65). She is referring to
another episode, yet the boy knows that the two stories are in some way related:
It’s a curse a family can never shake off. Maybe it’s something terrible in the
family history, some terrible deed that was done in the past, and it just spreads
and spreads down the generations like a shout down that tunnel, in the walls of
Grianán, that echoes and echoes and never really stops. It’s held in those walls
forever (66).
The boy is aware that the tales relate to him and his own family history: “An instinct
woke in me at the mention of Grianán. I wanted her to stop, not knowing why, but she
went on” (66). Yet he is not yet ready to make these connections and is left at this point,
93
on both a personal and narrative level, to blunder about in the dark. He cannot see
clearly, or completely understand what he has been told. In retelling the story through
Brigid’s viewpoint, Katie excuses Brigid’s actions and offers up a kind of catharsis or
release of the trauma that Brigid has experienced. However the cathartic process of
retelling is not complete. Brigid is punished by being ostracised at the end of the tale-
shunned by a community that doesn’t want to listen to what she is telling them. At the
end of the tale the boy is also unable to read the expression on the face of the other
listener, his sister, and thus gauge another’s reaction to the story, as “her hair (was)
falling fair over her obscured face” (71). The reader, like the boy, is left with several
choices. They can condemn Brigid, agreeing with the community that she is not fit, a
person to be shunned for telling what people don’t wish to hear. Or they can sympathise
with her plight and see within her story parallels to the boy’s own experience of being
ignored, misunderstood or distracted from a search for the truth. In an ironic inversion
of the earlier history class, where the narrator and his classmates are encouraged to
adopt the language of propaganda, Katie’s transgressive speech is condemned and
silenced by her community.
The tales from the past such as “Katie’s Story” are helpful and remind the boy
and the reader of a form of education he needs to make more use of. They raise
questions about judgement and responsibility and the way in which episodes from the
past can be passed on in many different ways, depending on the teller. They also
highlight the selective nature of these types of history, the careful presentation or
arrangements of material that may in some way reflect disturbingly upon the present.
The story reads as chilling but not cruel, a social parable rather than the stuff of
nightmares. It is the fate of the storyteller within the tale, a young woman who is
condemned to silence for her part in the children’s disappearance and for her wish to
talk about it that remains its most moving element.
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Chinese Whispers
What is at stake… is often less the “message” of the story than its reception, less “what it says” than
“how it communicates.” 198
When you live in the ghetto, you know that loose talk costs lives.199
Rumour, secrecy and misinformation play a key role in shaping the lives of the
characters within Reading in the Dark. Entrenched patterns of behaviour that involve
codes of silence as a form of protection are reinforced by repeated acts of violence and
suffering. The narrator, as a Catholic boy growing up in the Bogside of Derry in the
1930’s and 40’s, inherits both the legacy of a politically divided Northern Ireland and
his own family’s distinctive history of trouble and silence. Several episodes in the novel
serve to highlight the ways in which rumours are spread and information is twisted in
order to serve hidden causes and ideologies. The notion that in order to say anything
there are things that must not be said is demonstrated through events in which
individuals suppress information without being fully aware of the reasons for doing so.
Through these events, Deane allows readers to see beyond the actions of the
protagonists to the processes of covert social blackmail that are directing them. The
ways in which some of the underlying ideological premises of the text itself reveal their
own gaps and contradictions will be discussed in detail in a later section.
The boy-narrator’s involvement in these processes is established in the chapter
titled “Accident”, where he witnesses the death of a local boy, Rory Hannaway, when
he is run over by a reversing lorry. The narrator finds himself, to his astonishment,
initially sympathizing with a policeman who attends the accident rather than the boy or
the driver, and in doing so breaks an unwritten code of local allegiances. His sympathy
198 Peter Brooks, “The Storyteller,” in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford, UK:
Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 76.
199 Eileen Fairweather, Roisin McDonough and Melanie McFadyen, Only the Rivers
Run Free (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984), p. 48.
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is conveyed through a narrative link between the policeman and the boy in which the
two seem connected in a suspended moment of horror and revulsion:
His distress reached me, airborne, like a smell; in a small vertigo…Somebody
told me that one of the policemen had vomited on the other side of the lorry. I
felt the vertigo again on hearing this and, with it, pity for the man (11).
The narrator chooses to remain silent and keep these disloyal feelings to himself. His
unease over the event can only be shifted at a later date when a friend “told me in detail
how young Hannaway had been run over by a police car which had not even stopped”
(11). The narrator is faced with a moment of choice; he can tell his friend what he really
saw and in doing so establish the innocence of the hated policeman, or remain silent
and allow the myth to continue. He chooses to remain silent, seeing in the moment a
strange form of release from his own earlier feelings of guilt: “I tightened the hauling
rope around my waist and said nothing; somehow this allayed the subtle sense of
treachery I had felt from the start” (11). The significance of this betrayal is underlined
by small references to historical and geographical details that form part of a wider
spectrum of conflict. When he witnesses the accident the boy noted that “he could see
the police car coming up the road from the barracks at the far end” (11), his casual tone
pointing to an acceptance of the close proximity of a police barracks to his
neighbourhood. His subsequent betrayal of the policeman takes place while he is
involved in the illegal collection of wood for the Feast of the Assumption bonfire, in itself
a Catholic response to the Protestant bonfires that occur in July and December in
Northern Ireland:
It was a city of bonfires. The Protestants had more than we had. They had the
twelfth of July, when they celebrated the triumph of Protestant armies at the
Battle of the Boyne in 1690; then they had the twelfth of August when they
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celebrated the liberation of the city from a besieging Catholic army in 1689;
then they had the burning of Lundy’s effigy on the eighteenth of December.
Lundy had been the traitor who had tried to open the gates of the city to the
Catholic enemy. We had only the fifteenth of August bonfires; it was a church
festival but we made it into a political one as well, to answer the fires of the
twelfth (33).
This betrayal, while temporarily relieving the narrator’s feelings of disloyalty, is the first
episode in a series of exchanges between him and the local police in which games of
subterfuge and the withholding of key information take place on both sides. Readers
are alerted to the possibility of future trouble through the telling image that closes this
chapter: “It was dark before we brought the tree in, combing the back lanes clean with
its nervous branches” (12).
The practice of misinformation is layered further through the information that
the narrator receives from his family about the past. In conversations with his mother,
father and grandfather the boy realises that not much can be taken at face value; stories
and expressions that have long held particular associations are shown to have surprising
origins, and old rumours undergo a process of continual editing and revision. The boy’s
father tells him that an old song about the Lagan is not about the River Lagan in
Belfast, as the boy might believe, but about a stream in Donegal. He knows this as his
own grandfather met an old man in West Donegal, who sang it to him. This small tale
serves as the basis for a moment of intimacy and quiet connection between the boy and
his father, with the boy saying that he would love to go to Donegal more often and
explore connections with that part of his family (47-8).
A family story has opened a door for the boy and allowed for further
communication between himself and his father. It establishes the importance of
discovering the exact origins of stories while also acknowledging that their family history
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extends beyond the violence and rituals of life in Derry. This moment of connection is
broken when the boy thinks through the consequences of his requests and realises that
there will be a price to pay for this new understanding between himself and his father:
I knew then he was going to tell me something terrible some day, and, in sudden
fright, didn’t want him to; keep your secrets, I said to him inside my closed
mouth, keep your secrets and I won’t mind. But, at the same time, I wanted to
know everything. That way I could love him more; but I’d love myself less for
making him tell me, for asking him to give me a secret, for having sung a verse of
his song, for the accident of having been the one with the flecks of his dead and
maltreated sister’s blood on him (46).
Here the novel makes one of its leaps between disparate moments that are connected
through the narrator’s mixed feelings in relation to his family. Emotions and events are
subconsciously connected as the process of discovery is seen to be tainted, one in which
the discoverer will be marked, however innocent their intentions. Discovery is linked
with blood and harm to others; chinks will be found in his father’s armour as he tells
what has been previously hidden and the boy’s own insatiable desire for further
knowledge about his family’s dark past is inextricably linked to his father’s presence at
the scene of past misdeeds.
Although the strongest tendency in the novel is to associate discovery and
nonconformity with forms of suffering, the sharing of information can also offer
moments of light relief and glimpses of situations where it is possible to laugh at
obsessions with correct behaviour. The narrator is sent to live with his dying
grandfather, to help with his care. He resents this, knowing that “it was a punishment, I
knew, for all the trouble I had caused” (116). Gradually, this resentment fades as he
realises that this is an opportunity to mine his grandfather for information about his
family’s past deeds. A sharing of information begins when his grandfather reveals that a
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black sheep of the family, Great-Uncle Constantine, had not, as has been passed down
in the family annals, been “rescued” on his death bed by a Catholic priest from the evils
of Voltaire, (who had been placed on the Catholic Church’s black list of forbidden
authors) but had, in fact, “refused to see the priest and died holding that French book
across his chest that they tried to get off him” (117). This revelation both shocks and
delights the narrator, who finds himself united with his grandfather in celebrating great-
uncle Constantine’s determination to remain a transgressor: “I was so pleased for
Constantine that I was shocked at myself” (118). The narrator, like his grandfather and
his great-Uncle Constantine, is a transgressor, one who regularly steps outside the
boundaries of accepted behaviour in his community. What is particularly interesting
here is the way in which Deane has rescued Great-Uncle Constantine from the silencing
of his disapproving family and allowed his story to be retold through the mouth of
another transgressor.
The power of language to confuse and deceive is further demonstrated through
the chapter titled “In Irish”. In this chapter the narrator writes out everything he knows
about his family history in English. Terrified that it might be discovered and read he
translates this passage into Irish, then reads it out to his father one evening, telling him
that it is a school essay. His father does not understand Irish and so “just nodded and
smiled and said it sounded wonderful” (195). The boy’s mother however does
understand and is aware of what the boy is trying to do. This act of penance by remove
allows the boy to tell his parents what he knows, without causing his father, for whom he
feels great sympathy, any further pain. This act and his clear intention in doing so to
hurt and accuse his mother demonstrate the ways in which language can be used to
serve hidden purposes and may reach different audiences in varying ways, depending on
the background information and tools they posses when receiving those messages. In
choosing to tell one person and deceive another the narrator also places himself once
again in the reviled position of “the informer”, participating in a role of betrayal in

99
order to improve his own immediate situation. A question that can be seen to lie at the
heart of this episode is whether or not the boy’s actions were justified; having been
denied other, less harmful, outlets for telling what he has discovered.
In work on Brian Friel’s play, Translations, the poetry of Seamus Heaney and
Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Geoff Edwards examines the role of language in
these works and compares Friel’s play, where “[l]anguage serves as a barrier between
the Irish and the English" to Heaney, who, like Friel “…uses language to enhance the
sense of place” and finally to Deane who shows in the chapter “In Irish”, “how the use
of language can convey meaning without understanding”.200 In this chapter in Reading
in the Dark the narrator chooses to reveal what happened to his brother Eddie, but in
Irish, a language his father can’t understand. Thus the act of telling becomes one of
catharsis, but not necessarily progress.
Burials and exhumations
One of the central themes of Freud’s “The Uncanny” essay, and a theme which Deane
explores in Reading in the Dark, is the way in which we silence our own stories and in
so doing, are condemned to repeat actions which may be unpleasant or at best, futile.201
Derrida’s musings on the nature of the Ego, and its role as a guardian of repressed
content are visualised through an eerie scene:
The Crypt is enclosed within the self, but as a foreign place, prohibited,
excluded. The self is not the proprietor of what he is guarding. He makes the
200 Geoff Edwards, “Language and Modern Irish Writing,” English 342 (1998).
http://www.lfc.edu/!edwargs/end%20342%20---4.htm
201 “For this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and
old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of
repression.” Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 394.
100
rounds like a proprietor, but only the rounds…and in particular he uses all his
knowledge of the grounds to turn visitors away.202
Acting as the keeper of the cemetery, and in particular as the guardian of the crypt, the
Ego is careful to ensure the crypt’s preservation and protection from an unwanted
exhumation, while remaining blind to its contents. Parallels can be drawn between
Derrida’s crypt keeper and the seanchaithe or oral storytellers in Reading in the Dark.
While the various seanchas or tales in Reading in the Dark play an important role in
offering alternative versions of history to the young narrator, they ultimately fail to help
him come to terms with “the contents of the crypt” – the ongoing “Reality”(in
Abraham’s and Toroks’ terms)203 of repressed family and communal traumas.
Unlike the wary crypt keeper, even if the seanchaithe in Deane’s Derry are
persuaded to “open up the tomb”, “Reality” will not be released and become speakable.
In this novel, it is the “visitors to the cemetery”, the boy’s family and local
neighbourhood members, who are equally involved in the burial of desire for
connection, as the consummation of that desire is seen to be as much of a threat as its
loss. Here, the finding that “…the experience of the Uncanny might be summed up as
that moment when the seemingly natural reveals itself to be cultural after all”204 seems
strikingly profound.
Jacques Derrida’s speculations on “the time that is out of joint” and the
“revenant” or that which returns can also be useful when considering the configurations
of the past in this novel. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida raises the notion that events from
history that do not fit into a neat pattern are just as important, if not more so, than those
202 Derrida, “ ‘Foreword’: Fors”, p. xxxv.

203 “Reality can then be defined as what is rejected, masked, denied precisely as ‘reality’;
it is that which is, all the more so since it must not be known; in short, Reality is
defined as a secret.” N. Abraham and M. Torok, “The Topography of Reality:
Sketching a Metapsychology of Secrets,” p. 157.
204 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, p. 9.
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that do.205 He argues that all time can be perceived to be “out of joint”, if a more
inclusive approach to history is taken, rather than one that eliminates events that do not
fit the particular pattern the historian is trying to lay down: “[t]he time – or more
correctly – times of the spectre is always already multiple. Spectrality thus disrupts all
conventional notions of time and presence”.206 For Derrida, anachronism, or the
essential reminder that life is both order and disruption, is most tellingly found in the
form of ghosts, spectres, or, in French, “Uncanny”:
Late in his career, Derrida will call this time being out of joint “anachronism”
…anachronism for Derrida is the flip side of what he calls “spacing” (espacement);
space is out of place. But we should also keep in mind… that the phrase “out of
joint” alludes to justice: being out of joint, time is necessarily unjust or violent.207
According to these principles, that it is only by acknowledging the return of the spectre,
or that that does not belong, as well as by identifying the specifics of each return, that we
may arrive at a more satisfactory understanding of history. This process seems to be
magnified in situations where the need to present a certain view of events is particularly
strong, driven and underpinned by forces that often remain unacknowledged, such as
fear of the unknown and insecurity over territory.
In Reading in the Dark the chapter titled “Lundy Burns” can be read as an
interesting illustration of the workings of the Uncanny and the return of the revenant. The
New International.
206 Julian Wolfreys & Jacques Derrida, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, Vol
15 of Stages (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 30.
207 Leonard Lawlor, Jacques Derrida entry, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Nov
22, 2006), p. 8.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/
and Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” p. 394.
102
name in the chapter title: Lundy Burns, refers to the man seen by many Loyalists in
Northern Ireland, and Derry in particular, as a traitor. Lundy’s particular role in
defending the city against Catholic forces during the Siege of Derry in 1689 is open to
speculation, opinion being divided as to whether he was simply a weak leader, or
whether he actually betrayed the cities’ inhabitants by making supposed deals with
officers in the besieging armies.208 A legacy of these events is the burning of Lundy’s
effigy on the eighteenth of December each year, as part of the cycle of Loyalist
celebrations and rituals in Northern Ireland. As the narrator visits his Grandfather in
this chapter, he is aware that these events are taking place not far away: “Lundy, I
knew, would soon be burning in effigy from the stone pillar above the city walls, on the
hill opposite” (124). Unlike his Grandfather, who loathes the roll of the Orange drums
and tells the boy to shut his bedroom window, so he cannot “hear those savages with
their tom-toms” (125), the boy is fascinated by the celebrations and creates opportunities
to obtain a better view of the events taking place outside the city walls: “The window
was closed, but I pretended to close it again so that I could look out across the house-
tops to the huge figure lolling on the pillar, flames crawling upwards from his feet” (125).
The boy feels neither fear nor anger, but is simply enjoying the spectacle. He
becomes aware of his grandfather’s anger and moves away, but the roll of the drums
remains an insistent presence in the room. It is at this point that the boy realizes that his
grandfather is about to tell him the whole story about his Uncle Eddie’s disappearance.
He will become a substitute for the priest that his Grandfather has refused to see in his
grandfather’s own particular version of a deathbed confession: “Eddie was dead, he told
me as the drums rolled and rolled again. He had been executed as an informer” (126).
208 See Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 1997), for a detailed examination of the ways in which the siege of
Derry has been constructed and received in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
103
The boy finally discovers what he believes to be the whole “truth” behind
Eddie’s disappearance and the reason for his mother’s silence on the subject. The
information he receives is not empowering however, but acts to create further silences
and repression: “I left him and went straight home, home, where I could never talk to
my father or mother properly again” (126). Instead of releasing the boy from the terrible
position of not knowing, the information has served to alienate him even further from
his parents. The knowledge that his parents and grandfather are fallible and have
participated in shocking acts pushes him further into the dark, and makes the possibility
of reconciliation with his mother even more unlikely. Two days after this final
confession Grandfather is taken to the hospital after suffering a stroke and a short time
after this, dies in his sleep. The boy witnesses the ritual of grieving and remembrance
associated with the wake, but is unable to connect with them, feeling shell-shocked by
the information he has recently received. In this way he feels strangely linked to his
mother, yet both of them are unable to articulate what it is that connects them:
I was sick with apprehension through it all, hoping that with his death the effect
of what he had told me would magically pass away or reduce, even though I
knew it could not but re-embed itself in my mother and go on living. We were
pierced together by the same shaft. But she didn’t know that. Nor was I going
to say anything unless she did (127).
The women of the house sit together as part of this grieving process and recollect events
from Grandfather’s life. This activity takes on a hidden, sinister aspect as the boy is
aware of the events that underpinned the actions they are recollecting, and knows that
his mother is also privy to this terrible knowledge. Katie, his mother’s sister, notes that
her father stopped drinking after the flight of her husband to America. Her words imply
that she admires her father’s actions, seeing them as a stand against her husband’s
betrayal. The boy knows the truth behind this story and sees that his grandfather’s
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actions were related to his own feelings of self-horror and guilt, rather than as an act of
sympathy for his daughter. He functions here in the narrative as a silent judge, inviting
the reader to join him in revulsion at his grandfather’s actions and awareness of his
mother’s lies:
I stared at her and saw the lie spread across her face like a change of expression.
I knew what had stopped him drinking in 1922. It was after Eddie, and Eddie
was before the Mahon trial. And in 1926, it was the discovery that McIlhenny
was the informer, that Eddie had been innocent (128).
The boy’s mother is caught in a disabling moment. Unable to speak out what she really
knows, or to admit to her own role in the families’ traumatic past through loyalty
towards her husband and sister, she is left to signal real feelings through non-verbal
tools. These tools will not be enough to save her from a collapse into silence later in the
novel.
A re-reading of the chapter establishes the significance of the title, and the many
ways in which it functions as an allegorical device. Grandfather, like Robert Lundy, is
ultimately cast as a traitor. As a man who has shot his own son for a crime he did not
commit, he has become a revenant, or carrier of what has been repressed in the past.
Like the Lundy effigies, he has been left to “burn” in his own feelings of guilt and
remorse. These feelings are only released, like the explosion of the effigy outside his
window, in a final confession to his grandson. His actions cannot be made fully public as
the family would be shamed even further and so the legacy of secrecy and
misinterpretations of past events continues. Like Lundy, he manages to escape “through
the gates” yet his actions remain open to speculation. The newest victim in this cycle is
the boy who now carries the burden of knowing his grandfather’s actions, yet is unable
to pass them on. Battles based on political differences and family misdeeds are thus cast
together, with the problem of communication informing both. His grandfather’s

105
“confession”, while making clear elements from the boy’s family history that have been
repressed, fails to award the boy a much-desired outcome - his return to the fold and re-
establishment within the family as an accepted member. Lundy’s Uncanny effigy taunts
the grandfather, a fellow traitor to his own. The symbol of Loyalist retribution is passed
over to the other side and acts as a signifier for all that cannot be forgiven or overlooked
– perceived past misdeeds must be lit up and put on show, or, in Grandfather’s case,
handed over to the next generation.
In Reading in the Dark, the taint of the secret is seen to be widespread, despite
efforts to pin it upon certain scapegoats. It is initially presented as an inevitable outcome
of a society in which past and ongoing economic and political injustices make secretive
acts and deviations from the truth a necessary, if ultimately self-damaging, means of
survival. A conversation between Sergeant Burke and the narrator’s mother highlights
this position:
Isn’t it about time it was stopped? Did nobody want to be free of it? Why had it
to go on and on and on?
Well, she told me, she let him know in quick order why. Injustice. The police
themselves. Dirty politics. Its grand to say let it stop to people who have been the
victims of it (203).
Where this argument falls apart, at least in the eyes of the narrator, is when individuals
shy away from taking responsibility for their own part in the state of affairs. Inter-family
deceptions, in particular, are viewed as terrible crimes: “Can’t you see what you are
doing, even now, telling me all that Burke said and still not telling me anything I didn’t
find out for myself?”(206) The final irony behind all of this condemning lies in Deane’s
awareness of the impossibility of ever gaining the full truth to a situation that is already
embedded in constantly shifting discourses of power and responsibility.
106
In a perceptive essay on Reading in the Dark Eóin Flannery has linked Deane’s
thematic interests with both the structure of the novel and his literary and cultural
criticism.209 I agree with Flannery that the novel can be read as a means of working out
Deane’s argument that “the ease or difficulty encountered by a community in verbally
representing itself has an effect on the ease or difficulty it has in being politically
represented”.210 However I would like to add a small caveat here – for it seems in this
novel that we can say instead that “the ease or difficulty encountered by a country in
being politically represented has an effect on the ease or difficulty it has in verbally
representing itself.”
Armistice
The final chapter in Reading in the Dark, titled “After” – “July 1971”, is the only
chapter in the book that takes place during the Troubles. Set ten years after the
preceeding chapter, the children in the narrator’s family have all left home. His parents
are left with each other for company, in an increasingly violent neighbourhood. They
are unable to leave as his father had a heart attack the year before retiring and so lost
his pension (231). The external dangers are counterpoised by the narrator’s observation
of his parents’ closeness, which seems all the more apparent now that they are both old
and vulnerable: “Now, as the war in the neighbourhood intensified, they both sat there
in their weakness, entrapped in the noise from outside and in the propaganda noise of
the television inside” (231).
The alternating patterns of noise and silence, speech and secrecy, which are
threaded throughout the rest of Reading in the Dark are here magnified and brought to
a kind of final balance. The narrator’s mother has had a stroke, “and lost the power of
speech, just as the Troubles came in October 1968” (230). Her earlier distance from
209 Eóin Flannery, “Reading in the Light of Reading in the Dark,” Irish Studies Review Vol
11, No.1 (2003) 71-81.
210 Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since
1790 (Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 150.
107
her son, brought about by shame and the anxiety that he will spill her secrets, is now
slightly diminished, as her enforced silence becomes a new form of protection. A British
soldier is shot dead in their doorway, and the narrator’s father opens the door to see “a
man lying there, his face up, his mouth open” (231). When the soldier’s father arrives,
two days later, to ask about his son’s death, there is a poignant moment of connection
between the two men. The narrator’s father tells him that his son died instantly: “‘ So he
didn’t suffer, didn’t speak?’ the miner asked. No. They talked a little more, but there was
not much to be said” (232).
This incident functions on one level as a moment of reprieve from the
surrounding violence, a brief armistice in both the external Troubles and the family’s
internal disconnection. “‘Poor man,’ said my father. ‘I feel for him. Even if his son was
one of those. It’s a strange world’” (232). Both the narrator’s father and the father of the
dead soldier are working class men. Perhaps it is this that brings about their moment of
connection, as well as compassion for the lost man between them. Yet even this incident
bears the traces of previously established traumas, taboos against speaking openly. The
lines “So he didn’t suffer, didn’t speak”, suggest a connection between the two actions,
borne out by the rest of Reading in the Dark. To be silent in such circumstances is to be
dead.
This chapter closes with a series of distinct images. The narrator’s father is killed
by a second heart attack in his sleep. His death is, like so many other events in this
chapter, strangely balanced by external events: “He died the day a curfew was
proclaimed by the army” (232). An end to what has passed before is brutally signalled in
the images of “armoured personnel carriers” which intrude into the neighbourhood,
“nosing around the barricades” (232). The private moment of his father’s death is
partially shattered through the spectacle of the British army moving into the streets
around the house. This event is described in phrases loaded with sensory images,
reinforcing its intrusiveness on all levels:

108
Other armoured trucks, with guns on top, with their yellow-and-white lights in
front and their hard, high-pressure tyres, flashed their red-sashed sidelights and
showed in their turnings glimpses of the avocado battle-dress of the soldiers who
sat in facing rows within them (232).
The narrator stays in the house that night, staying awake until dawn, when he sees
something almost equally out of place in the Derry streets:
The noise of horse-hooves roused me to the window again. As though in a
dream, I watched a young gypsy boy jog sedately through the scurf of debris
astride a grey-mottled horse. Bareback, he held lightly to the horse’s mane and
turned out of sight…The clip-clop of the hooves echoed in the still streets after
he had disappeared (233).
Michael Parker reads this image as an “evocation” of “all the other lost, transient
children peopling the text”,211 a moving reading that is certainly supported by the many
children in the text who are forgotten, confused or who fade to ghosts in local tales. I
read it though as a sign of the narrator’s ongoing relationship with in other ways of
seeing or reading; symbolic of the myths, stories and legends that offer alternative
visions of the world where he lives. These stories might not always be reliable, their
tellers flawed, but they remain an essential part of survival in such extreme
circumstances. The image of the gypsy boy, with its literary associations of traveling
‘into the west’ can be read as an appropriate elegiac image for his father, who always
seemed to be most alive to the boy when he was walking in the fields of Donegal. In the
final moments of the book, there is a return to the image that opened it, as the narrator’s
mother stares out of the window at the turn of the stairs. This time, however, instead of
211 Northern Irish Literature 1975-2006: Volume 2: The Imprint of History, p. 192.
109
staring at ghosts inside the house, the spectres of her own projected guilt and fears, she
stares outwards at the cathedral, where the father’s body is resting: “for that night,
before the darkened altar, he so innocently lay” (233). His father has been protected
from any revelations of the spectacular secrets of the family past and lies in peace. The
narrator is left in a very different position. Gerry Smyth reads this book as
Insist[ing] upon the existence of secrecy without trying to violate the integrity of
the secret. As so many commentators and theorists argue, this is what literature
is for, after all: to map the invisible route home, to keep the secret.212
He also uses the image of Derrida’s crypt as a means of exploring Reading in the Dark.
For Smyth: “The family secret (which is also the text’s secret) is, like Derrida’s crypt,
there – in the past, in the text, ‘motivating everything but you cannot get there from
here.”213 For me, Deane does have the last word, and you do indeed “get there from
here.” Reading in the Dark is Deane’s way of revealing and coming to terms with the
spectacular secret at the heart of his family’s troubles. The book ends with the image of
the innocent father, lying at peace, but exists because of his son’s desire to explore and
open those secrets, to understand both their provenance and their legacy, despite the
cost that effort incurred in terms of his relationship with his mother. The final message
of Reading in the Dark is the importance of speaking in the face of fear, of not silently
guarding the crypt, but of opening and facing its contents.
212 Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave 2001), p. 158.
213 Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination, p. 158. Inserted quote is from: J
Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 305.
110
Chapter Two: Burning Your Own
From heart pangs to first jabs, the foreigner’s face forces us to display the secret manner in which
we face the world, stare into all our faces, even in the most familial, the most tightly knit
communities.214
Text and Context
Burning Your Own is a carefully structured novel that examines the formation of a
young boy’s character and social conscience in Northern Ireland over the inflammatory
summer of 1969. A young Protestant boy, Mal Martin, struggles to find both a sense of
personal identity and acceptance by his peers, while constantly confronted with belief
systems based on exclusion and injustice. His secret friendship with Francy Hagan, a
local Catholic boy who spends much of his days on the town dump, offers a temporary
escape route from these confrontations, but ultimately serves to highlight the
intractability of sectarian bigotry, and to reveal the sources from which that bigotry
stems. This process takes place amongst the conflicts, allegiances and emblematic
moments of a semi-integrated working-class estate, “Larkview”, situated on the outskirts
of Belfast. The estate has a double function within the novel, serving both as a
microcosm of working class fears and resentments in Northern Ireland at the time, and
as a mirror of wider practices of sectarianism. The rise in sectarian conflict in Northern
Ireland in the summer of 1969 forms the backdrop to the events in the novel and is
localised through the growing tension upon the estate between Protestant and Catholic
families. In a manoeuvre illustrating the inter-connectedness of conflict in Northern
Ireland, tension arises upon Larkview estate in response to the unrest developing at the
time in the rest of the province. There are repeated references to the rise of the Civil
Rights Movement and Catholic opposition to the Orange Marches, as well as to the
street battles in Derry and Belfast and the forcing of families from their homes that
214 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991), pp. 3-4.
111
heralded the beginning of the renewed outbreak of the Troubles. The challenges that
Mal faces throughout Burning Your Own – making friends in a new place, his parents’
arguments, his father’s drinking and unemployment – are set against the backdrop of
these events. The fact that the Troubles have reached Larkview is made evident through
various occurences: the pressure put upon Mal’s father for information by the members
of a local sectarian militia group, increasing anxiety over the neighbouring,
predominantly Catholic neighbourhood of Derrybeg, the departure of Catholic families
from the estate, and the forcing out of Francy Hagan’s family from their home.
Episodes within the book, such as the vandalism of a new building works site on
the outskirts of the estate, are connected to these wider events, but also to the local
grievances and petty jealousies within the estate. As the two become increasingly inter-
connected, Mal comes to see Francy as occupying a space apart from the Troubles, the
only person who can look about him with calm objectivity. One of the strongest
arguments raised in Burning Your Own is the importance of privacy, and ‘good’ secrets,
as opposed to harmful ones, made manifest in the increasing levels of sectarianism upon
the estate over the course of the summer.
In the harrowing closing pages of the novel, Francy holds an ‘auction’ of various
items of over-determined symbolic meaning, in an effort to bring home to the members
of the estate the insanity of their actions and current attitudes. Yet Francy’s awareness of
the impossibility of remaining separate from the madness of the times is made clear in
his subsequent suicide. The next day British soldiers arrive on the estate. All that Mal is
left with is the memory of what Francy represented.
The title of the novel makes reference to the Eleventh Night Bonfires that hold a
key place in the annual cycle of Protestant rituals in Northern Ireland, and which occur
in the first third of the novel. On the Eleventh Night, effigies of Catholic leaders or even
Protestant figures seen as disloyal to their own people are often burnt upon the bonfires,
and the title makes a literal reference to this practice. The novel also examines the
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extent to which communities in Northern Ireland are willing to sacrifice their own
inhabitants in the service of wider allegiances to religious and cultural groups. The term
“burning your own” thus operates within the novel as a signifier both of the specific time
and place in which the novel is set, but also as a philosophical statement upon living
conditions in Northern Ireland in 1969, and the extent to which the practices that make
up daily life there became self-destructive.
The novel can be read as an interrogation not only of the violence associated
with the Troubles, but also of the assumptions and practices that led to their outbreak.
Patterson adds another strand to ideas about post-colonialism by highlighting
the ways in which blame and responsibility are often much more complex than they first
appear. In telling this story from the point of view of a young outsider, Patterson raises
questions about the ways in which we read history and the assumptions we might bring
to such readings. The controversial status of Northern Ireland as a post-colonial place
has already been examined in the introduction to this work, but several other elements
of Burning Your Own complicate both the status of the book as a post-colonial text and,
as a result, definitions of what that term might encompass.215
Patterson highlights the closeness of desire and repulsion in relations with the
Other. Traditions and rituals are inverted in order to question the belief systems and
stereotypes upon which they rest. Mal Martin is the medium through which events in
the novel are witnessed and conventional territories are subverted through the Dump’s
heterotopic status. Even the narrative structure of the book, with an ending that is
215 This position is also held by John Goodby who has written an illuminating response
to an earlier article by Klaus-Gunnar Schneider, in which Goodby emphasizes the
importance of the real historical and material context in which the text is situated
as significant elements in any discussion of the novel as ‘post-colonial’. See Klaus
Gunnar-Schneider, “Irishness and Postcoloniality in Glenn Patterson’s Burning
Your Own,” Irish Studies Review, Vol. 6, No1 (1998), 55-62, and
John Goodby, “Bhabha, the Post/Colonial and Glen Patterson’s Burning Your Own,”
Irish Studies Review Vol. 7, No.1 (1999), 65-72.
113
strangely reminiscent of passages from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs216 calls for a more
cautious reading of its underlying political agenda than as a straightforward criticism of
the pre-existing colonial system.
Patterson makes use of various post-colonial tropes and conventions in Burning
Your Own in order to examine indirectly the legacy of a previously established colonial
rule, but is also interested in the way other markers of identity, class and sexuality in
particular, complicate that legacy. The ending of the novel, in which newly arrived
British soldiers puzzle over a map amongst the ruins of Francy Hagan’s self-destructive
act, serves to bring these differing strands together in an allegorical set piece that seems
to be commenting on the dangers of all forms of oppression, of which imposed
intervention from Britain is just one. Rather than employing the more traditional post-
colonial model in which the injustices of the coloniser are set against the struggles of the
colonised for recognition, Burning Your Own works within what Colin Graham has
identified as the “Subaltern Studies group model” which “…aligns itself with groups
inside society which it sees as excluded, dominated, elided and oppressed by the
State.”217 This model accords with the presentation of violence in the novel, which
largely avoids stereotype and cliché while still acknowledging the specifics of
discriminatory situations. Catholics living upon the Larkview estate are victimised and
treated unfairly by mobs of Unionist supporters, but both Catholics and Protestants
within the novel also turn upon their own. Thus the novel is more concerned with the
ways in which language and identity can be manipulated to serve the needs of those in
power than with a direct criticism of British involvement in Northern Ireland, although
216 John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martys: Being a History of The Protestants carefully
compiled from original documents in the government state-paper offices, and
known as the Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church ed. A. Clarke
(London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1888).
217 Colin Graham, “‘Liminal Spaces’: Post-Colonial theories and Irish Culture,” The
Irish Review No 16, (1994), 29-43, [31].
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the ways in which power is abused can be read as variations and traces of earlier
patterns of discrimination established under colonial rule:
…the ideological restrictions which a culture imposes upon itself by fetishising its
‘other’ – and this without a necessary privileging of the colonised, but with a
retention of the knowledge that empowered discourses constitute the colonial
situation.218
Throughout Burning Your Own the position of the ‘outsider’ as opposed to the one
‘inside’ the circle is interrogated on a number of levels, with Patterson acknowledging
both the appeal of a strong sense of community identity and the ways in which that
formation inevitably entails the personal and communal sacrifices of other identities.
The novel is not so much interested in an ‘us versus them’ mentality but more in the
challenges posed when ‘us’ becomes ‘them’. Mal is an outsider within a dominant
group, whose most striking preoccupation is an anxiety over loss of identity, and whose
endeavours are all connected to the control and legitimization of the territory that
increasingly represents that identity. Mal’s growing recognition of this phenomenon and
his deep need for acceptance by individuals who know where they stand are evidence of
Patterson’s understanding of the complexity of cultural identity in Northern Ireland.
In Burning Your Own, Francy Hagan, the grotesque, self-exiled Catholic boy of
local legend, is the ultimate Other, who confronts Mal with the ideologies that support
the estate’s inhabitants, then proceeds to unpick them one by one. In Francy, and in his
chosen dwelling place, the town dump, Patterson “(rethinks) the concepts of irony,
mimicry, the contact zone and transculturation”219 in order to destablise the dominant
218 Graham, “Liminal Spaces,” p. 41.

219 Graham, “Liminal Spaces,” p. 41.
115
discourses upon the estate and provide, albeit in a transient and fragile manner, possible
alternatives to those discourses.
Patterson uses the specific and individual recollections of his experience of living
in Northern Ireland as a means of commenting upon conditions there and in other
countries.220 While Burning Your Own does highlight the ways in which sectarian
conflicts spread, and the dangers of forcing certain identities upon individuals, especially
children, it does not ultimately advocate a society premised completely upon the rights
of the individual above all else. Rather, through a materialist reading of society in
Northern Ireland and of the Larkview estate in particular, Patterson examines the ways
in which the energies needed for a co-operative and less greedy society can be diverted
into the more immediately sustaining rewards of tribal allegiance and sectarian division.
While the book is concerned with Mal’s changing identity, it is also concerned with the
different dynamics that make up a small community, and how these dynamics can be
distorted in times of conflict.
In a manner akin to Reading in the Dark, this is not a novel that finds the causes
of suppression and dysfunction solely in the existence and practices of the British
authorities in Northern Ireland, but instead locates those causes in the secrets and myths
that arise out of both the religious and the class systems operating there, and the
consequences of the intersection of these two systems. The carefully recorded details of a
specific moment, locale or character lend authenticity and appeal to the novel’s
examination of the underlying factors or assumptions that direct the behaviour of the
estate’s characters.
A key aspect of Burning Your Own is Patterson’s recognition of how certain
secrets may bury others, and in so doing deny individuals access to the circumstances
220 “I did a piece for the Dublin International Writing Festival…It was trying to apply
some of the Belfast experience to universal problems and questions, which is what
I think of the books as anyway.” - Glenn Patterson, Writing Ulster No.6 (1999),
pp.123-124.
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and forces that shape their lives. Class struggles and injustices, in particular, as well as
sexual identity, are represented in the novel as hidden entities, overshadowed by the
more prominent and publicly recognised battlegrounds of religious difference and
communal tribalism. Identities based upon class allegiances are seen as being
particularly susceptible to manipulation by the more pressing allegiances that arrive out
of sectarian conflict. John Goodby has defined this process as one in which “…class –
showing its occluded centrality – is subsumed by ethnicity, which is proletarianised.”221
Sexual identity that transgresses the heteronormative standard set by the community
can be read in the novel both on its own terms and as a metaphor for the dislocated
political subject, constructed in the margins of public experience.
What Patterson seems to be calling for here is an acknowledgement of the
damage that misdirected public anxiety in any form can cause, and of the ways in which
sectarian conflict can deflect interest in material injustice. The novel also surveys the
widespread acceptance by the members of Larkview estate of the material and political
conditions from which it has come into being and links that acceptance to the conflicts
that arise over the course of the novel. The inhabitants of Larkview “…blame
themselves, becoming self-destructive, or blame other working people, creating social
unrest, rather than accept that the assumptions themselves are at fault.”222 It can be
surmised that these ‘assumptions’ relate to the inability of the inhabitants of the estate to
recognize the range of divisions, such as class structure, that give shape to their lives, as
well as to their lack of interest in questioning their own motivations.
221 John Goodby, “Bhabha, the Post/Colonial and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your
Own,” p. 69.
222 Glenn Patterson, “I am a Northern Irish Novelist,” in I.A Bell’s (Ed) Peripheral
Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 150.
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Territorial Relationships
An interest in locale, and the purposes towards which different locales are put to use,
can be read as one of the key ways in which the novel interrogates secrets and acts of
concealment. Hidden spaces, forbidden grounds and closely monitored demarcations of
territory all feature within the novel, which employs a secret space, ‘the dump’ as the
site of the forbidden friendship between Protestant Mal and Catholic Francy as well as
the means of testing out the assumptions upon which Larkspur Estate is operating.
Patterson has acknowledged that Salman Rushdie’s “treatment of countries as collective
fictions…and as significant characters in their inhabitant’s lives accorded perfectly with
my own ideas of how to begin reimagining Northern Ireland.”223 In Burning Your
Own Belfast is depicted as a fractured character. Individual places are rendered with
close attention to detail. This reinforces the city’s distinct identity rather than simply
presenting it as a series of staged backdrops for the tensions leading up to the outbreak
of violence. Nevertheless, these observations are overshadowed by the sense that the
allocation of space in Belfast is ultimately restrictive and carefully controlled. The
addresses of the various protagonists in the novel denote not only their religious and
cultural background, but also their class status and progression within the class
hierarchies that exist in the city. Mal’s growing awareness of the inconsistencies in his
life and of the assumptions upon which they are founded gradually sets him apart from
his family and the rest of the Larkview estate. This awareness is facilitated by the use of
differing settings in the novel, as Mal’s movement through contrasting locales is linked
to his increasing insight into class divisions in Belfast.
The formal composition of Burning Your Own is also linked to an interest in
class issues and the ways in which they operate in Northern Ireland and in Belfast in
particular. A changing focus on different suburbs of Belfast serves to reinforce a
223 Glenn Patterson, “I am a Northern Irish novelist,” p. 151.

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presentation of a world that is fragmentary and disconnected. The inter-relationships
between the three chapters that make up the novel are useful starting points for an
examination of Patterson’s distinctive “re-imagining”, and of the suppressions and
silences that re-imagining brings to light. The plot has a tripartite structure, moving
from Larkspur Estate to the wealthy suburbs surrounding Cave Hill and back again.
This structure reveals Belfast to be a city in which the citizens are disconnected from
each other, and lay claim to the various suburbs they occupy in ways that are ultimately
self-destructive.
The structural ordering of the book can be likened to a triptych, with the three
sections of Burning Your Own similar to a triptych’s three panels. In a triptych, each
panel may be viewed individually or in conjunction as part of an overarching narrative.
In Burning Your Own each separate section serves as a commentary on the others, and
can be seen to fit into an alternative discourse of belief that Patterson establishes and
develops throughout the course of the novel. The central panel in a triptych is usually
the most significant, presenting the key image or scenario to which the panels on either
side may contextualize, comment upon or embellish. The centre-section of Burning
Your Own, which is set away from the Larkview estate in the wealthy streets of
Bellevue, can be read as integral to Patterson’s conception of the interconnectedness of
conflict in Northern Ireland. This section illuminates many of the problems and
injustices that are enacted in the other two sections of the novel. In this section Mal stays
for a while at his affluent relatives’ house. He has come to stay with his mother at this
house after his father has disgraced himself on Bonfire night on the estate. The sense
that Mal’s family has fallen from grace is sharply illustrated through Mal’s recounting of
the various suburbs they pass through on the way to his relative’s house, and through his
awareness of the distance of Larkview from Clifton Street in both economic and
geographical terms:
119
An estate like his own sped by, closely followed by another of uniform stucco
(Housing Trust grey) dragging in its wake a chain of flat-roofed shops and a
panic-stricken ramshackle of prefab bungalows. A long straight road of suburban
houses, with their hedges hitched to their middles, outstripped the car, dumping
it smack in the midst of row upon row of dingy back-to-backs, which promptly
took to their heels and fled as fast as their twists and turns would allow them.
Only in the centre was there calm. The grand shops and offices of Donegal
Square stood unperturbed, flanking the city hall, the heart of Belfast, its domed
top exposed as a bare belly (100).
The city here is turned into a multitude of personalities, in a mirror image of its own
inhabitants’ lives. The dowdy housewives of the suburbs are replaced by skittish “back-
to-backs”, which in turn are superseded by the implacable face of the city hall. For Mal,
a Protestant boy from the outskirts of the city, the city hall is the both the geographic
and symbolic centre of Belfast, representing stability and wealth. The extent of the city
centre’s remove from the confusion he has left behind on the estate is reinforced
through the figuring of the “grand shops and offices of Donegal Square”, which are
“unperturbed”. Yet the suggestion is also made that such stability is an illusion. The
word “unperturbed” implies that events around you may be, even if you are not,
disturbing, and the domed top is “exposed”, a “bare belly” that is vulnerable, like Mal,
to attack. This passage balances fleeting insights into the sectarian divisions that fracture
Belfast with an awareness of the ways in which wealthier individuals may avoid them
through careful navigation:
The car purred impatiently behind them for a time through the main shopping
streets, then made its break at the bottom of North Street, skirted the Shankill,
and raced along Clifton Street, bypassing the Orangemen and beating them to
Carlisle Circus, where many other lodges and bands had already converted in
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preparation for the march through the city. Mal flopped into his seat, dismayed
that this was the closest he would get to the parades this year (100-101).
The process of establishing Mal’s position within the Belfast class spectrum is further
reinforced through his observations of his Uncle’s house. Unlike the hastily constructed
Larkview estate, this house seems to be indelibly connected with the landscape: “[it]
seemed to be cut into the very hillside” (102) in a way that underlines the permanence
and security of his Uncle’s position at the top of the pile. Mal’s reflection on the events
that led to his own family living upon the Larkview estate is presented as a kind of fable,
in which the Martins are ultimately unable to escape the territorial spirals that mark out
their status within society:
He understood now his [Mr. Martin’s] hurt when last year it had all stopped and
the Belmont Road house went up for sale and Mal was sent here to his aunt and
uncle. When his parents came for him again it was to drive him not east, but
south, past the town houses to the estate on the edge of the city, closer by almost
a mile to the tired, grey market town where his father was born than to the
centre of the city (102).
Class conflict is most fully realized in the character of Mr. Martin, who at the outset of
the novel is an unemployed drunk, and whose passage to community acceptance entails
various forms of self-betrayal: a groveling plea to a wealthy brother-in-law for
employment is subsequently, and ironically, replaced by a betrayal of that bond through
his unwilling involvement in the activities of the Larkview Protestant vigilante group.
Many of the problems faced by Mal’s family in Larkview are also directly linked in this
section to the class bullying and hypocrisy epitomized in the character of Uncle Simon,
who owns the house near Cave Hill. He is awarded the contract to build in the woods
near the estate, and crows to his wife: “We’re in with the Housing Trust, now. We’re
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made.”(131) This is a blatant acknowledgement of the importance of being in favour
with those in power in Belfast, in this case the Unionist party dominated Housing Trust.
Yet when Mal tells his uncle that the woods are where “we have our bonfires”(132) his
Uncle’s stance of being above local sectarianism is made clear:
(‘Bonfires? Orange Parades?’ Uncle Simon would often scoff.
‘I’ve better things to do than be bothered with that carry on.”)
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘How could I forget?’
But nothing was going to spoil this mood, if he could help it (132).
Through these observations Patterson acknowledges the way in which territory sustains
the otherwise unspoken class distinctions between the various members of Mal’s family,
and the extent to which location is involved in identity construction in Belfast. Mal’s
family’s sense of exile from prosperity and stability has been earlier symbolically marked
out through Mr. Martin’s comments on the state of the English flowers growing in their
estate garden:
‘Roses’, he said, scooping a handful of soil and crumbling it with his thumb.
‘Never been properly nourished. We’ll have to be careful with these beds if
we’re ever to have anything take here again.’ (27).
The roses, like the Martins, are eking out a precarious existence, displaced from more
accommodating environments. Mal’s awareness of his family’s class position within
Belfast is complicated by a parallel insight into the illusory nature of such constructions.
Haunting the narrative structure of Burning Your Own is the fact that this centre-piece
is ultimately, like the estate’s Eleventh Night bonfire, weak in the middle. Mal’s relatives,
and the assumptions upon which their lifestyle is founded, are portrayed as being even
more misleading than the prejudices he has encountered so far upon the estate. Uncle
Simon’s family is living a kind of lie, made most obvious through the daughter Alex’s
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feelings towards her bullying father and through the references to the brutal and unjust
ways in which Uncle Simon conducts his business affairs.
As hostility between Catholics and Protestants increases outside the confines of
Bellevue, small allegorical moments within Uncle Simon’s home signal the spread of
anxiety and the relative fragility of the economic security upon which the family has
been resting. Mal’s Aunt Pat drops cigarette ash onto an expensive carpet in response
to the news that the Orange Parade was bombed at Unity Flats and even Uncle Simon
is not oblivious to the “sinister import of the reversal” when a crowd tries to set alight a
new Orange Hall (112). These moments subtly draw attention to the suppressed
connections between class and sectarianism in Belfast, as the attacks upon the
established face of commemorative Protestantism, the Orange Marches, are linked to
Uncle Simon’s growing sense of status anxiety. This connection is made obvious
through Uncle Simon’s response to the outbreak of the troubles: ‘It galls me to have to
say it, Uncle Simon told the TV, ‘but your man Paisley was right: the Civil Rights is
nothing but a bunch of IRA men and Communists.’ (113)
Patterson brings all of these concerns into a complete circle in the next passage,
which brilliantly combines both the underlying ideologies of the novel and its narrative
structure in one simple movement:
The last word chilled Mal’s brain. The year before, in his old school, they had
said special prayers one morning after assembly for Czechoslovakia. Something
had happened there with the Communists. The headmaster showed a
photograph on the overhead projector. Of what? A building in ruins; a church.
That was it. Communists didn’t believe in God; they wanted to take from
people all they had earned, to destroy everything (113).
In Mal’s mind, “communists” present a threat to all of the previously secure foundations
upon which his identity rests: place, religion, income, possessions. What is so heavily
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ironic here is the landscape Mal calls to mind in his fearful recollections. The
“ruined’”church and destruction of what has been earned must also find echoes in the
place where he has come to feel most at home, the Larkview dump. This connection is
reinforced in the next passage, which operates as one of the set epiphanic moments
within the novel:
A thought came to him with the thought of revelation. The Civil Rights were
wrecking things because they said they were left out, but they didn’t want to be a
part of them in the first instance. Like Francy. Mal had got it all wrong before;
Francy was hated because he wouldn’t join in, the other way around (113).
Mal’s association of these two landscapes allows for the bringing forth of one of the
novel’s secrets, that security and ruin are relative terms, dependent upon the agendas of
those who live within them. The ambivalent nature of landscape, and its dependence
upon cultural and historical association for meaning, is explored at several points in the
novel. Slightly askew echoes of earlier places and experiences serve repeatedly to
reinforce the hidden connections between different elements of society in Belfast. The
Martins’ day-trip to Bangor is initially presented as a form of contemporary utopia
within the novel, as the family enjoys a space in which they are finally neither outsiders
nor exiles. Buoyed by Mr Martin’s offer of a job on the estate, the day has a carnival
atmosphere, where the unexpected – a mini stuck in a sea of pedestrians, an old woman
carrying a set of false teeth made from sea-side rock candy – is curious or amusing, but
not threatening (156-158).
Underneath these images, and Mal’s feeling of untroubled contentment, lurk
other images that connect with the pressing concerns of the rest of the novel. Mal’s
mother chooses chance over logic and repeatedly loses on a racing game, finally
claiming: “gambling’s like politics, women would do better to leave well enough alone”
(158), in a comment that illustrates the dysfunctional nature of the current political state.
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A gypsy family catches Mal’s eye, in particular a young girl carrying a baby whose
weight has tipped her “fully forty-five degrees to the left” (157) and whose wrists have
veins “as prominent as an old woman’s” (158). This final image in particular strikes a
singular note for Mal, who later recalls the gypsy girl in one of the novel’s most striking
and allegorical episodes:
On the road before his driveway, two very young boys, carrying pot lids, were
arguing with a small girl, who walked round and round in circles, jetting water
from a Fairy Liquid bottle on to the dusty tarmac. It seemed they had been
going to play riots, only nobody wanted to be the Bogsiders…(the girl) was no
older than the gypsy girl Mal had seen in the amusement arcade in Bangor
(220).
The connection that Mal makes between the young girl who refuses to be a Bogsider
and the gypsy girl at Bangor reinforces the novel’s presentation of children as the
ultimate victims of a society ill at ease with itself, who must negotiate their own
meanings and means of survival amongst the detritus that adults have left them.
Another place that is layered with meaning in Burning Your Own is the site of
the ruined chapel, in the woods bordering the estate. Initially presented in association
with Protestant victories:
He had read once (or had somebody told him? – he couldn’t remember) that the
old chapel had been destroyed during a skirmish outside Derrybeg, when King
Billy was through from Carrick on his way to the Boyne, hundreds of years
ago…(46)
The ruins are later revealed to have had much more recent, and more ecumenical
origins:
125
…there was a party for all the local children the first Saturday it was finished
and one of the Methodist ministers in the city brought a whole load of kids from
his church to it. There was even a man came along with a camera. He sat the
children down outside the chapel – Protestant, Catholic, Protestant, Catholic –
and took their photo (216).
This new version of events is disappointing to Mal, who had enjoyed the romance of the
earlier version. The ruined chapel operates as a sign of the consequences of choosing
myth in place of reality, as the chapel’s original purpose is deferred onto a series of
repetitive and ill-informed acts of destruction. The final attack upon the church is
indirectly connected to Mal and his family, for it is Mr. Martin who tells the estate’s
agitated unionists the only night that the chapel watchman is absent, with the resulting
destruction of the newly restored building. In this way the chapel acts as a kind of
architectural spectre, continually torn down and yet never completely effaced, its ruins
operating as shadowy and misleading reminders of what had existed before. These acts
of destruction are, of course, ultimately self-destructive. After reciting the chapel’s
fraught history to Mal, Francy remarks (in a moment that cleverly reflects both the title
and the central theme of the novel), “We’re a shocking lot for burning things” (218).
Ironically, it is only the Larkview dump, the pre-eminent site of what has been
refused or rejected by the rest of the town, that is granted a certain, limited exemption
from such struggles, and as such is most fittingly ruled over by a figure who is half-way
between a child and a man. Through the dump, Patterson examines the ideal of an
alternative political space in Northern Ireland, one that is neither Unionist nor
Republican in nature but rather something in-between the two – a secret location that is
really under people’s noses all the time: “…the ‘liminal spaces’ of colonial discourse;
marginal areas, where the ultimate opposition of coloniser and colonised breaks down
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through irony, imitation and subversion.”224 The dichotomy between colonizer and
colonized is further complicated by the fact that Francy ended up at the site after being
chased by his own, Catholic, classmates (225).
The objects that Francy collects upon the dump, and his singularly fantastical
“dump knowledge” form an epistemological bricolage in which meaning is constantly
open to new interpretations, and whatever has been previously held up as sacrosanct is
given new, insalubrious uses. Mal sees the dump as a refuge from the restrictive codes
that operate on the rest of the estate, and part of his attraction to Francy lies in Francy’s
continual ability to surprise (205). Mal’s visits to the dump function within the novel as a
series of staged lessons that subvert pre-established beliefs existing upon the estate, and
constantly point out to Mal the dangers of seeing anything as absolute. The dump can
be read in line with Foucault’s definition of a “heterotopia”:
With romances and Gothic fiction, however, the social function of the mirror is
distorted, its reflections exceeding the proper balance of identification and
correction, the utopic mirror of perfected or inverted reflection is intermingled
with a heterotopic form. A heterotopia, in contrast to a utopia, is a ‘counter-site’,
an effectively enacted utopia’ in which the real sites of culture are represented,
contested, inverted.225
The dump is indeed a place upon which, as Goodby has asserted, the “real sites of
culture are “represented, contested, inverted.”226 Filthy, tangled and riddled with rats, it
224 Colin Graham, “Liminal Spaces,” p. 33.
225 Fred Botting, “ In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture,” in A Companion

to the Gothic ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000.), pp. 3-
14. and also Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Diacritics Vol.16. No.1(1986)
22-7, [24].
226 John Goodby, “Reading Protestant Writing: Representations of the Troubles in the
Poetry of Derek Mahon and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own,” in Modern Irish
127
is nevertheless a means of clearly reading the estate and the ideological codes that
underpin it, which have previously been presented to Mal as truths. The dump is a
“heterotopia” rather than a utopia, as it manipulates the norms and conventions of the
rest of society, rather than rejecting them completely. The refuse, dirt and disorder of
the dump, as well as Francy’s reinvented objects, constantly present visitors with traces
and reminders of the way in which the estate seeks to suppress meaning and identity. A
toilet seat becomes a throne and a baby carriage a feeding ground for rats in grotesque
inversions that confront Mal with the lies upon which the estate is founded. Words and
shit, babies and rats are equally intermingled in a simultaneous display and effacement
of the hierarchies and obsessions with appearances that have allowed life upon the estate
to develop in its present manner. The dump is a “liminal space”227 in the sense that it
is on the boundary, yet also representative, and is ultimately presented as a twisted
mirror of the society that surrounds it. In a figuring that brings to mind Kearney and
Hedermann’s earlier proposal of a fictive “Fifth Province” as a space for negotiating
identity in discussions of Irish culture and history, the dump is a site for subversion, not
a refuge or viable alternative to reality:
The purpose of The Crane Bag is to promote the excavation of unactualized
spaces within the reader, which is the work of constituting the fifth province.
From such a place a new understanding and unity might emerge.228
Writers and the Wars, ed. Kathleen Devine, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe
Limited, 1999), p. 328.
227 Gunnar-Schneider, “Irishness and Postcoloniality in Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your
Own,” p. 60.
228 Richard Kearney and Mark Patrick Hedermann, “Editorial I/Endodermis,” Crane
Bag I.I (Spring 1977), 89.
128
This speculative, hidden geography is employed as a means of illuminating the
assumptions upon which the Larkview estate rests and the comfort these assumptions
provide in the face of poverty, unemployment and neglect, rather than as an end in
itself. Francy tells Mal near the end of the novel that “your version’s as good as mine –
a pack of fucking lies. It’s all lies – the hut, the dump, everything. I’d wish I’d never got
you into this”(230). Mal’s hopes of becoming an inheritor of this seemingly separate,
heterotopic domain are dashed by Francy’s final acknowledgement of his own role as a
manufacturer of deception: “I made the whole lot up. Do you hear me?”(230) This last
revelation is made tragically literal in the closing pages of the novel, when Francy uses
the dump as a stage for his final production, and his own life becomes the ultimate prop
in his ongoing efforts to confront the community with the lies that underpin the choices
they are making.
What is striking about the depiction of the dump in Burning Your Own is its
presentation as both a post-colonial and a Gothic space. Filled with objects and
reminders of the cultures that surround it, one of the ways that the dump operates
within the novel is as an inverted exhibition site or warped mirror of the estate: “The
postcolonial place is partly familiar and partly unfamiliar – partly resembling
home…and yet also evoking something quite unrecognisable and strange”.229
In Gothic literature secret sites may be prohibited, situated on the outskirts of
the town or city in which the tale is set, or labyrinthine in nature, containing further
secret rooms, tunnels and passages which deepen the site’s appeal at the same time as
they underline its potential as a dangerous and unknown space. In post-colonial
literature, the liminal space is often a means of giving voice to otherwise occluded stories
and experiences. The dump is liminal and occasionally fearful, an alternate space where
229 Ken Gelder, “Postcolonial Gothic,” in The Handbook of Gothic Literature, ed.
Marie Mulvey- Roberts (Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), p. 181.
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otherwise repressed or socially contained scenarios are acted out and where what has
previously been most feared, the shadowy and only half-known Other, is confronted.
In the dump these two, seemingly disparate uses of a secret space are brought together,
highlighting the ways in which what is unknown or oppressed can be externally
constructed as terrifying and dangerous. Klaus Gunnar-Schnieder notes the disparity
between Mal’s initial preconceptions about Francy and the dump and the reality he is
faced with, seeing in this disparity:
[T]hat confrontational position where the visibility of the ‘Other’ and the
resulting identity of the centre meet with the problems inherent in the
antagonistic concepts of deception and difference.230
The reality that Mal is forced to face after entering the dump and meeting Francy
ensures that not only his understanding of the Other, but also his understanding of his
own identity, must undergo radical revision.
The construction of a “heterotopic” site within the novel is, however, only one of
the numerous Gothic features that can be found in Burning Your Own. Its Gothic
tropes have been employed in order to bring to the surface the issues of class, poverty
and social inequity that have been so carefully suppressed by the inhabitants of
Larkview, and which are made troublingly visible in the character of Francy Hogan.
The following section examines the distinctive ways in which Patterson manipulates
Gothic conventions in order to comment upon class, sexuality, gender and poverty.
230 Gunnar-Schneider, p. 59.

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Gothic desires
Everything, then, begins in – and perhaps continues to reside in – an absence, a premonition of arrival
which will never be fully removed or replaced.231
Throughout Burning Your Own Mal is confronted with traces of what has gone before,
as well as the constant waiting for a return of that past, a premonition of arrival that is
figured variously through the ritualised exchanges on the football field, the building of
the Eleventh Night bonfire and Francy’s monologues on the creation of the estate. Each
of these confrontations contains brief glimpses of what has been suppressed, but the text
shies away from ever arriving at a complete moment of understanding. Even the final
and most fully articulated moment of confrontation, Francy’s “Sale of A Fucking
Lifetime” carries within it the ghosts of other moments and future problems that cannot
ever be wholly captured in a single act. The loss of Mal’s friend is the absence upon
which the novel ends, allegorising the larger themes upon which the novel is predicated.
David Punter’s association of the Gothic with political subversiveness is a thus a useful
platform from which to examine the various ways in which the Gothic operates within
Burning Your Own:
Gothic has come to serve as a kind of cultural threshold, or as a repertoire of
images that fatally undercut the ‘verbal compact’ on which, among other things,
the modern state rests, then more than ever it deserves and needs to be
investigated. 232
This statement seems to both sum up the inter-relationship of the post-colonial to the
Gothic, and also implies the extent to which this relationship rests upon secret and
previously uninvestigated matters. In Burning Your Own, the numerous confrontations
231 David Punter, “Spectral Criticism,” in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, ed.
Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 262.
232 David Punter, “Introduction,” in A Companion to the Gothic, p. xiv.

131
of the status quo can be seen as forming a “repertoire of (Gothic) images”: dump, rat
boy, burial, immolation, that challenge the “verbal compact” upon which “the modern
state rests”. This “image-repertoire” revolves around what is hidden: the dump lies on
the outskirts of town, Francy’s reputation rests upon his elusiveness, and even the stories
that are told throughout the book centre on what is unseen. Yet, in another
manipulation of the Gothic, the final claims upon “the verbal compact” are made via
acts of spectacle and display, as what has been hidden resurfaces and demands the
e/state’s recognition of their presence and role in society.
In its striking depiction of the means by which the increasingly estranged Other
becomes simultaneously the focus of various kinds of desire, Burning Your Own yokes
together post-colonial concerns with a Gothic sensibility that highlights the reasons why
we are so disturbed by what is simultaneously un/familiar. Through his treatment of life
upon the estate, and in particular of the secret and illicit friendship between Mal and the
dump-dwelling Francy Hogan, Patterson examines the intermingling of fear of the
Other and the desire for connection. Mal’s desires range from the desire for community
acceptance so evident in Reading in the Dark, to an emotional, sexual and intellectual
desire for the company and friendship of Francy Hogan – desires that must be
ultimately incompatible.
Patterson also reveals the way in which the need to first define the Other and
then engage negatively with it is exacerbated in periods of conflict. It is a process that
Mal complicates through his friendship with Francy. Mal shifts from his initial desire to
meet the unknown to a desire to a desire to inhabit the liminal world that Francy
occupies by living on the Larkview dump.233 The level to which a fascination with the
Other is realized both through Mal’s desire to seek out the mysterious Francy, and
through the escalating need of Loyalist groups within the community to confront and
233 “Francy’s dump is the backside of utility, the ‘Other’ of a structure which produces
order and meaning in the text.” Gunnar-Schneider, p. 58.
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harangue Catholics, even as they are driving them out from the estate. These
relationships bring to mind Bhabha’s readings of ambivalence in colonial discourse,
“that ‘otherness’” which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of
difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity”.234 The “fantasy of origin
and identity” is explicitly articulated in Burning Your Own through the growth in
sectarianism on the estate. Local, Loyalist militia groups set about forcing Catholics out
of their homes as part of an increasingly popular re-reading of history that interprets
former neighbours and friends as absolutely alien. These confrontations often require
physical proximity to the Other as the same time as the Other is viewed as abject. An
example of this can be found in the close gathering of the crowd of onlookers after the
destruction of Francy’s family’s garbage bin, who jeer in delight at the outraged cries of
Francy’s pregnant mother (67). While it is difficult to read Burning Your Own as an
avowedly post-colonial text, it can be argued that it incorporates several “post-colonial”
readings of identity.
Patterson’s interest in absence is also worked out through the transposition of the
conventional setting of the Irish Gothic novel, the Big House, to Larkview, a working
class Protestant estate. Gothic tropes within the novel – a vulnerable protagonist, a
gnomic friend, secret and unsettling spaces – are used here to examine the situation and
desires of the working-classes in Northern Ireland in 1968, rather than as an exploration
of decaying Anglo-Irish values. This transposition allows for several new statements to
be made about the Gothic form and its appropriateness as a medium for illustrating
social and political unease. In Burning Your Own there is a sense that the estate feels
cut off and isolated from the rest of Northern Ireland, and its inhabitants feel anxious
and abandoned in similar ways to Big House inhabitants, and for similar reasons.
Underlying sectarian anxiety is another Gothic trope, unspoken fears about material
234 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: a

Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 38.
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security and survival as a social class. These fears are hinted at in the presentation of the
estate itself as a kind of dumping ground. Situated on the outskirts of Belfast, marked by
lost opportunities and stalled building plans and shadowed by the increasingly
threatening proximity of “Derrybeg”, a neighbouring Catholic village, the estate is,
despite its initially mixed community, a site associated with failure. Mal’s family has
arrived here after the failure of their business, a move that has taken them “closer by
almost a mile to the tired, grey market town where his father was born than to the
centre of Belfast” (102). A telling sign of the local state of affairs is found in Mrs.
Martin’s disparagement of the Campbell’s car: “an Austin 1100 which sat in the
driveway…it had no wheels and the body rested on four piles of paving stones” (39).
Symbolising both sectarian rifts and the general air of going nowhere that pervades the
estate, this body is, like a succession of others in Burning Your Own, ruined yet
alarmingly present, a constant, unwanted reminder of the uncertainties upon which the
estate has been founded. These anxieties are magnified in the prevailing attitudes upon
the estate towards both Francy and the dump, which each bring to the surface the fears
the inhabitants work so hard to suppress.
Gothic associations are also found in the construction of Mal’s sexual awakening,
which is linked to a parallel increase in his perception of the operation of various
political discourses upon the estate. The association of sexual desire with the Gothic in
the novel seems to suggest the extent to which such desire is outside publicly accepted
modes of behaviour. However, this use of the Gothic also suggests that transgressive
desires lie underneath the society that rejects them, and form a crucial, if repressed part
of its psychic make-up. In this way, Burning Your Own shares with Reading in the Dark
a pairing of “ideological enlightenment with a kind of forbidden erotic.”235 Expressions
of desire within the novel can be read as a means of indirectly articulating an alternative
235 Andrew Lynch, Professor, UWA School of Social and Cultural Studies, email
correspondence, 17 May, 2004.
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politics, with the Gothic overtones signalling the simultaneously frightening and
fascinating possibilities of such an alternative. Friendship that traverses sectarian divides
is signed as a “kind of incipiently queer relationship; and political and social
enlightenment is a kind of sexualised knowledge – the ‘facts of life’”.236 Goodby has
noted the extent to which threatening political positions within the novel are couched in
terms of transgressive sexual acts and figures: “Burgeoning dissent is associated with
what patriarchy has labelled as sexually deviant”.237 The acceptable form of masculine
sexuality upon the estate is clearly marked out from the beginning of the novel through
the boys’ bantering on the football pitch. Heteronormative, and with a focus on
reaching and proclaiming socially satisfactory sexual goals – “I’ve had mine sucked
loads of times. And I’ve had three bucks and all” (11) – this sexuality is a means of
defining masculine identity and establishing position within the pecking order of the
gang Mal belongs too. Mal, as an outsider, struggles to understand the various codes
that will entail complete acceptance within the gang, but finds himself alienated by the
tales of sexual exploits and by the gang members’ savage and unpredictable ability to
turn upon each other. Discussion of Francy Hagan is, significantly, woven around such
bantering, with the spectre of Francy arising as a deviant figure whose sexual actions are
the stuff of urban myth:
‘They say he tamed rats in the dump.’
‘That’s right,’ Andy Hardy backed him up. ‘I heard he fed them miscarriages he
stole from the hospital and now they’ll attack anyone he tells them to.’
The gang wagged their heads, muttering. A strange mood had stolen over them.
If Mal had been older he might have had words for it. Instead he looked on,
236 Andrew Lynch, Professor, UWA School of Social and Cultural Studies, email
correspondence, 17 May, 2004.
237 John Goodby, “Reading Protestant Writing,” p. 239 and “Bhabha, the
Post/Colonial and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own,” pp. 68-69.
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trying to account for their actions, as though they were characters in a film he
had missed the start of.
Two girls whispered together in an exaggerated fashion and began to titter.
‘What’s the matter with youse?’ Mucker asked.
The girls nudged each other, disputing which should speak, until finally the
taller, more daring of the two said: ‘Did you know he stands perched on a barrel
sometimes at the side of the dump, waving his …you know – cock – at passing
cars’ (10).
The interweaving of horror, sex and mystery within this passage serves to establish
Francy as the Gothic underside of society, epitomising all that is most forbidden, in
particular the lurid yet endlessly fascinating subject of transgressive desire. The
performative nature of this episode, underscored by Mal’s feeling that he has come in
late to a movie, stresses the connection between the anxieties that surround the
forbidden and the need for public display of what is secretive or suppressed, however
deferred and distanced from the speaker. These conversations influence Mal’s first
meeting with Francy, as his fears of both sex and violence, and the fact that Francy
represents these equally, are intermingled: “his stomach flipped again as he remembered
the hatchet and the jumbled stories of miscarriages and sucking cocks” (13). From this
point Mal’s relationship with Francy Hagan invokes a sexuality that is strongly
transgressive of the codes of sexual behaviour that have been previously established as
acceptable. The relationship is secretive and concealed, due in part to both Mal’s and
Fancy’s desires to find a space out of the public eye, and thus to a certain extent
ironically underscores some of the assumptions about Francy that have previously
proliferated amongst the gang. Taking place out of the public eye, the relationship
consists of a combination of an openly stated and sworn mutual allegiance as well as
implicit homosexual desire. The relationship functions within the novel both as an end
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in itself and as a working example of the larger belief system of understanding and
exchange that Francy promulgates in the novel.
Mal’s initial attraction to Francy is also connected to the conversations about sex
he has overheard and only half understood on the football field; for what is fascinating
about Francy is the extent to which he quietly enacts what has otherwise been
suppressed. The relationship between Mal and Francy possesses many Gothic elements,
since Mal’s desire for Francy occurs in unexpected ways, is often ritualized, and is
frequently associated with dirt and decay. These elements highlight the subversion of
the status quo that Mal’s relationship with Francy represents but also reveal the aspects
of life on the estate that the surrounding community seeks to deny.
One of the novel’s uses, or even subversions, of Gothic traditions can be found in
the association of homosexuality with political maturity which in turn works against the
codes of Protestant masculinity found elsewhere. Transgressive sexual activity, so often
depicted in Gothic literature as deeply threatening to the status quo and to the security
of the populace as a whole (perhaps most famously seen in Dracula’s untrammeled
desires for men and women) is here offered as a meaningful alternative to the stifling
gender roles advocated upon the estate and in Mal’s Uncle Simon’s house. Such desires
and choices do not come easily and are often linked to religious and political disloyalty.
To be a supporter of Catholics is marked out at several points in the novel as a ‘gay’
activity, since inappropriate loyalties are construed as emasculating. When Mal calls
after a departing Francy “take me”, he is referred to as a “Fenian Lover” (238). Such
moments signal an underlying anxiety about the succession of a strong male Protestant
identity, which is constructed within the text as reliant on loyalty and the guarantees of
future members to carry on the torch. Fears of losing literal ground to Catholics are
mirrored by fears about loss of virility or the ability to reproduce. These fears are often
deferred into the repressive codes that loyal Protestant males must abide by. The rivalry
for gang leadership between Andy and Mucker is conducted through displays of
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sectarian loyalty and sexual virility. Any failure in these areas is immediately seized
upon as a sign of weakness, and often results in exile, either imposed or self-directed,
from the gang.
Violence and sex are linked within these disputes in ways that signal their close
relationship as markers of a precariously maintained social identity. Mucker attacks
Andy after overhearing revelations about his failure to perform heterosexual sex. Yet
even this regaining of control is complicated by the subsequent revelation of Mucker’s
friendship with Francy. Mal is unsettled by the fact that Mucker has fought to retain his
publicly acceptable identity while simultaneously being associated with a more
disturbing private one that bears a striking resemblance to the relationship that exists
between Francy and Mal himself. This sense of unease is related to Mal’s growing
awareness of the choice that he has made in relation to his own social and sexual
identity. His initial attraction to Sally Cleary, a local girl, fades after hearing her friend
publicly chanting their names in a suggestive rhyme:
Jess chanted on:
‘First comes love, then comes marriage,
Then comes a baby in a baby carriage’ (192).
The alternative, Mal’s friendship with Francy, seems to Mal to be founded on more
honourable, and less publicly appropriated grounds. The secrecy of Francy’s hiding
place, the initiation rituals and the oaths of loyalty establish in Mal’s mind a realm of
desirable exchanges, which functions as a sanctuary from the confusing and coercive
requirements of the gang, his family and the rest of the world at large. When Francy
asks him if he was jealous of his relationship with Mucker, Mal realizes
138
…it wasn’t jealously exactly, but when he had seen them together they were in
Mucker’s world, not Francy’s. Now that he was on the dump, his thoughts ran
on the den, the altar and the oath (207).
This projection is unsettled, like so many others in the novel, by Francy’s description of
the earlier confrontation between himself and Mucker. After Francy’s destruction of the
Bonfire centre-pole, Mucker had “come looking for him” and the two boys had finally
met my surprise. Intending to kill each other, the duel is only thwarted when Francy
catches sight of Mucker’s penis:
‘His spurs were gaping and you could see right in his trouser. Dirt bird’d no
knickers on him and there was me staring at this wee thing like a jelly baby
dangling down: his dick. I swear to God, it was shrivelled away next to nothing.’
He crooked his little finger, pinching it at the topmost joint. ‘That’s when it hit
me: all these years, they’d been filling our heads with that much shit, it was
starting to get into our eyes’ (208).
It is at this point that the two worlds of the estate and the dump finally meet. Francy’s
recognition of the similarity between himself and Mucker, and of the ways in which they
have both been instruments of the surrounding propaganda, returns him to a sense of
himself as a child and an individual, rather than as an objectified enemy. The moment
also echoes the book’s title and central theme, reminding Mal and the reader of the
ultimate victims in sectarian violence. Anxieties over succession, male authority and the
ownership of land have been temporarily dissolved by the revelation of another
forbidden subject, the indiscriminate nature of fear.
In the dump, bizarre rituals that are a pastiche of established church traditions
and Francy’s own, singular, world-view are eroticised, signalling the intrinsic attraction
of re-writing established and repressive belief systems. Mal feels his first stirrings of
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sexual attraction for Francy in an initiation ritual in which Francy ties a rat on a string
to Mal’s jeans, while chanting a highly edited version of an oath of allegiance (21).
These moments are offered as alternatives to the codes with which Mal has been
previously indoctrinated. When Mal hesitates about holding hands with Francy in order
to crawl safely through a threatening hidden passage, Francy tells him, “Don’t be a
dick” (59). Working in a cumulative way to bring about Mal’s transference from the
edges of the estate’s carefully policed, heteronormative and exclusionist identity
practices, these moments bring Mal to a position of relative (if temporary) freedom as he
recognises in Francy what he has been seeking – the right to choose your own identity.
This moment is most fully allegorised when Mal kisses Francy, in the only point in the
book in which Mal truly takes control of a situation. Gerry Smyth has noted the
ambiguous nature of Mal’s kiss – arguing that it can be read either as an expression of
genuine liberation or as a Judas-like gesture before Mal’s final betrayal of Francy.238 In
my reading, the kiss symbolizes Mal’s increasingly liminal status as he is caught between
the relative security of the gang’s mindless games and the riskier territory that Francy
represents.
The treatment of sexual desire within the novel, given its most striking form in
that signally transgressive kiss, can also be read as a key component in Patterson’s wish
to provide alternatives to the values that dictate social interaction on the estate. This is a
discourse that seeks to replace exclusion with connection and rumour with realized and
meaningful experience. Part of the problem of the estate lies in the lack of witnessing of
different ways of life or communities: Catholic boys play football with Mal’s gang, but
Mal has never seen/been inside a Catholic household. It is the moments of interaction
within the novel that bring about greater understanding, even if that understanding is
238 “Even the kiss Mal gives to Francy at the end can be read as a both/either insistence on
a larger non-bigoted vision and/or Judas kiss of betrayal.” Gerry Smyth, The
Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction, (London: Pluto Press,
1997), p. 128.
140
not universally shared. The gentleness and easy camaraderie of Mal’s relationship with
Francy suggests that homosexual desire is offered within the novel as a kind of template
for beginning that understanding, as each boy starts from what he has in common with
the other in order to work through misunderstandings and misconceptions. The flouting
of social proprieties and a witnessing of the unexpected are occasions for sexual arousal,
in a development of Patterson’s association of political and personal enlightenment with
sexual liberation.
Gothic scatology, like homosexual desire, is frequently associated in Burning
Your Own with the political. Mal is aroused by the thought of his aunt using the toilet, a
desire that is also tied to an earlier conversation in which Mucker, another transgressive
figure from the estate, impersonates the Queen shitting (111). When trouble erupts in
Unity Flats, the gang is entertained with talk of “dirty bastards…throwing shite out the
windows…[t]hat’s what you get moving Catholics in where they’ve no right to be”
(176). References to faeces and waste abound in the novel, signs of neglect and injustice,
but also of a refusal to hide. Francy, the dump-dweller, is the figure within the novel
most often associated with discomfort and disease. When Mal kisses Francy, he notes
the dirty nappy taste of his mouth (231). Mal makes frequent reference to Francy’s
filthy jeans, unwashed hair and stained T-shirt, signs of poverty and neglect, yet these
references occur at the moments that he is seen as a figure of desire. Refusing to be
drawn into either side of the sectarian divide, Francy’s actions and physical appearance
are a means of drawing attention to those aspects of life that Larkview’s inhabitants
most wish to deny. Francy’s occupation of the dump, his unwashed and exiled state and
his obvious alienation from any of the controlling social norms that pervade the estate
all increase his status as a desirable sexual object in Mal’s eyes, although this is never
openly articulated in the novel. What Mal desires in Francy, as much as his position as
an outsider, are the attributes that defiantly make manifest the lies or assumptions upon
which the estate rests: “His refusal to hide poverty and degradation is perhaps the most
141
intolerable thing about him to the community”.239 Through Gothic features such as
references to filth and squalor in moments of sexual and psychological awakening, the
elements of life on the estate that have been formerly suppressed are turned into sites of
appalling fascination. Desire here is transgressive as it extends Mal’s identity formation
beyond the terms prescribed by the leading figures on the estate. The object of Mal’s
desire, the unwashed and spectacularly poor Francy and all that that desire represents,
must be not only forbidden, but also invisible.
Finally, striking uses of the Gothic, with its particular connections to what is
secretive and contained, can be found in the motif of burial and resurrection that
threads its way through the novel. This motif appears in various forms: Francy’s
renamed collection of community artefacts, the pervasive and chilling presence of the
chapel stones, and even in the spinning brass bowl that reappears in Mal’s household
every time there has been a fight between his parents. The most striking example of this
trope can be found in the repeated story of Sammy Slipper, “a master metaphor for
intrafamilial and community violence and the social order’s repeated efforts to cover it
up”. 240 In the first version of the story, which is first told to Mal by his father, the hen-
pecked Sammy Slipper buries his wife’s dog in the vegetable patch, after believing he
has accidentally killed it. Sammy pretends that Bobo, the dog, has run away and offers
to search for it, gaining the temporary admiration of his wife. His parents-in-law later
turn up to the house, and inadvertently uncover the dog, which jumps out, still alive,
resulting in Sammy’s subsequent humiliation (29-32). Margot Gayle Backus has noted
that the first three tellings of the story “are rendered in a ludic mode which retroactively
239 Comments made by Professor Andrew Lynch, UWA School of Social and Cultural
Studies, via email, 17 May 2004.
240 Backus, p. 3.
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justifies both the perpetrator and the act.”241 It is only in the final telling, in which
Francy reveals to Mal the ‘true’ version, wherein the stench from the dog that is truly
dead kills Sammy slipper “on the spot” (228) that the real release of the repressed
occurs. Yet even this ‘final’ version is shortly followed by Francy telling Mal: “What’s it
matter if the dog lived or rotted. Your version’s as good as mine – a pack of fucking lies”
(230). This seems to me to be the point at which Patterson lets the story rest, and at
which the underlying purpose of its recurrence is most fully revealed. Stories of burial
and resurrection do point to the “gothic trope of the return of the repressed”242 but their
other function is to illuminate the apocryphal and arbitrary nature of accepted truth,
and the dangers of taking any story at face value. This is the “buried dog” which
Francy, and the novel as a whole, is most interested in digging up.
The combination of realism and the Gothic within Burning Your Own allow
Patterson to examine the extent to which rumour, secrecy and myth are used to
suppress unwanted elements of society – elements that might remind people of the ways
in which they are similar to those they wish to exclude. This is not a one-way process,
though, as secrets in Burning Your Own can also form havens, spaces in which to take
stock of situations and in which the protagonist can make up his mind about his own
reaction to the influences upon his life. Like Reading in the Dark, this story is told from
the perspective of a young boy, and details both his desire to escape from stifling cultural
labels and his longing to conform to the groups that produce them. The urbanised and
often unique uses to which the staples of Gothic literature and form are put to use in
Burning Your Own testify to Patterson’s interest in the underside of society as a
collection of symbolic sites from which outsiders may confront the establishment, and
the close relationship of repulsion to desire in any engagements between the two.
241 Backus, p. 3.
242 Backus, p. 2.
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Sacrilegious Stories
Much of the horror novel’s concern with ‘superstition’ in one form or another carries the implication of
unstated orthodoxy…in the middle of a barrage of obsessively managed manoeuvres about the relative
nature of the credible will come a flash of horror usually from an earlier…part of contemporary
culture… the peculiar rhetorical form of the horror tradition discredits and authorises the unthinkable at
the same time…243
Patterson’s subversion of secretive discourses is another aspect of Burning Your Own
that I read as revolving around secrets or secretive practices. These discourses can be
seen to be secretive in the sense that they often privilege or speak to one section of the
populace at the same time as they refuse or withhold meaning from others. These forms
of secrecy may be obvious, such as those found in the carefully guarded terms or
symbols of a religious order or cultural group, or they may be found in the
manipulations of meaning in religious texts for sectarian ends.
Foster, Sloan and Sage have all noted the importance of “internal conscience” as
the one attribute that can be seen as a constant in representations of Protestant beliefs in
literature from Northern Ireland.244 In Burning Your Own, Mal’s “internal conscience”
is the means by which readers can chart his growing understanding of the society
around him, and his ability to listen to that conscience can be read as a gauge of the
extent to which he has achieved a sense of his own moral identity. On the estate,
individual gain, intercession by religious leaders and confessional modes are all
eschewed in favour of group solidarity and a belief in the justice and predestination of
their actions, a belief system which can be read as conventionally ‘Protestant’ in nature,
yet which eventually leads to violence and division. Mal’s interactions with Francy have
a distinctly ‘Catholic’ flavour, as Francy plays the role of priest and confessor figure to
Mal’s confused supplicant. However Francy’s role as a bearer of arcane knowledge is
243 Victor Sage, p. 233.

244 Barry Sloan, Writers and Protestantism in the North of Ireland, Victor Sage, Horror
Fiction In the Protestant Tradition, and John Wilson Foster, Forces and Themes
in Ulster Fiction (pp.1-10).
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illusory, as Francy becomes a victim of both community exclusion and of his own self-
awareness. The switching in the novel between these two, polarised, religious traditions
illustrates their pervasiveness in Northern Ireland as means of constructing identity. The
relationship between Francy and Mal can be construed, in some passages, as that
existing between a priest and his acolyte, containing elements of blind loyalty and acts of
confession. In other ways Mal’s journey bears the hallmarks of the “Protestant
clerics…[who] were represented as isolated and lonely figures”245, requiring constant
questioning, both of their conscience and of the ethical foundations of the society about
them. A Calvinist ethics of exclusion and denial is turned towards the promotion of free
self-expression. Sarah Nelson has argued that the “Calvinist view of the relationship
between religion and politics justifies denial of free speech and actions which threaten
Protestant liberty”.246 Francy teaches Mal to be more aware of the restriction of belief
and identity upon the estate, as well as the reasons why these restrictions exist in the first
place, as the estate’s inhabitants react to perceived incursions upon their liberty.
Francy’s lessons are made even more relevant by the forms in which they are presented,
which range from a teleological and localised re-working of the Book of Genesis, to a
highly subversive spectacle that incorporates ‘Catholic’ idol worship with the plain
speaking that might be found in a Presbyterian service.
The varying ways in which Patterson plays with modes of behaviour that could
be normally identified as stereotypically ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ attests to an interest in
an underlying ethical stance that favours neither religion, but manipulates particular
aspects of each. The figure of Mr. Crosier is another example of Patterson’s interest in
playing with these traditions in order to construct new meanings. A staunch Protestant
and key instigator of sectarian violence on the estate, his name – with its associations of
245 Sloan, p. 292.

246 Sarah Nelson, Ulster’s Uncertain Defenders (Belfast: The Appletree Press Ltd, 1984),
p. 71.
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Episcopalianism – also suggests a betrayal of Presbyterian values, suggesting that what
he is most interested in is status, rather than loyalty to his community.
Numerous passages in Burning Your Own can also be read as strong evidence
for Victor Sage’s argument that “the rhetoric of the horror novel is demonstrably
theological in character”.247 These passages testify to Patterson’s interest in linking the
theological to the horrific, in order to draw attention to the ways dominating discourses
may take root at the expense of others. The novel contains numerous ‘sermons’ in which
established meaning is negotiated around metaphors of creation and apocalypse, and in
which there is a sense of a pre-ordained order to events, and a constant battle between
the forces that operate to maintain social equilibrium and those that serve to disrupt
them. Francy, in particular, makes frequent reference to Old Testament Biblical
passages, yet these references are usually invoked as a means of undermining previously
accepted doctrines of faith, rather than as a means of reinforcing them: “He claims the
right to ascribe his own meanings and significances to the symbols, slogans and
proprieties of the rest of society, Catholic or Protestant, and to deny them conventional
respect and gravity”.248 Francy’s creation myths are telling in terms of their form, as
well as their content. Epistemological, retrospective and authoritative, they mimic the
Biblical passages Francy draws from – evidence of the hold theological patterning of
meaning has upon an otherwise secular community. Through the subversive use of
Christian rhetoric and the demeaning of sacrosanct objects, Francy establishes his own
distinctive doctrine, in which ‘The Word’ is constantly open to re-evaluation as part of a
process of challenging the belief systems underpinning the Larkview estate. Burning
Your Own opens with a re-working of the book of Genesis: “‘In the beginning’ said
Francy – ‘was the dump’” (3). In this passage, the story of creation is overlaid with the
story of the estate. Working men are presented in a utopian ideal of harmonious male
247 Sage, p. xvi.

248 Sage, p. 290.
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industry: “Hundreds of them: navvies, asphalters, boys for the drains and the water,
others to lay the electric and the gas…” (15)
This ideal is momentarily halted by Francy’s flirtatious reminder that women
had a certain part to play: “Except of course, you can’t make a baby with just men, as
you well know” (16), in a manner that only underscores the erotic content of his
previous vision. People arrive to the estate from the four corners of the earth: “Toronto,
Chicago, New York, Detroit, Wellington, Sydney, Perth and places you’ve never in your
life dreamed of” (18). Francy tells Mal why so many people came to the estate, neatly
summarising the troubles of the nineteen-twenties in Northern Ireland: the depression,
World War II and the subsequent desire for jobs and better houses as part of a pattern
of events leading up to the arrival of so many in “Larkview…a ready-made community”
(20). What is heavily ironic here is that nothing is ever really ready-made. Francy’s
appropriation of the Book of Genesis and his blending of biblical and local history in
order to arrive at this final point only underline the extent to which the legacies of the
past are ever present. The secret here is not how the community came into being, but
the assumption that it can bury or leave behind the conflicts and needs that created it.
This point is re-emphasized in Francy’s re-telling of the Sammy Slipper tale, and in his
response to Mal’s outrage at his new version: “‘That’s a disgusting ending. ‘It’s a
disgusting story altogether,’ Francy said. Most stories people tell each other are’” (229).
Blasphemy reaches new heights in the mouth of Francy Hogan, who reclaims
the religious and cultural discourses that are being used to reinforce division within the
community to offer Mal his own version of history. These reclamations are reinforced
by Mal’s increasingly acolyte-like position in relation to Francy, although the ‘religion’
that Francy represents is a fantastically hybrid one. Mal’s oath of allegiance to the
dump involves Catholic iconography – lit candles on a shrine which has been cobbled
together from the stones of the ruined chapel – and Protestant echoes; the terms of this
pledge recall oaths of loyalty to the Orange Order and the British subject’s oath of
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allegiance to the current monarch: “And, finally, that I will yield implicit obedience in
all things not contrary to the laws of morality” which, significantly in terms of the
novel’s wider politics, is the point at which Francy stops reading and declares “Scrap all
that yielding obedience stuff” (64). This rejection of blind allegiance can be read as a
veiled criticism of both the unthinking sectarian loyalties upon the estate and of Unionist
‘never surrender’ loyalty to Britain.
Francy’s oblique refusal of loyalty to such sources of power could be read as a
sign of his Republican tendencies. However his dismissal of all forms of unthinking
allegiance operates instead to reaffirm his own, distinctive theology, and the one which
the novel most obviously endorses, that secretive discourses are only ever useful if their
speakers use them to reveal what has been hidden, rather than to hide it further.
I have earlier referred to the analogy that can be drawn between the novel and
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with each text employing a theological rhetoric that directs the
reader towards a moral position in regard to the subject who suffers at the hands of the
state. In each text these rhetorical flourishes (though for very different purposes in each
case) are made most memorable through the final, lingering, images of the sufferer’s
death, which is presented as the ultimately castigatory form of public spectacle. What is
most ironic and telling about Patterson’s use of this religious backdrop is his swapping of
the central subject, and his complicating of the means by which this subject arrived at
the position of martyr. Francy is a Catholic, who arrived at the dump after running
away from bullies in his own, Catholic, classroom (226-228). He expresses scorn and
derision for all established doctrines, and indeed, one of his key purposes in the text, as
Barry Sloan has pointed out, is as a “demythologiser”.249 Francy’s existence is seen as
being fundamentally destructive to the well-being of the estate. Unlike the martyrs
Francy is not offered a chance to repent; his identity, in the eyes of the estate loyalists, is
249 Sloan, p. 291.
148
fixed forever. In these scenes Francy can be read as either an echo of those earlier
Protestant martyrs or as a victim of public crucifixion, whose only freedom lies in the
self-directed spectacle of his own death. Francy’s final act of self-immolation in the face
of this immobility can thus be read as a means of reclaiming his own theological
discourse that centres, however tragically, upon the right of the individual to choose his
own identity.
The alternating perspectives in these passages undermine any easier reading of
Burning Your Own as one endorsing one religion or history over another. The
intermingling of such seemingly opposite figures, in scenes of such striking similarity,
demonstrates Patterson’s interest in what is most secret and unspeakable, the shared (as
opposed to the conflicting) history of struggle and deprivation that lies behind the
present condition of the inhabitants on the estate.
The role of stories in Burning Your Own as a whole also demonstrates this
double drawing upon and undermining of established belief. Susan Engel has noted the
extent to which children’s narratives operate as both outlets of confronting material and
the means of devising answers to these confrontations: “…the form of the narratives
often offer clues about the kinds of solutions they have devised”.250 In Burning Your
Own stories are told by and between children about hidden, forgotten or misunderstood
events in slightly twisted versions of the preceding myths they have been fed by adults.
Narratives such as the Story of Sammy Slipper and Alex’s references to Joyce’s
depiction of Ireland as the “sow that ate her farrow” reverberate throughout the novel,
building up images of deceit, putrefaction and cannibalism as part of a wider
commentary on the current state of the production of meaning in Northern Ireland.
Margot Gayle Backus has written most perceptively on the role of story telling within
the novel arguing that: “repetitive patterns of abuse are, as Michael’s story about
250 Engel, p. 156.

149
Sammy Slipper suggests, maintained through attempts on the part of guilty parties to
‘bury’ the past and to deny the past’s relationship to the present”.251 Backus also argues
for a one-way reading of this process, in which children are innocent victims of a system
that exploits them in order to maintain its own existence:
The novel explores the position of children within a transgenerational familial
and national system that appropriates them into a priori patterns of loyalty and
animosity. This system of appropriation, Patterson suggests, exploits children’s
innocence, effectively ‘killing’ in them the capacity to think and act
independently by ensnaring them within a dissembling and contradictory
account of Irish history that treats Catholics as illegitimate interlopers.252
I would argue, instead, that the children in this novel are never really innocent, and are
equally involved in the process of establishing their own “dissembling and
contradictory” accounts of Irish history. Mal is a child in a family that is violent and
dysfunctional, and he passes on his version of the Sammy Slipper story to Francy not
because he really believes it is true, but in order to validate his own position as a holder
and conveyor of secrets. What differs in this novel between the stories told by adults
and those told by children are the reasons behind the telling. Adults here tell stories to
bury the past, while children tell them to point out its connection to the present.
One of the ways in which Burning Your Own can be read is as a political horror
story that employs images of martyrdom, re-readings of Biblical passages and a
grotesque sale of the sacrosanct in order to disturb pre-conceptions about both
Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, while bringing to light the unthinkable.
The most striking passages in the novel are these closing ones, Francy’s “Sale of a
fucking lifetime” in which objects that have previously held privileged positions within
251 Backus, p. 9.
252 Backus, p. 2.
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the community – an urn, a pram and an Orange sash – are given new and singular
meaning. In this conclusion Patterson draws together the various theological threads of
the novel as both Protestant and Catholic iconography are intermingled in a final,
dramatic parody of the symbolic structures upon which each religious identity rests. It is
this dramatic conclusion that I shall examine in detail as the final example in my
reading of the functions and manifestations of the secret in Burning Your Own.
Spectacular Inversions
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an
immense accumulation of spectacle.253
The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human
realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of
social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into
appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.
At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and
shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.254
The most dramatic and arresting presentation of the secret in Burning Your Own can
be found in Patterson’s use of spectacle. Links are made, via these spectacles, between
the deceptions and masks of an unjust economic system and those found within
sectarianism. Debord’s reading of late capitalism as a saturation of images and
spectacles that continually divide the spectator from a meaningful sense of self can be
equally applied to the fascination with rituals, icons and imagery that constitutes
staunchly sectarian codes of behaviour. In Burning Your Own, a series of staged events
or spectacles point to the inter-relationship of theatre, economics and violence in a
manner that reinforces the common ground these three seemingly disparate subjects
share. Underlying these presentations, and made defiantly clear in the closing sections
of the book, is a reading of the inter-connection of capitalism with sectarianism. This
form of sectarianism operates along lines of both religious and economic exclusion.
253 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New
York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 12.
254 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 17.
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Patterson highlights the means by which the desire for security and status is transferred
into the production of reassuring objects, over-determined with symbolic meaning, such
as an Orange sash, a public school blazer, or the tri-colour flag. These objects
simultaneously signal membership of a club and exclusion of the Other. Francy’s gift to
the estate lies in his ability to show how the meanings of such items are not fixed, but
open to multiple uses and interpretations, in the same way that identity could be if the
inhabitants of the estate would only let go of their fear and hatred.
The possibility of reading Burning Your Own as a form of post-colonial text is
reiterated through the novel’s use of spectacle, as the relationship between the Self and
the colonised Other is negotiated through a series of public stagings. The figures of the
coloniser and the colonised are not as straightforward as in other, more recognisably
post-colonial novels, as it is the disputes and differences between Catholics and
Protestants rather than between the Irish and the English that the novel is concerned
with. The same patterns of imposed subjectivity and the attempts of the dominated
Other to escape that subjectivity occurs in the dictates on appropriate appearance,
behaviour and loyalty found upon the estate, and in Francy Hagan’s attempts to re-
negotiate these impositions.
One way of maintaining difference is through holding things to yourself – a kind
of exclusivity whereby objects, rites and spaces are made special, territorial or distinct,
existing for your private uses, rather than another’s. This exclusivity is reinforced
through public spectacle that reminds the outsider that these objects and acts possess
meanings not universally available. An examination of varying examples of spectacle
within Burning Your Own demonstrates the extent to which Patterson perceives
economic and sectarian issues as linked in a mutually supportive network of exclusivity
and anxiety over identity.
The first reference to the dramatic production of meaning on the estate is found
on the opening page of the novel, as Andy and Mucker mimic Mal’s fighting parents in
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the roles of Punch and Judy. The fact that his domestic life has become a public joke,
and the choice of Punch and Judy to make that comment draws attention to the
community desire to turn misery and hostility into public entertainment. This desire is
also manifested in the jostling for position that occurs within the gang, as leadership and
status are usually awarded at the expense of another member’s public humiliation.
However it is the Bonfire, a carefully orchestrated and time-honoured community
spectacle, that most obviously points to the need to display, in a carefully deferred form,
the need within the community for an Other upon which to project its own anxieties
and desires. The bonfire is the ultimate commodity, a sign of success, virility and power
made dramatically visible and available to certain sections of the community. The
collapse of the bonfire, because its centre-pole is too weak, demonstrates Patterson’s
interest in pointing out the ultimately hollow nature of such spectacles. Eve Patten has
discussed the extent to which the Eleventh Night bonfires on the estate are a means of
solidifying community, with their presentation in the novel working against
conventional readings of the Bonfire as rituals that are “readily associated with sectarian
aggravation”255 Patten also argues that this bonfire has wider narrative functions,
providing a means by which Mal increases his understanding of various individuals on
the estate: “ It is experienced from Mal’s perspective as a social occasion on which the
local residents who form the corporate identity of the neighbourhood are suddenly and
painstakingly illuminated in their identity”.256
The bonfire also functions as a signifier of difference, and as a means of
excluding the Other, Catholic, members of the community. The making of the Bonfire
initially functions as a display of solidarity on the estate. Preparations are not limited to
Protestants, as Mal realizes: “recently Mad Mitch Campbell had been helping at the
255 Eve Patten, “Northern Ireland’s Prodigal Novelists,” in Peripheral Visions, p. 140.
256 Patten, p. 140.
153
bonfire” (23). These preparations are confined to the neighbourhood boys, who use the
exercise as a means of strengthening ties within the gang. Ultimately, though, the work
on the bonfire ensures certain places amongst a wider network of Protestant masculinity
and community pride. Catholic boys who may have helped to build it or who are
happy to watch, are not able to happily avail themselves of the bonfires’ political
associations. The theft of the bonfire centre-pole, which has been brought about by
harassment of Francy’s family, highlights the fragility of this initial state of affairs, and of
the tendency for commemorative rituals to slide into disjunction and separation.
Several critics have pointed out the possibility of reading the Bonfire centre-pole as a
phallic symbol, and its subsequent loss as a statement about the underlying fears of
impotence that the bonfire represents.257
The gangs’ anxieties about the Bonfire success illustrate the powerful role that
public spectacle plays in staging and reinforcing conceptions of the Self in a sectarian
state. On the night of the Eleventh, Mal is asked to climb to the top of the unlit bonfire
to place the dummy, which has been changed from the Pope to one of Gerry Fitt, a
Catholic Belfast civil rights activist and MP. In a moment that prefigures Francy’s later
death, Mal is temporarily cast as the dummy or figure that will be burnt when Les and
Andy, members of his gang, remove the planks that will allow him to descend. Mal
clings to the effigy, and the scene is fraught with dangerous possibility, in which Catholic
and Protestant, child and effigy are intermingled. Mal’s precarious position on the top
of the bonfire, clinging to the effigy for support, illustrates the ultimately self-destructive
nature of the occasion, which, despite its potential as an opportunity for communal
gathering remains a signifier for sectarian difference, and a stimulus for violence. This
underlying meaning is realised when Mal’s father stumbles drunkenly upon the scene
257 John Goodby, “Reading Protestant Writing: Representations of the Troubles in the
Poetry of Derek Mahon and Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own,” p. 239; Gerry
Smythe, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish fiction, p.127.
154
and insults Mucker, who then attacks Mr. Martin in a fury. The chain of events that
lead to this point: insecure foundations, betrayal and entrapment and final destruction,
are mirrored throughout the novel.
A second ‘staging’ or spectacle in the novel is the televised moon landing. Mal
views this event at his Uncle Simon’s house. The landing is first perceived as a means of
putting everything into perspective, as Mal’s immediate surroundings and circumstances
seem to fade into insignificance before the “enormity of the distances inside his head”
(128). This sense of relativity reinforces Mal’s earlier vision of Belfast from his uncle’s
front lawn, where he had seen the interconnectedness of the city and wished that “if
only they could see the city from where he saw it…they wouldn’t cause trouble
anywhere” (115). These moments of detachment are fleeting. Even as Mal is watching
the landing, there is a sense that what he sees before him is still inescapably bound up in
his present situation: “The astronaut waved. In his visor was reflected the capsule, the
capsule whose camera filmed him. Waving reflecting. Encapsulated within the
television set, which Mal’s mother, uncle, aunt, cousins watched” (128). The spectacle of
the moon landing is, like most other spectacles in the novel, a temporarily dazzling
display that is ultimately unable to provide Mal with an alternative, and sustainable set
of terms for understanding his life. When Uncle Simon comments on the moon
landing, the irony of its inappropriateness as a symbol for hope within Mal’s family and
in Northern Ireland as a whole is made clear: “Wonderful achievement, though, there’s
no denying it. I mean for the youngster there to have a lifetime of this ahead of him”
(141).
When Mal’s father does attempt to deny the achievement, commenting that the
money would have been better spent in Belfast, the unwelcome nature of such
observations is made clear (141). Mal increasingly comes to see the earlier beliefs he
held as an illusion, rather than as an insight: “Whatever didn’t fit in, got excluded; that’s
what it boiled down to…Cathy’s picture had been taken down; but it was hidden, not
155
destroyed. Somewhere the eyes stared out, same as always” (201). The fact that the
moon landing is an empty, rather than enriching spectacle is made explicit through
Mal’s associations of the landing with the burnt out chapel site, which he reads as a
“scorched, desolate moonscape” (5). Mal realizes that spectacle can be used to hide
secrets, and aggravate old grievances, as much as to display progress. This realisation
has been brought about by the simple changing of perception: “What he had seen was
all the surfaces and surfaces could fool you. You only had to zoom in to Larkview to
discover that” (203), illustrating Patterson’s interest in pointing out the different ways in
which meaning may be constructed.
Conversely, Francy’s spectacles parody all sides of the sectarian divide. His “Sale
of a fucking lifetime” reminds the community what they are sacrificing in their desire to
maintain the sanctity of objects and allegiances over life itself. The fact that this
spectacle takes the form of an auction also reinforces the connection made in the novel
between sectarian violence and social and economic injustice. Spectre and spectacle,
which derive at different points from the same Latin root; specere to view, are combined
in a display of grotesquely distorted iconic objects. The sale can be read as a heavily
symbolic statement that summarises the ideologies and interests found in the rest of the
novel. Francy’s collection of cultural artefacts, and his dramatic re-inventions of their
uses, can be read in line with Homi Bhabha’s ideas on mimicry:
…in the ambivalent world…on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding
objects of the Western World become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés
of the colonial discourse – the part-objects of presence.258
After Francy’s family is forced off the estate, Francy holds the sale in a final effort
to confront the community with the consequences of their actions, as well as of the
258 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” p. 96.
156
assumptions upon which those actions are resting. A variety of objects, whose previous
associations have ranged from the mundane to the sacrosanct, are offered up for auction
to the gathered crowd. These items are ‘sold’ to the members least likely to find them
desirable, or who are most likely to be offended by their reincarnations, in a parody of
the forces of supply and demand. The items are also sold in a form of mocking mimicry
that involves a direct confrontation with the forms of communication and identity that
have been previously imposed upon the estate: “The discourse of mimicry is construed
around ambivalence. In order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its
slippage, its excess, its difference”.259
The dictionary upon which Mal earlier swore an oath of fealty is thrown at Tom
Garrity after he rudely gestures at the proceedings with his fingers. The “SpittUrn” is
tossed at Big Bobby Parker, who has been the instigator of much of Francy’s family’s
troubles, and turns out to be the one that previously lay upon Bobby’s father’s grave.
An Orange Sash is used first as a towel, then as toilet paper and finally as a noose,
defiantly declaring the Sash’s associations with dirt, refuse and violent death. These sales
are not confined to one side of the sectarian divide however, for Francy is often as
disrespectful of his own religious background as Mal’s. The final item in his sale is the
Irish Tri-colour flag, which he cuts into pieces as he announces: “A bit for everyone”
(248). Meaning and objects are now open to all in a spectacle that is designed to result
in recognition of what is commonly shared on the estate – poverty, prejudice and
pointless destruction. Francy’s grotesque sale is a spectacle which confronts its
spectators with their own involvement in the systems that operate to increase their
unhappiness, an involvement that has been previously masked or deferred in the
comforting exclusivity of sectarian ritual. Francy declares: “Youse never knew – what to
waste – and what the fuck – to keep” (246), underlining the terrible decisions that have
259 Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” p. 86.
157
been made as part of an economy of violence. The impact of this “Sale” rests upon the
estate’s understanding of their history and involvement in the past as much as it does
upon the objects themselves.
Michael Parker has noted the extent to which Patterson’s fiction is centred
around “still self-recognition…a fiction which repeatedly conjures faces staring
uncertainly in windows, screens, mirrors, eyes, amongst memories…”260 The sale
suggests the causes for this repetitive need for self-recognition by alluding to the constant
anxiety over property, status and representation that haunts the estate. Larkview’s
Protestant inhabitants become increasingly edgy, not when their religious affiliations are
threatened, but when the land they occupy and the jobs they hold are seen, however
indirectly, to be under attack. Religious identity acts as a deferral for the underlying
fear of truly ‘lacking recognition’ in society; a fear they transfer onto the Catholic
families they drive from the estate.
Francy’s sale and his “dangerous knowledge” (248) are brought to their
desperate conclusion when he sets fire to his hideout, with himself inside it. Setting
himself alight, he takes control of the ritual of burning that has previously functioned as
the marker of identity on the estate. The effigy, however briefly, has been given a
chance to speak. He has literally ‘sold his life’ in order to be heard.
Francy’s death is eulogised in several ways, first by the sad accompaniment of
the dump rats, who “rain down or skitter in crazy, dying squiggles across the mound”
(248) and later, in another grotesque inversion of the power of the word, in a piece of
community graffiti that reads “FRANCY HAGAN’…’REST IN PIECES” (249).
Francy’s literal dismemberment is the final act in a spectacle that has served to
260 Michael Harte, “Books of Hours: The Fiction of Glenn Patterson.” Honest
Ulsterman 101 (Spring 1996) 7-14. [7].
158
illuminate the destructive nature of the beliefs that operate upon the estate, and, by
inference, in Northern Ireland as a whole. His attempts to point out to the community
his greatest ‘secret’, that meaning is mutable and not fixed and thus can be used to form
unexpected connections rather than divisions, is made even more tragic by the
community’s satirical appropriation of that message. This inability to see ‘the stranger
within’ has immediate consequences. The arrival of British soldiers on the estate at the
end of the novel is marked by their obvious confusion about the current state of affairs,
as well as the implication that any local difficulties will soon be ironed out by more
powerful concerns:
An armoured car, the first seen in Larkview, slowed and parked by the roadside
beyond the grass. Two soldiers got out, nursing heavy rifles and called a
policeman to them. Then all three poured over a map spread on the armoured
car’s bonnet (249).
The reference to the map, in combination with the obvious signs of military
intervention, call to mind earlier re-writings and translations of the landscape found in
the nineteenth-century Ordnance Surveys. A re-writing of the community is about to
take place, which will set the shape for relationships between Catholics and Protestants
in Belfast for the next thirty years. By ending on this note, the cost of not heeding
Francy’s secrets is made clear, as a new and much more threatening stranger is
welcomed onto the premises.
Remnants
The significance of the novel’s title: Burning Your Own, can thus be read on a number
of levels: as a statement acknowledging the perpetuation in Northern Ireland of
practices that are self-destructive, as a reference to the central symbolic motif in the
novel – the bonfires that form part of the Eleventh Night celebrations – and as a
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signifier for the ways in which the sacrificing of individual to community desires can be
tragic if those community desires are based upon exclusion and enmity rather than upon
a mutually rewarding co-operation. While Burning Your Own has moments of self-
realisation, it ultimately, like Reading in the Dark, refuses the solutions and adjustments
of the bildungsroman, highlighting instead the difficulties young people face when public
conflicts dictate the patterns and outcomes of private behaviour. The biggest secret here
is the one Francy has to ‘auction’ off in the closing chapters of the novel: that it is a fear
of connection rather than a desire for division that is truly underneath the outbreak of
violence. In a novel that is deeply concerned with what is seen as well as what is hidden
from view, the final tragedy in Burning Your Own lies in the inability of the Larkview
residents to envisage their community in more liberating ways than those created by
violence.
I have read Patterson’s key contributions into what is hidden or withheld in
Northern Ireland through a number of narrative features. In Burning Your Own, space
and locale point out the sidelining of class divisions in Belfast. The novel also contains a
distinctive treatment of the relationship between desire for the hidden Other, and sheds
light onto spectacle’s potential as a means of interrogating of dominant discourses. It is
these key areas, as well as the varying “escape routes” in regard to the secret that
Burning Your Own offers to Mal and to the reader that make this story so illuminating.
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Chapter Three: No Bones
“Who ever heard of a casual person living in Northern Ireland who honestly turned out to be one?”261
Text and Context
Anna Burns’ first novel No Bones contains within its pages multiple individual and
family secrets. These secrets function on one level as metaphors for larger cultural
practices that include the suppression of the past and an avoidance of reflection upon
violence. Northern Ireland is depicted as a place where the culture of secrecy is
widespread and where, ironically, one of the key means of survival is to have secrets of
your own. The title alludes to the idiomatic phrase “make no bones about it”. The
various meanings for this phrase all revolve around openness and transparency: to have
no difficulty or scruple in expressing yourself, to speak directly and plainly, to tell the
truth, to admit openly what we are thinking. These elements are certainly all found in
Burns’ writing style. In the novel starkly vivid images are narrated in an almost
disconcertingly direct manner: “The Troubles started on a Thursday. At six o’clock at
night” (1). Yet the title is also heavily loaded. The residents of Ardoyne (both in the
novel and in reality) are literally walled off from their Protestant neighbours. They live
in a world that is intensely violent and riddled with secrets and unspoken codes of
behaviour. Who one could and could not talk to, where one could and could not go
directed all aspects of life there during the Troubles. Burns explores the implications of
living in a state of confusion, where to speak directly and plainly, to speak without fear,
is a very dangerous act. Her depiction of life as a member of a very violent Ardoyne
family is a testimony to the courage it takes to let go of secrecy and denial in a
261 Anna Burns, No Bones (London: Flamingo, 2002), p. 260. All further references to
this book will be included in the body of the text.
161
traumatised society, to speak openly about what has happened and to ‘make no bones
about it.’
In No Bones key events from the Troubles are interwoven with the daily trials of
the anarchic and self-combusting Lovett family. The extent to which the Troubles
influenced life in Ardoyne during that period is cleverly summed up through Burns’
chapter headings, which pun upon common terms from Troubles media jargon to talk
about more personal issues. “The Pragmatic Use of Arms, 1973” for example, refers
not to any paramilitary or army weapons but to a neighbourhood fist fight, and “In the
Crossfire, 1971” alludes to a child’s attempts to appease her teachers at a terrible local
school. The book’s setting in the middle of the Troubles also means that the characters
live within a very small and enclosed world that has its own distinctive social norms.
What is secretive or suppressed is again interwoven with spectacle and display,
although here it is the body itself that becomes the primary battleground. The
traumatized body in No Bones is the site upon which the dysfunctional relationship of
Self to Other in Ardoyne is most clearly played out. Details of life in Ardoyne as viewed
through Amelia’s eyes are interspersed with graphic accounts of beatings, knee-cappings
and sexual abuse. These events are filtered through differing points of view, diverse
fictional modes and graveyard humour. A feature that sets No Bones apart from the
other novels I have examined is this use of extremely black humour, with many passages
combining images of violence with a deadpan delivery that serves to highlight the
farcical nature of the situation at hand:
Doctors on the TV warned about getting blocked. “If you’re going to be
kneecapped,’ they complained, ‘please please please – don’t get drunk...
‘Tough!’ said the boys with complete total selfishness. They had every intention
of getting drunk and as drunk as they possibly could (95).
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Black humour is also a key component in Burns’ examination of the omnivorous
nature of violence, which functions in Ardoyne as the master code through which all
other practises – public, personal, sexual and psychological – are filtered. Many passages
are also piercingly sad, summing up the tragedy of the situation in a single striking
image or line. In one vivid episode, a psychiatric patient “knew the door would be
locked so he didn’t try to open it. He went through it the usual way and in no time at all
he was gone”(137). The patient uses his mind, rather than his body, to escape; a
survival stratagem employed by many characters in No Bones.
As with my other readings, I have broken this chapter down into a series of
topics relating to the treatment of the secret in the novel. “Walking the Minefield,” the
first of these, surveys Burns’ distinctive depictions of secret spaces in the novel. These
depictions combine a detailed awareness of Troubles codes in relation to place and
space with a desire to complicate conventional readings of these things. One
particularly memorable chapter accompanies a couple of young people on their attempt
to walk home to Ardoyne at night. The fact that one wrong turn could result in being
picked up by the Shankill Butchers vividly captures the importance of knowing the
secret codes of the streets in Belfast. Such chapters are strongly reflective of the actual
events and experiences of inhabitants of Belfast during the Troubles. Belfast was riddled
with “safe” and “no-go” areas, ritualised beatings and punishments, people you knew
you should stay away from. Burns’ deadpan register conveys both the importance of
treading carefully in Belfast, and the senselessness of never considering any alternatives
to the familiar:
Fergal lived in Ardoyne so first of all he got a Falls Road taxi into town…The
Ardoyne taxis were sporadic but as a rule, nothing much happened after two
o’clock. It didn’t occur to him, as it wouldn’t to lots of other people in Belfast, to
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go round and get a normal taxi in Victoria Street instead. He began the two-
mile walk by himself and he took, it goes without saying, the Catholic Cliftonville
route (176).
It is the intersection between the unspoken and the ridiculous that makes Burns’
examination of space in the novel so interesting. While she is deeply aware of the fixed
ideas about territorial allocation operating in Ardoyne during the Troubles, she also
employs several devices, black humour being one of the most obvious, to destabilise
these ideas. In this sense No Bones supports Shane Murphy’s argument that “much
recent Northern Irish fiction and many visual artworks adopt an alternative socio-
geographical model, one which propounds a provisional rather than a strictly
deterministic outlook.”262 Local landmarks in No Bones are frequently the sites for
actions that undermine their iconic status in the neighbourhood. An arranged game at
‘Logues’, which was “the old derelict bar…where, by convention, all bizarre, subliminal,
dark behaviours of the inhabitants of the area were always and forever carried out” (88)
becomes the setting for a farcical series of confusions, misunderstandings and manic
mishaps, all pointing out the insane and deeply flawed logic upon which many Troubles
practices were based.
This “provisional model” is most evident in the chapters detailing inner worlds
or spaces in the novel, which are narrated in a style I have coined ‘Gothic carnival’. In
these chapters traumatised mental states are expressed through descriptions of strange
and disturbing worlds where locally recognisable landmarks are turned to new and
sinister uses. In the chapter titled “Mr Hunch in the Ascendant” a young man’s means
of mental escape is an imaginary carnival, where paramilitaries tend grim sideshow stalls
262 Shane Murphy, “The City is a Map of the City: Representations of Belfast’s Narrow
Ground.” Cities on The Margin; On the Margin of Cities: Representations of
Urban Space in Contemporary Irish and British Fiction. eds. Philippe Laplace &
Éric Tabuteau, (Vol. 753 of Annales de l’Université de France- Comte), Paris:
Presses Univ. Franche-Comté, 2003, 183-199, [184].
164
and attempt to outdo each other’s spectacles of the grotesque. The combination of the
grotesque and the spectacular that marks these visions figuratively enacts that striking
phenomenon often associated with sectarian violence: violence as display. Burns layers
Gothic images which add up to create a sense of life as a constantly shifting nightmare,
made up of a series of vivid and horrifying vignettes. Nonetheless, these scenes do serve
a further purpose, since they represent a different version of the truth, as understood by
the traumatised young man who enters that world in his imagination. The carnival is a
psychotic projection of the violence of everyday Belfast into a recognisably ‘other’
world’: a means of mediating the daily intrusion of the extraordinarily violent. In this
way No Bones literally enacts Bakhtin’s words on carnival: “This carnival spirit offers
the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that
exists, and to enter a completely new order of things”.263
The various sideshows that the young man ‘visits’ during his hallucination
represent a surreal montage of the disturbing sights he has witnessed in the ‘real world’.
In their strange inter-mingling – mementos of child abuse are found alongside sectarian
thugs – they also testify to Bakhtin’s insights into the inter-connection of public and
private violence.
Burns’ socio-geographical model is contingent, rather than fixed, but her shifts
and challenges to perceptions of space in Belfast are not always comforting either. The
depictions of spaces and places in No Bones force the reader to think about connections
between public and private violence that may have previously been overlooked. Burns
interrogates and ironizes the concept of a ‘safe house’, for the family home is often the
site for experiences that are equal in horror to those taking place on the streets. A sense
of violation pervades all areas. Burns’ presentation of space in the novel sharply conveys
the disjunction between conventional understandings of space and what is actually
263Katerina Clark & Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1984),p. 34.
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experienced as their spatial reality when living in places like Belfast during the Troubles:
“A profound discontinuity marks the relations between the conventional social coding of
spatial transaction, imagined space, and experiential space”.264 The reader, like the
characters in No Bones, is kept in a continual state of suspension about what lies around
the corner, an experience that is magnified by Burns’ use of short, tense sentences and
the frequent and shocking insertion of unexpected violent sights. The subject’s relation
to the spaces she moves through in the novel, despite the use of secret codes and maps,
is fraught with danger, and there are no certainties about what any space might contain
at any particular time. The uncertainty is intensified by the lack of reflection upon
experience that Burns sees as central to the experience of trauma in Northern Ireland:
There were those who didn’t want to know anything about anything – based on
the bizarre belief that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. And then there
were those who spent all their time immersed in the latest news update, the latest
event but yet who had not time to pause or reflect on any of the information
they thought they were taking in.265
These delusive practices are found in No Bones, fed by the local understanding of the
surrounding environment as a series of extensive and unknown minefields, always
poised to explode.
The second major trope or area of investigation in relation to the secret in this
novel I have titled “Souveniring”. I employ this trope as a means of exploring Burns’
interest in the manipulation and commodification of Irish history, expressed in the novel
through a number of secretive and heavily coded acts. In this section of the chapter I
264 Feldman, p. 9.
265 Anna Burns, “Author Interview,” Harper Collins Publishers, p.3.
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draw upon Susan Stewart’s depiction of the souvenir as interrelated with nostalgia and
the fetish.266 Both nostalgia and the fetish can be read as having a distorted connection
to a disconnected experience, whether that is a romanticised longing for an impossible
past or a displacement of desire onto an objectified representation of a whole person.
The souvenir also functions as a symbol for a distorted link between personal and
community identity. This distortion is expressed though the coveting of objects believed
to represent missing connections. Key “souvenirs” in No Bones – a watch that is
supposed to have belonged to Wolfe Tone, a child’s collection of rubber bullets and
even Amelia’s body – are desired and obtained in secretive ways. They represent in each
case idealised versions of Irish history, and also function as a means for different
individuals to lay their own claims to those histories, to “transform and collapse distance
into proximity to, or approximation with, the self.”267 Stewart’s statement that “the
souvenir therefore contracts the world in order to expand the personal” has a powerful
resonance in this novel.268 Surrounded by competing ideologies, which are expressed
daily in violent acts, individuals in the novel seek to capture and hoard iconic
representations of an idealised moment or ideal. These actions also indirectly reinforce
Stewart’s argument that the souvenir is the material embodiment of an attempt to
capture a non-existent event: “we do not need or desire souvenirs of events that are
repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events
whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby only exist through narration”.269
The souvenirs in No Bones are stand-ins for idealised aspects of Irish history, links to a
desired political association, or simply the means of going one-up over another. Yet they
266 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir,
the Collection. (London: The John Hopkins Press Ltd, 1984).
267 Stewart, p. xii.
268 Stewart, p. xii.
269 Stewart, p. 135.
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are also dangerous. They draw attention to the anxiety of the owner and are a frequent
source of conflict.
In No Bones souveniring is always undercut by irony, and doomed to failure. A
desperately lonely young man attempts to connect with his relatives in Northern Ireland
by offering to pass on Wolfe Tone’s watch to one of them. But the relative who desires
it murders him in a back alleyway, in order to souvenir the watch, which was never
really Wolfe Tone’s anyway. Amelia hoards British Army rubber bullets as part of a
private treasure trove, only to have them stolen by her brother. In the most heavily
ironized example of souveniring in the novel, Amelia’s anorexic body itself is prized by a
group of school bullies in a twisted association with Republican hunger strikers. The
extremity of the situations in which Burns’ characters find themselves amplifies the act
of distancing between “the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world
(which is) replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence”.270 The souvenir here
obviously and dramatically underscores Stewart’s argument that “[i]n the process of
distancing, the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object, a memory
standing outside the self and thus presenting both a surplus and a lack of
signification”.271 The fetishised souvenir comes to replace the human subject that it was
once associated with. Compounding this phenomenon is that fact that all the acts of
‘souveniring’ in No Bones either take place in a secretive fashion, or are associated with
secretive or hidden acts.
Souveniring in No Bones is thus a symptom of a deeper malaise: the hiding,
burial and deferral of shameful acts of violence through secretive acts and objects. These
souvenirs, like the treatment of the body in the novel in my final area of examination,
simultaneously draw the viewer into the scene of the crime and put up barriers to stop

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them getting too close. The main point of connection that James Tone has with his
cousin is not the phoney Wolfe Tone watch, but the fact that they both bear the scars of
domestic violence from the hands of their fathers. Amelia’s obsessive collecting and later
starving is symptomatic of an unspoken desire to gain some control over her intensely
violent surroundings. The souvenir functions as a link to a preferred association between
subject and place, overriding the grim realities of the subject’s actual lived experiences:
“The present is either too impersonal, too looming, or too alienating compared to the
intimate and direct reference of contact which the souvenir has as its referent”.272 In
this way secretive objects and practises ‘souvenir’ or preserve a version of reality that
staves off confrontation with the terrors of daily existence in Ardoyne. Souveniring here
creates a safe space around the self, delaying connection with the feared other. The cost
of that safeguarding is usually the appropriation of the prized object for other purposes.
These appropriations often continue the work of the spectacular denial of connection
between self and other that marks life in Ardoyne. They also deepen the complex
interaction between the personal and the political that Burns interrogates throughout
this novel. Thus it is no accident that the chapter about Amelia’s school bullies is called
“Somethin’ Political 1977”.
My final trope or site of examination of the secret in No Bones is titled “Body
Damage”. The body in No Bones is both a secretive and a traumatised site, used as a
form of defence against the continual shocks of life in Ardoyne during the Troubles. The
descriptions of bodies in the novel stand as a fictional testimony to Allen Feldman’s
argument that “In Northern Ireland the practice of political violence entails the
production, exchange and ideological consumption of bodies”.273 The bodies in the text
are increasingly commodified within a distinctive economy of violence: they are turned
into the central forms of currency that allows that economy to keep operating. Strategies

273 Feldman, p. 9.
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of resistance to this process include starving yourself in order to become invisible and
marking your body in a reconstruction of previous crimes. These acts function as
desperate survival strategies at the same time as they often replicate the violence they
are trying to withstand.
In this section of the chapter I focus on two aspects of the damaged body in No
Bones. One of these is starvation, which also has obvious wider cultural and historical
resonances in Irish history. Amelia’s anorexia functions as an unspoken reprimand to
her family, and is part of something that is “inner, top secret and to do with my own
soul” (79). One cannot read a book set in Northern Ireland without associating anorexia
with two other forms of starvation in Irish history: the Maze hunger strikers and the
Famine. While each of these differs hugely in terms of agency, context and impact upon
the population, they share with Amelia’s anorexia the image of the starving Irish
subject. Souvenirs and commemorations of the Irish Famine often feature the
emaciated body as a visceral sign of what might be otherwise forgotten: the Famine
sculptures in Dublin are a dramatic case in point. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger,
Terry Eagleton discusses accounts of famine families boarding themselves into their
homes as a clear marker of the shame associated with starving to death, and of a
consequent wish to remove themselves from history.274 This image has been inverted
over time, as the absent bodies are reinforced as a ghostly presence, the evidence of
suffering unavoidable through its very desire to appear otherwise. In Northern Ireland
the spectre of Famine is doubled by or superimposed onto the image of the Hunger
Striker. While the politics and losses of the Famine and the Hunger Strikes of 1981 in
Northern Ireland are obviously vastly different, both involve questions of personal
responsibility versus the role of the establishment and the image of the emaciated body
as the ultimate signifier of demeaning systems of exchange. In the Hunger Strikes the
274 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London:
Verso, 1995), p.12.
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body was carefully and strategically used as a means of directing attention to the issues
lying behind the Strikes. Starving here was chosen. Various critics and historians have
pointed out the detailed orchestration of the Hunger Strike campaign, and its utilisation
of the starving body, with all the echoes to the past that encompasses, as a means of
drawing attention to their cause. Yet in terms of simple visual memory, the image that is
most strongly associated with each event remains the same: the emaciated, desperate,
Irish body.
Burns alludes to both the hunger strikers and the famine in the novel. As
previously mentioned, in the chapter titled “Somethin Political, 1977”, Burns plays
ironically with ideas of individual agency versus wider political agency, as Amelia’s
anorexic body is appropriated by school bullies in a pseudo-attempt to identify with
Republican hunger strikers. Later, in the chapter “No Bones, 1991 – 1992””, Amelia
hallucinates about travelling to a famine graveyard, where she sees an old friend who
had earlier been killed in an explosion. These allusions create a complex interweaving of
personal and national traumas. Political starvation, represented in the chapter about
the hunger strikers, is critiqued through the farcical nature of the situation Amelia finds
herself in: “It seemed the first rebellion was to refuse food…Unfortunately for me
though, that particular day had been an eating one” (79). The Famine is referred to in
the novel in a much more indirect manner, functioning as another sad secret that has
been locked away in the realms of the insane. To a certain extent anorexia in No Bones
can be read as an example of choosing (through self starvation) an “instability…in
response to gendered social, political, and physical forces”.275 This instability “revisits”
as O’Kane Mara has suggested, “the Famine with its terrifying instability.”276 It is not
275 Miriam O’Kane Mara, A Famine of Preference: Images of Anorexia in

Contemporary Irish Literature, PhD Dissertation, (Mexico: The University of
New Mexico, 2003), p. 5.
276 Mara, p. 5.
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the act of anorexia that can be read as a modern day parallel to the Famine, but rather
its disturbing nature, its bodily signing of a social abuse. These connections should not
overshadow the fact that Burns’ depiction of Amelia’s anorexia calls for a more critical
reading of the subject’s relationship to Irish history, cautioning against idealised and
romanticised readings of subjects such as the hunger strikers, and highlighting gender
inequities still prevalent in Northern Ireland today.
No Bones is also deeply concerned with the role an abusive and neglectful
family plays in producing damaged children. This is a role that may be masked by more
obvious social and political conflict. It is in Burns’ dissection of familial abuse that No
Bones most obviously deals with the abject – that terrain of the disturbing and secret in
relation to the body.277 The abject, in the form of bodily wastes, blood, flesh,
putrefaction and dead bodies is abundant throughout No Bones. Ardoyne is presented
as a haven for the abject, as the psychic violence inflicted on a daily basis, that is
repressed and unexamined by its inhabitants, returns in the repeated form of
confronting and grotesque sights. The abject plays a particularly vivid role in Burns’
depictions of Amelia’s family. Mrs Lovett gets into a fight and is left with “a mass of
sisterly hair in her fingers” (55). Amelia’s seriously disturbed (and disturbing) brother
Mick, rollicks with his wife Mena in a gross parody of carnival excess: “Mick tore open a
loaf and they pulled off clumpy bits of that and slabbered and gobbled and laughed as
they chewed their way along. Because they couldn’t eat like normal people, because
word was, they weren’t normal people” (121). The abject appears in the sights of two
corpses in the novel, that of Amelia’s sister Lizzie and Vincent’s father. Amelia’s
277“Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does
not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons
to us and ends up engulfing us.” Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, p. 4.
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breakdown reaches an abject climax in a vision of her brother Mick, turned into a kind
of crab that feeds upon her groin. All of these images combine to present a world where
children are almost overwhelmed by the abject, as what is normally prohibited or cast
out within a domestic environment makes repeated assaults upon the body and the
mind. The children’s defences against these assaults are varied. Amelia tries to cast out
all remnants of the abject by starving herself, making her body as unwomanly as
possibly and letting as little as possible in or near it. Vincent marks himself with red
pens in an unconscious but obsessive retracing of the sight of the multiple stab wounds
that marked his father’s corpse. Along with the loathing and revulsion associated with
the abject also often comes an attempted annihilation of the self. It is only when Amelia
can accept that she loved her family as much as she hated them, and that her psychic
revisiting of the terrain of the abject is as much about her as it is about them, that she is
finally able to form a new sense of self:
And now, as long as she didn’t think about her feelings, about her family, about
sex, or about Ireland, she could live here happily…forevermore. She settled
down to do this, but the voice of her sister spoke over her intentions. ‘Amelia,’
Lizzie said. ‘Ye’re nothin’ but a wee dope…’ Lizzie said
‘Ye’ve got to get it into your head Amelia. We can’t do it all y’know. We didn’t
come back to get you. You came back to get us’ (280).
Amelia needs to rebuild her identity away from Ireland, before she can revisit what has
represented for her the land of the abject, the place of the terrifyingly familiar. Part of
this rebuilding is learning to eat again, as her relationship with her family, her past and,
most importantly, herself, can only be reconstructed through a letting in, as well as a
filtering out. It seems hopeful then, that one of the things Amelia and her friends ask for
on their visit to Rathlin Island in the closing pages of the novel is food. In the final
chapter of No Bones the only things that Amelia and her friends bring back from their
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daytrip to the intensely secretive Rathlin Island are themselves. This lack of souveniring,
in contrast to the obsessive and often damaging seeking for souvenirs that was found in
earlier chapters, suggests that there has been a psychological progression. The
characters no longer seek to associate themselves with an idealised world that will always
elude them, but are working together to stand up to the one that they live in.
These observations conclude the introductory section of my final chapter. In the
following pages I trace what I have read as three major tropes of the secret in No Bones:
secret places, objects and bodily practises, in more detail. Using close readings of
various chapters from the novel, interwoven with the theoretical strands I have
mentioned in this introduction, I seek to demonstrate that No Bones is a work in which
codes of spectacular secrecy are evident as being central to the structuring and
experience of everyday life in Ardoyne.
Walking the Minefield
The Troubles imposed an invisible map upon the inhabitants of Belfast, an unofficial
blueprint about where you could move in space according to who you were. Yet there
were always gaps in this information. In No Bones, Burns has brilliantly captured the
mixture of ritual and anxiety that accompanies life in Belfast during the Troubles. One
of the most obvious manifestations of this mixture is found in the presentation of place
and space in the novel. The subject’s relation to the spaces he moves through in the
novel, despite the use of secret codes and maps, is fraught with danger, and there are no
certainties about what any space might contain at any particular time.
Burns’ interest in local geography, and its role as a component of social identity,
is signalled in the opening lines of No Bones. Seven-year-old Amelia Lovett is talking to
her friends “at the top of Herbert Street, which was her street, at the junction of the
Crumlin Road facing the Protestant chip shop” (1). If the words “Protestant chip shop”
weren’t enough to signal to the reader that this might be a novel about the interweaving
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of sectarian violence with daily life, then an examination of Herbert Street on any map
of Belfast would complete that message. Herbert Street is right next to the interface of
two Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods, lying within the staunchly Catholic,
Republican community that makes up Ardoyne, but also right alongside the Protestant
Crumlin road. The fact that Amelia is already aware of these territorial boundaries is
signalled through her use of the local street names and the words ‘Protestant chip shop’,
rather than through any direct reference to being part of one community, and not
another. This indirectness establishes a complicity with the reader in regard to local
geography – we are positioned, like Burns herself, to be “in the know”. This complicity
is consistent with Burns’ narrative stance in regard to place throughout No Bones. The
novel is replete with street names, local landmarks and references to places of local
political and historical significance, yet the associations these places hold are never spelt
out. This stance encourages the reader to feel a part of the local community, as if they,
like Amelia, know where to go and what streets should be avoided. It also recreates the
sense of living within an island, an intensely experienced small world, with deeply
demarcated spatial codes that are followed religiously but rarely reflected upon in any
depth. However these codes cannot always protect. The reader, like the characters in
the book, is consistently exposed to the unexpected and the alarming, and to the slide
between the “normal” and the terrifying that makes up life in Ardoyne during the
Troubles.
This instability is brilliantly conveyed in No Bones in the chapter titled “In the
Crossfire, 1971”. Amelia and her beleaguered classmates, hapless members of a
horrible, violent, classroom, are told to write a poem about ‘Peace’. This is a task,
unsurprisingly, that all the children find to be nearly impossible. The realities of their
daily lives, and in particular of their experiences of their local spaces, intrude and creep
into their poems in a blackly comic figuring of the gap between the worlds that seven-
year-olds are normally expected to inhabit, and the ones they actually live in:
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It seemed the children though, spent more emotional time on their borders than
they’d done on their poems about peace…Amelia’s border consisted of fangs
and teethmarks, pointing inwards…Bossy had Cowboys and Indians,
Marionetta, scalps and bonfires, Debbie, whistles and binlids and Pauline, rows
and rows of little tiny soldiers, lining up and searching rows and rows of little tiny
men. These borders didn’t go down well with Miss H and Miss G and Miss W
(37-38).
The obviously allegorical “borders” are another of Burns’ Gothic jokes, as she plays
with the irruption of the suppressed Ardoynian psyche while also having a laugh at the
inherent ridiculousness of the whole situation. This stance is repeated through the whole
of No Bones. Cryptic references to local places act as a means for Burns to establish a
picture of the local obsession with secrecy, while the black humour that surrounds these
depictions simultaneously undermines any belief that this might be a sensible way to
live.
A closer examination of a few episodes revolving around place in No Bones will
demonstrate Burns’ use of local knowledge as a launching pad for constructions of more
fluid subjectivities than those dictated in violent situations. Burns’ characters are subject
to the assaults, kneecappings and murders that might befall anyone venturing into the
wrong areas of a sectarian state. Yet they also often have their own, unique forms of
rebellion against spatial dictates, small, yet persistent assertions of individual identity
that fly in the face of the safe use of space. These fictional manoeuvres support recent
arguments about shifts in writing practices in Northern Ireland, which have produced
“writing which re-orientates urban space as a locus for the ephemeral and the
contingent”.278 Burns certainly does not underplay the grim realities of life during the
278 Murphy, p. 187.

176
Troubles, but not all of her characters are defeated. Several of her most sympathetic
characters have, consciously or unconsciously, their own secretive and distinctive forms
of resistance to the violent places they live in.
In the chapter titled “Babies 1974” the usual sectarian associations of local
streets are subverted. In a moving sequence, a young, intellectually challenged Ardoyne
girl, Mary Dolan, naively calls for witnesses to her own, private and domestic traumas
by pushing a pram containing her dead baby along the streets of Ardoyne. Burns has
acknowledged in interviews that this episode is based upon a real event she witnessed as
a girl growing up in Ardoyne.279 Several things about this episode suggest initially that it
may be a sectarian act: she is pushing the pram in the evening, when the streets become
no-go areas for locals and British soldiers are patrolling the area. The only person to
come, rather unwillingly, to Mary Dolan’s assistance, is Amelia Lovett, who initially
believes, not unreasonably in the circumstances, that Mary’s baby is actually the
eponymous ‘bomb in a baby carriage’. This misunderstanding is reinforced through
Burns’ depiction of the package in the pram: “It wasn’t a baby. It was a strange-looking
parcel, grey and plumped up with bits of dark wire and putty at the top” (67). The “dark
wire” subsequently turns out to be the umbilical cord and the “putty” is the placenta,
which the dead baby is still lying inside. Slippages like these between the abject and the
alarming are typical of Burns’ writing style, in which the surreal and the extraordinarily
out of place (lots of things, one after another) are presented with a deadpan, detached
tone, as if none of it is so alarming, really:
Mary Dolan had her baby someone said. There’d been problems with it coming
out, maybe because of all the age she was. Her da was still pretending he’d
279 Anna Burns, speaking to Peter Mares, “Books and Writing with Ramona Koval,”
Radio National Interview (Sunday, 9 March, 2003).
177
nothing to do with it and her ma was still not noticing. Nobody got in the doctor
(65).
By wheeling her dead baby around the barricaded streets of Ardoyne Mary finds a
means of asserting her own identity over the established ones, tracing her path over the
ones that are already there. She uses, however unconsciously, a mundane act in a
prohibited space in order to draw attention to the trauma of her own condition, and to
argue for other readings of local history. This spectacle is marked by repetitive actions,
as Mary’s walking becomes a spatial re-enactment of her trauma, a geographically
staged return of the repressed:
She started to wheel it about in an old toy pram, pushing it up Brompton Park,
round the corner, down Highbury, round the corner, up Holmedene, corner,
down Strathroy. They said that she worked her way along the whole row of
streets until she reached the barricades. Then she turned and came back. Again
and again and again (65).
The words “they said” call attention to the dramatic nature of her action. The reader is
led to believe here that everyone else in Ardoyne is silently watching this spectacle. The
isolation of Mary in the community, and the lack of support she has been given –
“Nobody got in the doctor” – are mirrored in the fact that she is alone on the streets.
Mary’s walk is a sad, almost horrifying mix of the domestic and childlike (a young girl
pushing a pram) with the grim reality that lies behind what you see (incest, neglect, total
isolation from care). These factors are overlaid with the particular significance of the
streets on which Mary is walking. Mary’s actions are interrupted first by the arrival of
British foot soldiers, and then by their shooting at Eddie Breen’s ice-cream truck, which
“was sometimes a lemonade lorry, a milk lorry, a whatever-was-wanted-at the time
lorry” (68). The war overlays everything with its own meanings. Burns’ Ardoyne
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epitomises the experiencing of life through a series of ideological prisms, the highly
demarcated relationships to space that Feldman discovered in his anthropological study
of the province:
In Northern Ireland the formation of the political subject takes place
within a continuum of spaces consisting of the body, the confessional
community, the state, and the imagined community of utopian completion…
The command of these spaces is practically achieved and sustained
through ideology and violence.280
Amelia reads Mary’s baby as a bomb, because she is used to thinking of secretive
packages in that way. Yet Mary’s ‘baby’ is a signifier of a much greater trauma than any
the British soldiers can provide. Her only means of calling attention to this, however
unwittingly, is to use the spaces that have been dictated for other uses – the no go streets
of Ardoyne at night. Mary’s repetitive, ritualised pram pushing along these streets is a
grim parody of an ordinary, innocent occupation. The extremity of her situation is
highlighted by the fact that what she is doing doesn’t fit into any of the neighbourhood
uses of these spaces, and that even the soldiers don’t really know what to do with her.
Her appropriation of the streets, however suicidal, is her only means of asserting her
right to some form of normality. It is a sad spectacle of the everyday turned into the
grotesque, but speaks also of Mary’s determination not to be overlooked.
Mary’s walk is representative of Burns’ desire to invest readings of Northern
Ireland, and in particular of Ardoyne, with more complex meanings that those allocated
by the sectarian conflict. Her insertion of private, familial, domestic trauma upon
streets associated with public conflict gives a new twist to Feldman’s argument that “[i]n
each of these spaces, claims of power are made and practices of power are
280Feldman, p. 9.
179
inscribed…the setting aside of places of imaginary representation…that mobilize
spectacles of historical transformation”.281 Mary’s childlike “mobilization” uses the
spatial materials of sectarian conflict in a new, and highly individualised manner. Her
walk may not be intentionally spectacular, but is underpinned by a desire for
acknowledgement, an opening up of her secret. This desire is mediated through the very
places that have previously called attention away from domestic abuse.
This chapter establishes the idea in the novel that individual associations with
place can lead to contestation and re-invention, even in the most regimented
circumstances. Strongly informed by the Troubles, Mary’s use of the Ardoyne streets
nevertheless offers a different reading of local place to previously established ones,
drawing upon what is known in order to draw attention to what has been denied in the
community. The use of place as a means of drawing attention to what has been
suppressed, either on a personal or on a public level, is developed in several subsequent
chapters in No Bones. One of the most striking chapters in the book, “Mr Hunch in the
Ascendent, 1980” uses the hallucinations of a very troubled young man as a means of
commenting upon the mix of the surreal and the ordinary sense of place during the
Troubles. Vincent Lyttle’s nightmarish mental journeys vividly convey the vulnerability
of the young or the weak in such situations. But they also offer a powerful means of
mediating trauma, and lend a unique sensibility and understanding to places and events
that might otherwise remain incomprehensible. Certifiably insane, Vincent is spending
time in a Belfast psychiatric institution after failing to take his medication. The chapter
is made up of a series of vignettes, alternating between Vincent’s analysis at the hands of
a kind psychiatrist, Mr Parker, and Vincent’s hallucinations. The chapter suggests that
both the world inside Vincent’s head and the one outside it are equally disturbing, and
281 Feldman, p. 9.
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that his hallucinations, while frightening, provide a valid means for interpreting the
insanity of living in Ardoyne during the Troubles.
The situation Burns depicts is open to discussion in terms of Bakhtin’s theories
on carnival and the grotesque and their relationship to what is secret or withheld. While
Bakhtin’s interest in carnival seems primarily motivated by its challenges to established
heirarchies and ideas, it is possible to make links between carnival and the secret. A
simple definition of the secret is that which is “kept private, not to be made known or
exposed to view”.282 While carnival might at first seem to be the opposite of that
definition, its display of what has previously been unacknowledged or repressed means
that the secret functions as a motivating force behind carnival’s structures and
intentions. Carnival is also restricted to particular times and occasions, and thus exists
between the borders of reticence and disclosure in the same manner that a secret does.
It reveals a special knowledge to which not all may have been privy, and its expression
results in a shaking-up of previously established concepts. Linking the priest with the
demon, the ascetic with the debauched glutton, carnival also establishes “the relative
nature of all that exists”.283 It is this aspect that I read as the central motif in the chapter
I will now examine, where the surreal hallucination of a Troubles carnival forms a
mental landscape for interpreting connections between personal and public trauma in
Northern Ireland.
The chapter is narrated through Vincent’s point of view, encouraging the reader
to see things in the same way he does. This is a very unsettling experience, as one comes
to realise Vincent inhabits a world where madness and the surreal are the only
certainties. Vincent is a victim of childhood neglect. He had a deeply religious and
insane mother, who killed her unwanted second baby, and a kind father, a baker, who
was stabbed to death by a roving sectarian murder squad. As a logical conclusion to all
282 Concise Oxford Dictionary (1982), p.949.

283 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 34.
181
of this, Vincent is mentally very unstable and spends a large part of his days fantasising
about guns, murder squads and shady espionage figures, and marking his body with a
red pen in a direct replica of the wounds he saw upon his father’s dead body when he
was a child. His hallucinations are filled with both real figures from the streets of
Ardoyne who have either been violent or the victims of others’ abuses, and the spectres
he has created in order to protect himself. The leader of these figures, Vincent’s most
carefully protected secret, is the menacing Mr Hunch, whom Vincent first conjured up
as a child in response to the terror of having to survive in a silent house. Mr Hunch is
the primary barrier between the world in Vincent’s head and the world outside it, the
boundary-man and guardian of the tomb, whose will must be obeyed in order for
Vincent to avoid bringing these two worlds together.
The primary locale for Vincent’s hallucinations is a carnival ground, where the
attractions make up a post-modern collage of Troubles horrors:
Stalls and promotions were crawling with activity and only the attraction
opposite was in trouble…(it) was called How To Sit With Your Depression and
it was not, it goes without saying, popular with any of the punters nearby. They
were more interested in the dazzling spectaculars, like Death and Half-Death!
And Falling Off the Roller Coaster! And especially the Identify the Body display.
That one had a queue a mile long wanting to get into it (138).
While I am not suggesting that Bakhtin’s writing on carnival directly influenced Burns,
that fact that Vincent’s hallucinations take place in one is highly suggestive. The
transient, shifting world of the carnival, with its trumpeted “attractions” and Gothic
surprises is a perfect allegory for Northern Ireland during the Troubles, where sectarian
killings make the daily news and knee-cappings are often performed before select
audiences. In this world, the shocking is normalised, and to live in a perpetual state of
anxiety is strangely comforting. Several other elements of carnival writing also feature
182
in the chapter: a mixing of literary styles and devices, an anti-authoritarian stance, the
inclusion of grotesque figures and scenarios, and a fascination with the body and its
confronting aspects. This world is crazy, illogical, dangerous and violent, yet it also
bustles with life. The amalgamation of the conventional and the unexpected, the
authority figure and its subversive underside is also found here, as paramilitary thugs
morph into psychiatric nurses wearing circus costumes:
Mr Parker…had his legs casually crossed and was wearing one of his famous
twenty-four changes of costume. Vincent’s favourites were the Star Spangled
costume and the Glitter and Tinsel costume and his least favourite was the
Hacked with 153 Stabwounds costume (134).
Vincent has his own stall in the carnival, a rifle range. His prizes are a motley collection
of trauma momentos, insignias of public violence and the detritus of his own personal
nightmares:
Mr Hunch was amused by Vincent’s prizes at the rifle range for he was offering,
in descending order, Special Treats, Mere Flesh Wounds, Two Dogs Stuck
Together Backwards and a Dead Moth Squashed by a Boy’s Bare Foot. There
was also mustard-coloured sand, flowers moving on wall-paper, a million rounds
of ammunition, complete funerals and so much more (152).
These odd trophies are the constantly revisited advertisements from Vincent’s catalogue
of unwanted and abject experiences. The strange lists can be read as a strategy on the
part of the author to revisit Vincent’s experience in all of its confusion, without any hope
of understanding it. His trauma is repeated and re-inscribed through the surreality of
the language. Continually screening in Vincent’s head is a post-modern film in which
sectarian and domestic horrors intermingle and paramilitary thugs lurk outside the
bedroom where he was forced by his mother to stay whenever she went on one of her
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extended rites of penance. Vincent has drawn upon the secrets that have been given a
name, the public secrets of internment, arrest, informing and retaliation killings that
make up the matrix of secrecy underpinning the Troubles, in order to make sense of his
own, less easily identifiable secrets and horrors: neglect, child abuse and the death of a
parent. This seems to say in regard to secrecy that we draw upon official or pre-existing
secrets in order to find a language to describe our own, more intimate secrets –
transposing one discourse of secrecy onto another. Frequently shut away from the rest of
the world, and exposed to sights that a young child cannot make any sense of, Vincent
lives in the traumatic gap, the space created in order to survive. In accordance with the
dictates of the traumatic experience; this secretive gap, his inner world, cannot be a
refuge but is filled with the displaced signs and traces of his traumatic experiences.
Vincent’s carnival is both a means of avoiding a direct confrontation with the
nightmare of his earlier experiences and a continual projection of them into new plots
and scenarios. Mr Parker tells Vincent that this world is “a plot in your own story…a
plot in your own head” (147). Burns’ use of the word “plot” in the sense of “a secret
plan”284 here is highly suggestive. Vincent’s world is a secret plan, or story for survival
within a story concerned with secrets. One of the points Burns is making here is that we
all live in plots of our own making, and that there is no meta-narrative that represents
the truth. Mr Parker also tells Vincent that he doesn’t want to let go of the figures in his
hallucinations: “Part of you…doesn’t want to let go of them. They’re you, a part of you”
(145) Vincent responds to this by shouting: “ ‘Wrong…They’re not me. They’re a life
apart from me every time!’” (145) Mr Parker sees Vincent’s hallucinations as simple
extensions of himself, and his traumatic past. Vincent’s defence is that he has a life and
an identity apart from these things. Part of his struggle is not to be defined by them,
even when they are a constant presence in his life. Another point Mr Parker evades
284 Concise Oxford Dictionary (1982), p. 787.
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here is that many elements of these nightmares are not confined to Vincent, but form
part of the experiences of many residents of Ardoyne during the Troubles.
Vincent’s madness is thus juxtaposed with the madness of the Troubles,
sectarian shootings with child abuse. In this way, his carnival is still “life itself, but
shaped according to a certain pattern of play”.285 One striking difference between
Vincent’s carnival and the carnival literature Bakhtin describes is that the central
atmosphere is not one of shared gaiety, but one of shared dread. Perhaps this is the kind
of carnival most befitting Belfast in the Troubles, the “pattern of play” that suits the
experiences of its traumatised inhabitants. Bakhtin argued that carnival “celebrated
temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order.”286 The
prevailing truths and established orders of Belfast during the Troubles were that
violence was everywhere, and that one was just as likely to be subjected to suffering by
the local gang of sadistic thugs as you were by the police or soldiers who were meant to
maintain order. The real secret here is that, in these conditions, madness is a form of
sanity. This carnival is a place of horrors, but also a means of escape from the illusive
normality the mental institution wishes to treat as the context for Vincent’s experiences,
as if they were aberrant. In many ways, Vincent’s carnival is a saner reading of the
Troubles than the official histories wish to provide.
Souveniring
The word “souvenir”, which can mean a simple memento, but also something stolen, or
as a verb, something that pierces, functions here as a recurring trope for the relationship
of the individual to an idealised past or present in the novel. In No Bones, it is not so
much the past itself that is the cause for present problems, but the associations and uses
we make of it, the half-readings and mythologisings of key public events or figures that
are incorporated into a justification for present misdeeds. The souvenir in No Bones is
285 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 7.

286 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 10.
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also an emblem for the emptying out of the present. Human connections are replaced
with a desire for commodities, which are in turn often material representations of
distance, rupture or separation from the Other: rubber bullets, a phoney watch and an
emaciated female body.
The first example of “”souveniring” in No Bones is found in the chapter titled
“An Apparently Motiveless Crime, 1969 – 1971”. Before examining that chapter in
detail, I would first like to contextualise it by briefly examining recent historical and
cultural interest in Wolfe Tone, the iconic figure to whom chapter makes reference. The
bicentenary of the 1798 rebellion brought close attention to the United Irishmen, what
they might have stood for in 1798, and what they might represent for Ireland and
Northern Ireland today. Though historians and politicians have clearly differed as to the
agendas and actions of the United Irishmen, historians pointing out the complexity of
the rebellion and its disparate manifestations in Wexford as opposed to Ulster, and
politicians preferring to gloss over these and concentrate instead on “common goals and
beliefs,”287 it is fascinating to note the points on which both attitudes agree. The
historian Ian Mc Bride has referred to The United Irishmen as “spellbinding”.288 This
word seems apt for the glamorous figure Wolfe Tone often cuts, both in historical
records and in his more popular commodifications. One of these, The Wild Geese
Today – Erin’s Far-Flung Exiles, an online American organisation dedicated to
promoting Irish culture and history, features the story of the United Irishmen as one of
the dashing chapters in Irish history.289 Their website includes a page topped with a
1910 postcard of Robert Emmet, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone emblazoned
287 See Roy Foster’s chapter “Remembering 1798,” in History and Memory in Modern
Ireland, ed. Ian McBride (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 67-94.
288 Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the
Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988), p.321.
289 http://www.thewildgeese.com/pages/1798.html
186
on a shamrock, a neat encapsulation of the overlap between history and tourism that the
United Irishmen have often come to represent. In this matrix, the term ‘body’ can stand
for both the United Irishmen as a whole and the martyred body of Wolfe Tone himself,
which in its prolonged and self-induced death throes enters the Gothic parade of
Irishmen dying for their country. The association of Tone with bodily sacrifice is
perhaps given its most memorable form in Yeats’ poem “Sixteen Dead Men”, where the
fallen rebels of 1916 are caught in a sepulchural dialogue with “Lord Edward and Wolf
Tone (and)… converse bone to bone.”290 Such images ensure that the bodies of the
United Irishmen play an essential role in the preservation of their memory, with Tone’s
gravesite and death mask possessing talismanic attributes.
In No Bones, Wolfe Tone, and the fetishising of particular aspects of Irish
history are grimly satirised through the sad tale of James Tone, outlined in the chapter
titled “An Apparently Motiveless Crime, 1969 – 71”. James Tone “grew up in London
with his parents rarely speaking to him, barely speaking to each other, and never
inviting anybody” (10). When James turns sixteen he joins the British army and in
November 1969 he is sent to Belfast. The first part of the chapter recounts his visit to his
cousins in Ardoyne, the Lovetts, and his deep need for acceptance and inclusion in their
life. During his first visit his cousin Mick Lovett asks him if he still has “Wolfe Tone’s
watch” (18). James knows that the watch in question, an old pocket watch belonging to
his father, has nothing to do with Wolfe Tone, and that the family are not related to the
‘great man’ but tells his cousin yes, wishing to honour family loyalty. A young man who
is present at the exchange is very impressed, and was “off again, as he was on the least
excuse always, explaining heroes and martyrs of Irish politics” (18). James’ wish to find
the watch and give it to his cousin is not linked to a desire to be part of the legends of
Irish history however, but simply to form a connection with his otherwise dour cousin.
290 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1: The Poems, 2nd Edition,
ed. Richard J. Finneran (Scribner, 1997), p.184.
187
On James’ next tour, everything is different. The British troops are no longer
welcome in Ardoyne, after an escalation in violence and several cruel acts on the part of
the soldiers towards the local inhabitants. James becomes increasingly desensitised to
his surroundings, and “used walls as protection, or children, and took constant aim at
everything” (2). In the midst of all this remains his need to reunite and find solace in the
arms of the Lovett family, who, now boarded up in their beseiged home, will have none
of that and snub him in the street. Carrying the phoney Wolfe Tone watch he stumbles
into the dark back streets of Ardoyne, and is inevitably knifed by Jat McDaide, the
young man who had earlier trumpeted the virtues of Wolfe Tone. As James lies dying
on the street, “Jat rolled him over, searched him for the Great Man’s watch, found it
and ran away…” (27) James’ death is referred to as “just another of those motiveless
crimes that were going on all over the place” (28).
This passage sets up several ideas about identity formation and differing uses of
the past. Both James and Mick are left with the scars of domestic violence and are
searching for connection or status within the family that has denied them. The
centrepiece of the passage, the false Wolfe Tone watch, functions as a signifier for the
hollowing out of the past. The passage interrogates the valuing of the souvenir, the
commodity representing and reducing Irish history. For Burns, this process has come to
take the place of an awareness of the specific details of past events, and the recognition
of their significance. The cost to human life as a result of these choices is starkly
represented in James Tone the hapless victim who searches for a place to belong yet is
doomed to remain a forgotten outsider. Nevertheless the passage should not be read as
a simple stab at the crass commercialisation of Irish history recently decried by
historians, but rather at a more complex examination of the web of motivations inherent
in any desire to connect the past to the present.291 Jat McDaide, the murderer, is also
291 “One novel source of disquiet is the exponential growth of the heritage industry,
which threatens to reduce the historical landscape to a series of free-floating
188
the mouthpiece for republican history in the story, who literally souvenirs the watch as a
means of getting one up on his friend, Micky Lovett. Micky Lovett, James’ cousin, is
also callous and selfish. In a later reference to James’ death he says: “it wasn’t …that
Mick had minded Jat killing his British soldier relative. It was just that, fifteen years old
at the time, he still would have liked to have been consulted first” (101). History is
useful here only so far as it helps you to stand out from the crowd, and souvenirs from
the past are useful tools in the neighbourhood’s sectarian-fuelled jostles for power. The
present-day Protestant James Tone’s motivations and his attempts to unite himself with
his family by bringing the watch from England to Ireland are a pathetic and highly
satirical echo of Wolfe Tone’s early ambitions. Yet despite the satire, Burns retains a
gentle respect for such ideals, evident in the sympathy we feel for James, whose
forgotten body can be read as emblematic of the foot soldiers lost in the battles of 1798.
The crime is “apparently motiveless” but in reality is shot through with a fetishization of
the past. This fetishization values the supposedly original remnant, the desired sign of
authenticity, over the historical complexity of that past event and also over the real
presence of the present in the form of human need.
The second example of ‘souveniring is found in the fourth chapter of No Bones.
This chapter describes Amelia’s “treasure trove”, a collections of souvenirs from various
places, the most exciting of which was: “the thirty-seven black rubber bullets she’d
collected ever since the British Army started firing them” (41). Amelia’s collection is a
startling testimony to the interests of a seven-year-old living under a state of siege.
Amelia’s “treasures” are something that is private, her own, but also of course a means
of one-up-man-ship over other children in the street. This all seems relatively innocent,
but a menacing note is introduced to the chapter with the arrival of Amelia’s disturbed
brother Mick, who sees the treasures as a means of tormenting his younger sister. In a
tourist attractions.” Ian MacBride, History and Memory in Modern Ireland, pp.
3-4.
189
parody of domestic anxieties during the Troubles, Mick implies that Amelia is collecting
the bullets as part of a plan “to join the Provies when she’s sixteen” (49). The conflict
between Amelia and Mick escalates until Amelia is left, wounded, on the landing, with
the realisation that her most prized souvenir, “the Black Queen had been Mick’s all the
time anyway” (52).
This chapter seems to be saying several things about the intersection of public
and domestic violence in Ardoyne, and about the way distinctive objects, souvenirs of
more easily recognisable “troubles” are re-fashioned to fit private disputes. Poor
Amelia’s hopeless attempts to defend her ‘treasure’ and her realisation that the best part
of it never really belonged to her anyway reinforce the point that if the people you live
with hate you, public violence really pales in comparison.
Finally, in the chapter titled “Somethin’ Political, 1977”, Burns satirises the
idealising of the Hunger Strikers, and presents starvation, both willed and coerced, as
the status quo for life in the Troubles. In this chapter, an anorexic school girl is told by a
group of bullies that she must go on a hunger strike to protest against the school’s lack of
support for a local shooting victim:
It was late morning and the Loyalist gunmen got in to do it, did it and got away.
It turned out pretty quick she’d (the victim) been IRA so Sister Mary Fatima,
who wasn’t having any of it, announced she wasn’t having any of it. She was not
going to acknowledge the shooting or say prayers for that soul in assembly. This
didn’t go down well…it seemed the first rebellion was to refuse food (78-79).
This decision is met with unease by the narrator, 14 year old Amelia Lovett, as she “had
already been doing that, had been for over three years and all for a reason that was
inner, top secret and to do with my own soul. Unfortunately for me though, that
particular day had been an eating one” (79). Amelia’s anorexia, with its own particular
and highly ritualised set of rules, is set against the public refusals of the hunger strikers.
190
This is a battle that Amelia knows she will lose. Earlier she has noted the power of the
agitators, and the hopelessness of trying to refuse them:
Yer woman, that teacher, Ms Bannon, or whatever her name was, for all her
toughness and hanging out the fifth form window shouting ‘Ignoramuses! You
know nothing about Ireland! You couldn’t point Ireland out on a map!’ missed
out on something completely. She didn’t have to pass them in the areas when
she went home in the night because she didn’t go home at night to those areas
(79).
Amelia knows that when you live next door to your victimisers, it doesn’t really matter if
they are right or wrong, they are going to get you in the end. The “mad history teacher”
lives in a more privileged part of Belfast, and is thus physically immune from the attacks
Amelia knows she will face if she tries to impose her own will. The mob take Amelia
outside and set about beating her up, partly because she was eating when she should
have been hunger striking but also because they just feel like it. She is finally rescued,
just as she thinks her eyes are going to be scratched out, by Vivienne Dwyer, another
student, who is neat, calm, “of course was IRA” (as opposed to just pretending to be)
“and very much an unknown quality” (80). Vivienne despatches Amelia’s tormentors
and feeds her a Twix bar. The passage raises several interesting questions about agency
in relation to uses of the past in Northern Ireland. It would seem at first that it presents a
simple critique of the hunger-strikers, who here are not really interested in the cause
they agitate for, but simply see it as an excuse to harass the weak. Political fasting
becomes psychological starvation. At the same time Amelia’s anorexia is presented in a
satirical light, highlighted by her frustration at the hunger strike being called on one of
her “eating days”. Amelia starves herself in order to remove herself from her
surroundings, yet it is her obvious anorexia that makes her visible to her tormentors. It is
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Amelia’s body that the bullies desire as a souvenir of the occasion. She is also rescued,
and fed, by “a known member of the IRA”.
All of this suggests that Burns is interrogating the role of hunger in Irish popular
historiography and the various ways it has been appropriated for identity construction.
What is at question here is not so much the association of the Irish with hunger, but the
temptation to overlook the specifics of different “hungry” situations in Irish history. In
this sense, both the sadistic hunger strikers and the middle-class history teacher are
complicit in producing versions of history that ignore those most oppressed by it. Read
this way, Amelia’s anorexia, though self-imposed and fiercely guarded, is a blackly
comic twist upon the boarded-up cabin: the shamed body attempting to remove itself
from a history that has no place for it, a disturbing souvenir.
Bodies
In No Bones, secretive practices are mapped onto Belfast streets and further revealed in
the selective and frequently violent fetishising of an imagined past. They are also found
in the book’s most sustained area of interest: the traumatised and damaged human
body. In the introduction I referred to the startling number of references to damaged
and abused bodies in No Bones. The human body as a site subject to constant attack –
abused, starved, beaten and wounded – is a consistent feature both of No Bones and
Burns’ second novel, Little Constructions. Violent acts against the body in these works
is continual, yet not mundane, as the reader is never allowed to slide away from the
consequences of living under such conditions. Escape strategies, both physical and
psychological, are put into place by her long-suffering characters, but both works move
towards disclosure and confrontation with what has been experienced, however
harrowing that process may be. The indiscriminate nature of the violence is perhaps its
most disturbing aspect. While the most menacing characters in both of her novels are
men, women are not always presented as passive victims of patriarchal violence, but are
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often depicted as deeply frightening individuals, who revel in emotional blackmail and
street-fighting, abuse or neglect their children or become highly accomplished
paramilitaries.
The sectarian violence of the Troubles feeds these psychopathic tendencies, but
is in no way solely responsible for them. This is made particularly clear through
references to domestic violence pre-existing the Troubles: Amelia’s brother Mick has a
“misshapen” jaw, an “ ‘accident with m’da’ that ‘ happened years ago’” (19). Vincent’s
mother would leave him alone in the house for days as a small boy, telling him not to go
downstairs because “the Devil is there” (157). On several occasion this synonymous
relationship of violence to daily life in Belfast is used for comic effect, ironising the
tendency to make all violence there accountable to political differences. In a chapter
outlining a work scheme for unemployed Catholics and Protestants, the extremely
volatile Bronagh causes massive damage and destroys the work-site, not because of
sectarian ideologies, but because another girl insults her in front of a boy she fancies.
Burns has stressed that No Bones is “less about Northern Ireland than the
psychology of violence”.292 This “psychology of violence” is given its most immediate
and evocative form in the depiction of the body in No Bones, which frequently functions
as sites of secretive practice, unwittingly put on display. Characters try to remove
themselves from their immediate traumatic contexts, either psychically or physically.
Yet they also continually draw attention to themselves in the process, their scarred and
starved bodies tragically functioning as an unconscious and self-inflicted sign of the
damage they have experienced at the hands of others.
292 Anna Burns speaking in an interview with Una Bradley, “Emotional amputation in
Ardoyne,” Belfast Telegraph, (Saturday, 3 May, 2003)
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/imported/interview-emotional-amputation-
in-ardoyne-13629027.html
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The spectacularly wounded bodies in No Bones have powerful connections to
the structure of trauma as outlined by Cathy Caruth. Caruth argues that trauma’s
greatest paradox is the inability of the subject ever to recover completely the traumatic
moment, accompanied by a compulsive return to the surrounding circumstances. She
writes of “this peculiar paradox: that in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality
may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough,
may take the form of belatedness”.293 The damaged people in No Bones produce in
and on the body the continual tension between a desire for escape and a desire for
return to the elusive traumatic moment or condition. In this way they are also caught in
a double bind between the secrecy of the unrecoverable horror of their existence and
the spectacle that draws attention to that fact. Whether or not Burns ever allows her
characters to experience a final recovery is debatable, although she certainly advocates
the importance of the attempt to do so.
Amelia’s anorexia is one of the most vivid examples of bodily secrets in No
Bones. In the section examining souveniring, I have already noted Amelia’s description
of her anorexia as something that is “inner, top secret and to do with my own soul…”
(79). Women starve in No Bones as a reaction to the uses to which their bodies are put,
although Amelia experiences sexual abuse at the hands of both men and women.
Amelia’s anorexia can be read as a reaction to the ways in which women’s bodies in
Ardoyne are controlled and abused, an abuse that is often secretive. Nevertheless, the
connections between this and other “hungry” episodes in Irish history is complex.
In “Somethin Political, 1977” the black comedy of the episode and its unusual
aspects ward against overly romantic readings of the starving woman’s body as a
metaphor for an idealised history of Irish struggle. Amelia’s body, and her various rules
about eating, bring into play ideas about borders and containment that in turn reflect
293 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” American Imago Vol. 48, No.1(1991), 5.

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upon Northern Ireland as a bordered state, but Burns’ method inhibits simplistic
analogies. The descriptions of Amelia allude to the fascinating combination of denial
and desire that her starving body signifies: “outrageously, sexually thin” (123). Amelia’s
hunger is presented as both a product of external traumas and a self-imposed condition.
Her anorexia is harmful, but also strangely alluring – a spectacle of secret suffering –
unwittingly put on display before those who are largely responsible for her current state.
It is both the product of her mistreatment at the hands of her family and her means of
self-defence. If she does not eat, then she can pretend she is not part of what is going on
around her, but the act of starvation means that her body draws attention to itself
defiantly, and even erotically, flagging its traumatised state. The intermingling of the
sexual with the violent is one of Burns’ narrative staples. It is a means of bringing
together, on a narrative level, the mix of mad agency and helpless inter-dependence that
epitomises all of her characters. Amelia’s anorexia is as frequently associated with
display as it is with secrecy and regimentation: “She came in the door with that arm-
swinging vigour all six-stone hunger-strikers are very keen on – or at least while on one
of their extraordinary highs” (123). Burns recreates the anorexic’s complex mix of
desires: Amelia strives to remove her body from visible sight but also continually
displays the extent to which she is fading away. This paradoxical situation can be read,
once again, as a fascinating textural metaphor for the relationship between the Self and
the Other in Northern Ireland: as the wish to hide or put away from view what is
obviously one’s own comes into conflict with the desire to rub it in the face of the
alienated Other.
The second most striking use of the body in relation to secrecy in No Bones can
be found in Burns’ interest in the abject. Examples of the abject are found throughout
No Bones: bodies spill blood or defecate, food is spilt and slobbered, corpses thrust their
way into the public and private view. The abject reaches its most vivid and disturbing
climaxes in Burns’ depictions of the experiences of traumatised children. In these

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episodes, the abject, and all that is secretive about it, becomes a medium for examining
trauma. It is both the thing that is most shocking thing in the children’s pasts, and also a
distinctive image repertoire, a means of making clear the impact of that past by making use
of threatening and abject images in new and striking ways.
The chapter titled “Mr Hunch in the Ascendent”, where Vincent hallucinates a
re-visiting of the sight of his father’s murdered body, exemplifies these fictional
manoeuvres. In this chapter Vincent’s vision is aided, ironically, by the defensive and
imaginary Mr Hunch, who becomes interchangeable with the kindly and real
psychiatrist Mr Parker as part of Vincent’s journey towards the central site of his
repressed past. In Vincent’s hallucination, the figure of his father is a Frankenstein’s
monster, literally a stitched-together assemblage of bits and pieces, in a corporeal
spectacle that embodies the fracturing capacities of secretive violence:
‘I think it’s time you examined the body,’ said Hunch. A case of spaghetti-
fication. Know what I mean?’
Vincent felt himself going forwards…a booming man up ahead said, ‘Come over
here my dear boy.’ It was audience participation and Vincent, as always, did
exactly what he was told. He went over to the man by the coffin and he was up.
He was five years old and he was with a crowd of strangers…
‘Cutting and flesh wounds might seem necessary for you to be able to identify
with your father,’ said the man. ‘To identify with how your father must have felt
at that time.’
Vincent was surprised. He was looking at the man holding him and it was none
other than Mr Parker. He was by the coffin and holding Vincent tight in his
arms. Vincent didn’t answer or say ‘But I was too young Mr Parker. All I
remember is that he was a ginger person, a ginger person in a floury apron with
a very strong baker, crushed cardamom smell.’
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‘Shall we look in together?’ said the psychiatrist. ‘I think we should lookin
together. I really don’t think you make enough use of me, my poor boy.’
They looked in together.
It was hardly like a father, more as if a five-year-old had tried to put a father
together, alone, untutored, but creatively, by himself. There were rags and
rubbish and grave clothes and clay clumps, all sewn together with lengths of
thick black thread. There was a bruised puffy skin, striped and black and blue
through the make-up, smatterings of stains from a hundred and fifty-three knife-
wounds. There were stripes along his face, stripes along his throat, about his
back and front and every-where. Could this have been a person? Thought
Vincent. He sniffed. No baker here (165).
In this passage the grotesque body is used as a means of vividly demonstrating the shock
of the entrance of the abject into a child’s world. It is also used as a means of
highlighting the central role the body plays in the discourse of violence, that has for so
long constituted the key system of exchange in the North:
This production and reproduction, this distribution and circulation of bodies
formed and signified by violence and signifying through violence, constitute the
vast economic enterprise and structure of exchange that is warfare in Northern
Ireland. 294
Mr Lyttle’s body is the sectarian victim magnified, its grotesqueness a testimony to the
unnatural nature of his death. Killed for being dressed in green, orange and white, his
body is both a glaring signifier of the language of violence, as it is liberally marked with
the inscriptions of the stab wound, and a symbol of the cost of that language:
294 Feldman, p. 146.
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The act of violence transposes the body whole into codified fragments: body
parts or aspects that function as metonyms of the effaced body and of other
totalities. The violent reduction of the body to its parts or disassociated
aspects is a crucial material practice as much as it is a linguistic practice… 295
Mr Lyttle is, in my reading, a dramatic fictional example of this concept, a transposing
of the body into grotesque parts, which function as “a metonym of the effaced body and
of other larger totalities”. For what is effaced here is Vincent’s relationship to the person
behind the body, because the display of the secret at the heart of his hallucinations is too
shocking to be truly absorbed. It is also a metonym for “the other larger totalities” of
grief and loss in Northern Ireland, which must be put aside in the service of making the
shocking conjunction of the phantasmal and the real manageable. The stitched together
body becomes a signifier for the literary style employed here, the collage of anecdote,
direct narration and surreal memoir that in turn captures the disruptive experience of
life during the Troubles. Both body and text in the novel are grotesque spaces,
alienating and yet also uncannily familiar.
The secrets in this chapter are set pieces within a larger statement about the
hold of secrecy upon the individual and the state in Northern Ireland. Their revelation
demonstrates the price of that hold. Vincent’s carnival of horrors, and the centre-stage
attraction of his father’s body, although they allow both character and reader to “look in
together”, provide a fitting narrative for the Troubles, but no real escape. At the end of
the chapter Vincent continues to mark himself with red pens, unable to come to terms
with his secrets. There is no Hollywood moment of catharsis, only a sad return to the
impossibility of closing the gap in the traumatic experience. Yet this carnivalesque
chapter, peopled with its grotesque figures, does make a powerful statement about the
295 Feldman, p. 69.

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relativity of all experience. It vividly demonstrates the importance of considering
different kinds of narratives in situations where conflict often arises over meaning and
identity. The chapter also attests to the value of the shared, if startling story as a means
of addressing the politically and socially sanctioned secret, and understanding the
experiences of those who live within them. Mr Parker tries to help Vincent to leave this
world behind, while Burns seems to be suggesting that telling the story, enunciating the
secret, is an essential form of survival. It can never completely remove the trauma
experienced, but it can illuminate the experience of the traumatised subjects, giving
them a voice that may be otherwise drowned out in a culture of distrust.
Excursion
The closing chapter of No Bones: “A Peace Process: 1994”, concerns a day-trip to
Rathlin Island. This excursion functions in the novel as a metaphor for surviving the
Troubles. The misadventures of a small group of damaged friends become a picaresque
commentary on refusing to succumb to violence, and on moving forward from the
legacy of the past. Amelia, having survived a nervous breakdown in London, has
returned to Belfast for a visit. She suggests a day out to her friends, who are all
damaged in various ways by the Troubles and the hugely dysfunctional community they
have grown up in. Despite great fears and misgivings, they set out together,
accompanied, to their great surprise, by the new Japanese wife of one of their friends,
who knows a great deal more about the history of the places surrounding Belfast than
they do. They all end up on Rathlin Island, which in the novel is a brooding, wet and
comically depressing place, where it rains all the time and mad locals keep threatening
them on the edges of cliffs. The friends survive the day, finding in each other’s company
and in the refusal to respond to their circumstances with violence or escapism, a means
of coming to terms with the madness of the world around them:
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So they got down to the boat and they embarked and they left sad, often
massacred little Rathlin. But what if they hadn’t?...What if they hadn’t been
able to leave? Or what if they hadn’t wanted to leave? What if Rathlin Island
had also been their homeland? How could they have lived there and yet
constantly not be on the defensive, with people like Ambrose Gray always
turning up? It was a difficult scary question and as yet, none of the day-trippers
had an answer to it. But it was brave of them to ask it, and they sat close
together, didn’t bicker, not once, all the way back to the land (321).
This closing passage can be read as the novel’s epiphany, and as evidence of Anna
Burns’ sympathy for those who refuse to read their situations in easily reductive ways.
Rathlin Island is, in the novel, another Ardoyne, a place beset by borders and edges,
with a brutal and tragic past, and where surprising and horrible things may happen at
any point in time. It is also self-contained, with its own weird logic and unspoken rules
for survival. The fact that the friends question these rules, and their own relationship to
them, even if they don’t come up with any answers, provides a moving counterpoint to
the circumstances they have survived. The group don’t take away any souvenirs, as “it
isn’t really a tourist island” (320), other than their thoughts about how they relate to
what has passed.
In terms of narrative technique and in its use of violent images as a means of
exploring the nature of violence itself, No Bones is the most experimental of the four
novels I examine within this thesis. Burns’ use of shocking anecdotes, narrated in a flat,
almost desensitised tone, in combination with black humour, force the reader to occupy
the same sense of living in a state of siege that her characters are experiencing. It
would be hard to find any other book written by a woman about Northern Ireland that
is as confrontational, and at times as bleak in its presentation of life there during the
Troubles. Even the hard-hitting Troubles thrillers of writers like Eoin McNamee focus
200
largely upon public rather than private or domestic violence in Northern Ireland.296 It
is Burns’ refusal to read all violence there in terms of political struggle that makes this
novel’s arguments so significant. Political and domestic violence in No Bones are
interconnected, but both are also shown to exist quite happily without the other. This
seems to me to be the most obvious ‘open secret’ in No Bones. It is enacted through
various narrative tropes, which I read in terms of the traumatised subject’s relationship
to place, the past and his/her body. Each of these tropes in turn acts as testimony to the
levels of violence experienced in the home as well as in the street in Ardoyne. These
testimonies take the form of that distinctive relationship between the Self and the Other
which I have read as the dominant paradigm in fiction revolving around secrecy in
Northern Ireland: the secret as a spectacle – confronting, haunting and vivid, yet rarely
openly acknowledged or shared.
296 See for example: Eoin McNamee, Resurrection Man (Picador, 1995).
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Chapter Four: Swallowing the Sun
“He knows all about secrecy. It’s in his very blood.”297
Text and Context
In this chapter I read Swallowing the Sun through a set of tropes concerned with the
secret: gazing, preservation, consumption, and display. Through an examination of
these tropes, it is possible to trace the way Park negotiates meaning and ideas about
identity, subjectivity and loss. The central character in Swallowing the Sun, Martin
Waring, is a man who seems to attract suffering. The survivor of a violent and abusive
childhood, he has remade himself, to a certain extent, as a security guard at the Ulster
Museum in Belfast. After making love to an installation artist, he suffers from feelings of
guilt and betrayal. His daughter, Alison, an academic star, dies from an Ecstasy
overdose and Martin and his family, all of whom are already experiencing isolation and
disconnection from each other and society as a whole, spin off into a vortex of grief and
loss. Martin attempts to establish the exact circumstances of his daughter’s death, and
in so doing, confronts figures from his past neighbourhood. He puts into place two
forms of atonement for Alison’s death, one negotiated along the established discourse of
public violence and retribution, the other a radical act of displaying what has been
secret, as he mounts an illegal installation on his daughter’s life in the museum.
While Swallowing the Sun has not been marketed as a Troubles thriller, it can
be read as a revision of this genre, in which conspiracy, fear and intrigue are shifted
from the international to the domestic sphere, and the standard plots and elements of
the thriller are inflected in surprising ways. The Troubles thriller can be defined as a
subset within the thriller genre. In Troubles thrillers the violence, and intrigues
297 David Park, Swallowing the Sun (Bloomsbury: London, 2005), p. 26. All further
references to this work will be contained in the body of the text.
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occurring in Northern Ireland since the unofficial outbreak of the Troubles in 1969
(though some books are set in periods earlier than this) are welded to the fast paced
action, hidden agendas and violent confrontations that are staples of the thriller genre.
As early as 1991 Eamonn Hughes highlighted the point that “…the major response to
Northern Ireland has been in the form of the thriller”298 a situation that does not seem
to have changed much in recent years, if an inspection of CAIN’S list of fictional works
concerned with the Troubles is anything to go by.299 Highly specific in terms of time
and place, its ideologies, patterns and outcomes can shift in accordance with the real
social and historical circumstances it uses as its source material, though these shifts may
not always be readily apparent. The Troubles thriller mode has been the subject of
controversy and debate, with many critics differing widely over the role the Troubles
thriller has played in terms of both contemporary fiction in Northern Ireland in general,
and as Northern Ireland’s predominant fictional form. In the ‘negative camp’, critics
have noted the sense of inevitability that exists in the relationship of the Troubles to
their most dominant fictional representation:
It should not come as a surprise then that a mode that has been defined as “the
resolution of a mystery in circumstances of physical danger and energetic activity
has developed in particular in Northern Irish writing, trying to reflect the violent
atmosphere of the Troubles…300
298 Culture and Politics in Northern Ireland, 6.

299 Thrillers are by far the most frequently listed forms of fiction in CAIN’s Bibliography
of Works of Fiction Relating to the Troubles: CAIN (Conflict Archive on the
Internet).
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/fiction.htmn
300 Marisol Morales-Ladron, “‘Troubling” Thrillers’, Between Politics and Popular

Fiction in the novels of Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore and Colin Bateman”,
Estudios Irlandeses, Number 1, (2006) 58-66, [59].
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Summations of Troubles thrillers as inevitably conservative and reductive are
questioned in the work of Aaron Kelly, who engages in close reading of a number of
contemporary Troubles thrillers in his book on the subject.301 Kelly argues that
Troubles thrillers reveal subtle yet persistent references to the material conditions under
which they were produced, which in turn suggests a self-awareness that denies readings
of these works as conventional renderings of complex circumstances. Kelly raises
important points about absences and intention in Troubles thrillers, arguing that overtly
conservative ideologies found in these books are often undercut by references to places,
names and events loaded with suggestion, implying that sectarian struggle may have
materialist causes.
My position forms a half-way point between these two “schools” of thought. I
believe that many popular Troubles thrillers do display signs of self-awareness of form,
setting and plot, but are still limited in terms of, characterisation and underlying
ideological intent. It is in the area of characterisation in particular that many Troubles
thrillers still follow limiting conventions, particularly in their construction of an ideal
protagonist. In the popular or more stereotypical works this protagonist is almost
invariably a hard man, who is set apart from the mob through his distinctive SAS type
skills and insights into the inner workings of the criminal world. He retains sympathy
through his own selfless moral code, which demonstrates that he is really a good man
who must make tough decisions in a corrupt world. This construction is usually
accompanied by the idea that the Troubles are perpetuated by deviant criminal
elements working in conjunction with corrupt figures of authority. Even in the more
“literary” versions, the hero is often a hapless witness to the violence around him,
becoming embroiled in conflict for reasons beyond his control, and the villain is
301 The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Ashgate, 2005).
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demarcated as a rogue or particularly repellent paramilitary figure, clearly
distinguishable from the rest of society.
In all of the Troubles thrillers I have examined, there remains a sense that the
enemy can ultimately be distinguished from the hero, and that there are forces and
individuals “out there” and “behind the lines” who are corrupt and either directly or
indirectly responsible for the violence that the hero encounters and attempts to put
right. It is this construction that is profoundly challenged in Swallowing the Sun, in
which both the hero and the enemy can be read as the populace itself, obsessively
repeating acts of violence and looking away from them, yet also trying to find a way out.
Park’s book indirectly challenges the conventions of the Troubles thriller,
offering through its interrogation of questions of responsibility and cause a number of
sharp insights into the ways readers may have previously viewed this mode, and into the
Troubles themselves. Through the re-location of the thriller from the public, national or
even international sphere to the home and local neighbourhood, Park also raises
questions about notions of subjectivity and allegiance in Belfast, and the lines along
which these are constructed. In this re-location, the home becomes the foreign country,
subject to invasions, assassinations and subterfuge, and the members of a family strive to
work out their own identities and to understand the “crimes” or traumas that have
seemingly infiltrated their private lives. Another result of this re-location is a raised
awareness of the home as a place of continually negotiated allegiances, withholdings and
exchanges of information, operating along its own unspoken forms of government,
which are historically and socially predetermined. Traumatic events from the past,
however secret and unacknowledged, thus have a direct bearing on the manner in
which the members of the family conduct themselves and relate to each other.
In Swallowing the Sun the close-knit relationship in the book between domestic
violence and public acts of terrorism or corruption suggests that these differing forms of
violence are often bound up together – a brutal home environment encourages

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participation in public, gang-related revenge beatings, and a policeman’s feelings of
helplessness in the face of a young girl’s overdose is threaded with his anger at the recent
untimely release of a murderer from the Maze. Recent surveys of contemporary fiction
from Northern Ireland have noted a shift in the relationship of the subject to the city,
from a position of alienation to one where “the self and the city are strictly
interconnected, the dialectics of inside and outside take place, harmonically, within the
urban text”.302 This is certainly the case in Swallowing the Sun where a man’s
investigations into his daughter’s death in Belfast can also be read as investigations into
himself and his relationship to the past.
In Swallowing the Sun Park also employs and then unpicks the gender
stereotypes so often associated with the popular thriller. The traumas of domestic
violence, in particular the events detailed in the opening passage in which a savage
father forces a boy to fight his younger, weaker brother, suggest that the province is
founded upon a deeply brutalised version of masculinity, that carries within itself the
seeds of its own future destruction. To a certain degree, the gender roles in Swallowing
the Sun follow those of conventional “hard-boiled” thrillers: the men are frequently
violent, disconnected from themselves and the society around them and are uneasy
around intelligent women, while the women are relatively passive figures, victims of
domestic violence or worn down by poverty. Passages in which men are brutal are also
laced with misogynist overtones; a father tells his sons: “it’s fuckin’ dresses they ought to
be wearing” (1).
The thriller femme fatale is missing, or at least strangely projected onto the key
figure of the mummy Takabuti, who functions as an object of both fascination and
loathing within the text. Seemingly stereotypical gender attributes are also undermined
by the narrative structure of the book, in which repeating patterns signal masculine
302 Laura Pelaschiar, “The City as Text. The Case of Belfast: from Gothic Horror-Story
to Post-Modern Novel,” Prospero 10, (2003), 179-191, [185].
206
brutality as an ongoing tragedy, rather than as a sign of power. There is also a growing
awareness on the part of the central character, Martin Waring, of the causes of the
conflicts within him and of the pointlessness of simply repeating the past. Gender
constructions are clearly tied to material circumstances in Swallowing the Sun, as
poverty, social apathy and neglect are seen as the starting points for cycles of violence,
with the accompanying legacy of a public that, like the protagonist, must constantly
‘guard’ both the present and the past from unwanted inspections. Park also carefully
negotiates responsibility for ongoing suffering between individual practices and their
underlying political and material structures. Neither the state nor the individual is
totally to blame for the perpetuation of violence in Belfast, but rather the relationship
between the two. In this way the book can be read in the light of Foucault’s ideas on
regulation and truth:
We cannot know the truth about ourselves, because there is no truth to know,
simply a series of practices that make up the self. Nor can we escape the
regulatory institutions and discourses in which we are produced. But we can
identify them…and identify our own practices of the self, and from this basis
formulate tactics by which we can live in the world.303
The unlocking of secrets in this book, and their gradual incorporation into the public
arena, form part of the “tactics by which we can live in the world”. Martin Waring
gradually comes to identify his “own practices of the self” and sees in these a reflection
of the society in which he lives. It is his search to find new ways to express those
practices so that they can be seen clearly for what they are that makes this novel such a
powerful contribution to Northern Ireland contemporary fiction.
303 Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: Essential Works of

Foucault 1954-1984, Vol 2, ed. James Faubion (New Press: New York: 1998) p.
131.
207
Swallowing the Sun shares with Park’s earlier work an investment in individual
responses to trauma. It examines personal guilt and suffering within larger contexts of
dysfunctional behaviour. In Swallowing the Sun Park condemns the culture that chooses
to bury or make secret certain kinds of violence that do not fit into the wider, more
socially acceptable forms of violence that make up public history. Through the central
character, Martin, his relationship with his workplace, the Belfast Museum, and his
attempts to deal with both the traumas of his past and present, Park examines the
consequences of such avoidances. Martin Waring, who is both the victim and a
perpetrator of the event that acts as the violent primal scene within the book, his beating
of his brother, is ironically the figure most in the dark, blundering about for most of the
novel in search of clues to a narrative he contains inside himself. It is fitting, within this
context, that his daughter Rachel unwittingly associates Martin with the figure of
Polonius, whom she sees as troublingly intrusive:
What is it with Polonius? What makes this pompous, bumbling old man always
want to snoop and spy? His whole fawning, ingratiating life is about gathering
information, about being useful to those above him but even when he sees things
with his own eyes he sees them wrongly, his understanding is inevitably flawed
and distorted (53).
Martin’s identity shifts and changes in the book, alternating between victim and
perpetrator, secret agent and paramilitary thug, public avenger and private eye.
In Swallowing the Sun the Troubles are presented as interwoven with economic
inequity and poverty, rather than as a weird and self-sustaining phenomenon. A clear
example of this is found in Martin’s recollections of his school days:
They never had prize days – were told that for every one boy who got a prize
there were hundreds who didn’t. Maybe no one ever did anything that merited a
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prize, maybe they couldn’t find chairs for the parents that weren’t decorated
with phalluses or sectarian graffiti (9).
Personal flaws are also seen to play a part in creating the troubles that beset Martin.
The brutality of Martin’s father is presented as being a law unto itself, and the violence
of his home is distinguished from the community in which he lived as a child. The
picture here is both complex and convincing: experiences of domestic violence may lead
to participation in sectarian beatings, but are not necessarily caused by them. What is
most obvious is that the conflict is not removed from history but a vital part of it.
Park’s understanding of the legacy of violence can be read as one of the central
secrets examined and deciphered in Swallowing the Sun. His presentation of mourning
is another. The various attempts to mourn loss in the novel are also part of the
“formulation of tactics by which we can live in the world”. One of the key ideas Park
seems to be exploring here is whether one kind of mourning is more successful than
another is, or whether it is enough to simply mourn. Mourning is linked in the book to
a recuperation of the elements of history that have been lost or overwritten. The Ulster
Museum, its exhibits and installations and changing relationship to local history, all
signal an awareness of history as a process of forgetting and selection, as well as one of
remembering. The novel finally calls for a more inclusive view of the past and its impact
upon the present, indirectly reinforcing David Gross’s view:
…an external standpoint to the present age and a greater depth and breadth of
awareness come, however, not by enmeshing oneself in the memory of popular
culture, but by remembering what is excluded from the ruling memory schemata
of our time.304
304 Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 141.
209
Flashbacks, visits to old neighbourhoods, a mummified body and personalised relics can
be read as the signs and secrets of the excluded past that refuse to stay repressed, and
have found a way out into both private consciences and public domains. Martin’s
journey in the novel continually confronts these signs, and which eventually seeks to
make some sense of them: “it is yet possible to look through [these surviving traces] into
their distances”.305 The novel is replete with “surviving traces” which call up memories
from the past in order to confront figures with the meanings those memories contained.
Martin’s recurring flashbacks about being forced by his father to hit his brother when
they were both young boys acts as a kind of primary scene in the novel, and as a
determinant of his understanding of his relationship to the world around him. One of
the questions raised is whether he ever successfully moves past that memory, or whether
some secrets are so damaging that they can only be repeatedly acted out, albeit in
different forms.
The haunting conclusion of Swallowing the Sun , in which ghosts from the past
are exhumed as a part of Martin’s movement from stasis to action, brings to mind
Derrida’s claim that “a spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive”.306
The novel asks how we make tragedies narratable, but also, what changes need to be
made in society as a whole in order for them to be narratives we are willing to listen to.
Park thus critiques both the production of the kinds of historical narratives that service
corruption and suffering, and the patterns of behaviour that allow suffering to continue.
This kind of critique is not necessarily confined to Northern Ireland. In a study
observing survivors of abuse under Apartheid in South Africa researchers noted
305 Walter Benjamin, “Der Sammler,” in Konvolut “H” of Das Passagen-Werk: in

Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 275.
210
There may be, in effect, a wish to transform something into ‘memory’ by
converting it into narrative, at a point where the story has not attained closure
and the suffering is not yet a memory. For members of the ‘survivors’ group’
interviewed by Colvin, testifying is not enough, and moving on cannot happen,
without a change in objective conditions. 307
As with these survivors, it is difficult to imagine any real change in the kinds of suffering
Martin is experiencing “without a change in objective conditions”. While the two key
tragedies that define his identity – the abuse he experienced as a child and the loss of his
daughter – seem at first to be disconnected from Northern Ireland’s troubled political
history, the widespread willingness of onlookers to turn away or even condone such
losses suggests a link between personal suffering and a dysfunctional state. This link is
made explicit through Martin’s discovery that the likely supplier of the ecstasy that killed
his daughter is an underworld crime figure, Jaunty. Martin and Jaunty were once in the
same sectarian street gang. Through Martin’s reactions to his daughter’s death, and in
particular through the intimate detail of the installation Martin creates in the Ulster
museum Park also presents mourning as a state of heightened connection, rather than,
as Freud proposed, a “work” that resolves the condition of grief.308
Mourning here is not only personal but also political, indirectly reinforcing
Kathleen Woodward’s suggestion that “…if grief is in part produced by the apparatus of
307 “Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History,” Introduction by Katharine

Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone in Contested Pasts: the Politics of Memory eds.
Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (Routledge Studies in Memory and
Narrative), (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 102.
308 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol X1V, trans and ed. James
Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), p. 237.
211
the state, it can also be a sustaining force against its terror”.309 The multiple secretive
acts in the novel: a mother watching her sons being beaten from behind a window, a
teenage boy furtively bingeing on junk food, a father’s warning against letting outsiders
in, anorexia, drug-dealing and even dementia combine to create a picture of a society
existing in isolated, dysfunctional moments, disconnected from feeling. Martin’s choice
of the Belfast Museum as the appropriate venue to commemorate his daughter’s life is
thus deeply political, bringing into a public, institutionalised and carefully regulated
space the intimate evidence of what is overlooked when living within a terrorised state.
The internal conflict Martin experiences while constructing the installation is a literal
figuring of the gap between individual and collective narrativisation of experiences of
suffering in Northern Ireland. This gap underscores the importance of finding valid
ways to express what has been silenced, for both personal and political reasons: “the
relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented
also influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically
represented”. 310
Martin’s installation, which both commemorates the intimate details of his
daughter’s life, and, by bringing them into a public space, draws attention to the public’s
role in their erasure, is both a personal and a political act. In claiming the right to the
remembrance of the small things that have been lost amongst larger violence and
crimes, he makes a strongly political statement about what the state itself should begin to
remember and acknowledge more deeply, which may in turn be a small step towards
greater political representation of such values. This act is also important in terms of
309 Kathleen Woodward, “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief,”
Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture Vol.13,
No.1 (1990), 93-110.
310 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and UnMaking of the World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985.), p. 12.
212
what it states about prevailing Belfast attitudes, both political and personal, towards
memory itself. Susan J. Brison argues that
[m]emory is not something we have, but something we produce as individuals
sharing a culture. Memory is, then, the mutually constitutive interaction between
the past and the present, shared as a culture but acted out by each of us as an
individual.311
Yet what Park seems to be suggesting here is that individual suffering in Northern
Ireland stems from a fissure, rather than an interaction, between past and present, and
that what is “acted out by individuals” as a result are narratives that either repeat the
mistakes of the past (Martin tells his son to beat his tormentor) or that can only make
small appeals to a different kind of remembering. Secrets are deeply interconnected with
all of these narratives, and secrecy itself in the book comes to stand for a particular kind
of relationship to the past, in which injustices are remembered and internalised, rather
than confronted. The following examination of four themes that revolve around secrets
and their reception – the gaze, preservation, consumption and display – will unpick the
intricacies of these secretive relationships to the past, as well as Park’s tentative, but
moving suggestions for new and healthier ones.
The gaze
“He spends his life looking at people and things” (22)
.
Throughout Swallowing the Sun what I read as the theme of the gaze involves the role
of secretive watching in relation to the perpetuation of suffering. Martin’s son Tom uses
311 Susan J. Brison, “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” in Acts of
Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo
Spitzer, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 39-54, [ 37].
213
computer games, and in particular the animated fantasy figure of Lara Croft as a means
of looking into a different world in order to avoid gazing into the sad realities of the
world he actually resides in. Martin’s work as a museum guard involves watching others
for hours, which offers him a kind of protection from entering too closely into a
confrontation with the horrors of his own past. Acts of gazing in Swallowing the Sun
can offer a temporary refuge from the violence of the world, but can also be a
deadening activity, in which the watchers, like the central figure of the mummy
Takabuti become hollowed out and unable to act to help themselves or others about
them who are suffering.
Swallowing the Sun opens with a singularly traumatic spectacle, as Martin’s
father forces his two sons to fight one another as a punishment for losing their bike to a
local gang. This event takes place in a barren enclosed yard, and is watched by their
mother, her “face hanging ghostly behind the glass” (5). The act becomes a determining
scene, its violence and injustice reverberating throughout the rest of the novel, marking
both of the boys for life. What is most disturbing about the passage however, is its
double sense of secrecy and display, as the act is not socially sanctioned yet still
observed, and the private traumas of the family take place in the limbo-land of the yard,
at once a domestic and public spectacle. The lack of action on the part of onlookers –
here the mother and later, the neighbours, suggests that this novel is not concerned only
with destructive and secretive acts but also why they are secrets:
Across the entry another house looks into theirs. How can no one know? How
can it be a secret? Maybe no one gives a shit about anyone else, everyone
minding their own business and trying to think the best because it’s always easier
(70).
214
Martin is defined by his memories of that act not only because of what it signifies as an
act of betrayal on the part of his father, but also because it contains, however forced and
unintentional, his own betrayal of his brother. The novel seems to be examining the
consequences and legacies of such betrayals, where the role of victim and perpetrator is
unclear, or even mixed. The opening act also becomes a metaphor for the state of
society in Belfast as a whole; the city and its inhabitants are increasingly figured as an
inward looking family, compelled to turn upon itself and unable to read its own
tragedies in any new or more redemptive way. Here, Foucault’s associations of
surveillance with social obedience are turned on their heads, for what is disturbing in
this passage is not the fact that people might be watching, but the fact that they might
be watching and choose not to do anything to stop the violence.
The gaze and its relationship to violence are extended further in the novel
through Martin and his son Tom’s attraction to the idea of being invisible. Tom is
interested in the story of Christ passing though the Pharisees, “as if he was invisible to
them” (157). He sees in the story a possible escape from the nightmare of his school life
and listens hard “to understand how it might be done” (158). Tom, like Martin, wants
to be invisible, unnoticed, his thoughts and actions “hidden from the relentless probe of
the knife” (106).
Martin’s choice of the Ulster Museum as a workplace also speaks volumes about
his desire to redirect the gaze from his past to a safer, more controlled one. Cultural
studies investigations into the role of the museum stress that (they stage) the them/us
relation in overt, material ways, through directing the gaze within viewable space,
raising the question of who is doing the looking and who is being looked at.312 In his
work in the museum, Martin “watches them” (the visitors) but they do not see him: “It’s
as if he watches them from behind the protection of a glass and even when their eyes
312 Bella Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability,

(England: Open University Press, 2003), p. 146.
215
rest on him it’s only for a second and then they move on” (23). Martin has become, in a
strange reflection of his mother’s earlier role, the silent watcher. This repetition seems to
say a great deal about the suppression and release of trauma in Belfast, as Martin
becomes the very thing existing at the centre of his childhood trauma, the spectator.
Drawn to gaze as strongly as he fears being gazed upon, his work at the museum subtly
swaps the role of the victim for that of the bystander, in an acknowledged wish to
remove himself from the realities of his earlier experiences.
This shift is also connected to a larger discourse of memory, since the new role is
perceived as a chance to “make up for what was missed in the past” (23). By watching,
Martin feels that he will be able to gradually make up the gaps in his knowledge that he
perceives are a legacy of the paucity of his education, and in a fascinating projection,
also sees this as the necessary mode of learning for the state he inhabits. Martin’s fear of
learning by touching is deeply connected to his childhood experiences of receiving his
education from his father’s fist, and it is through the desire to protect that child that he is
“fearful of where it will end. Of what damage will ensue” (24).
Martin and his wife Alison are asked by the police to make a televised statement
as part of an investigation into their daughter’s death. Their statement echoes other,
more overtly political appeals that are a daily part of a highly policed state. Television,
as the state’s most obvious source of the gaze, is seen by Martin to have been a failure in
communicating his messages: “He doesn’t have the words and he should never have
gone on television and tried to use them, knows that he can never find them and that
even if he could, out there, there’s no one listening” (189).
The final irony of this book that Martin is only able to bring his message into the
public gaze by installing it in the one place he previously felt was sacrosanct from the
unexpected: the Ulster Museum. Through the installation, Park comments on differing
approaches to loss in Belfast, and how new uses of history may be more useful than
superficial discourses. These ideas echo those found in earlier novels by Park, such as
216
The Healing, in which a young boy uses the rhetoric and rich vocabulary of the Old
Testament as a catalyst for the expression of suppressed trauma. Both The Healing and
Swallowing the Sun contain a Calvinistic ideology of the ‘elect’ or the chosen (in this
case Martin Waring) finding new and valid ways to interpret ‘the word’ as a kind of
underlying, secret truth than has been forgotten by society.
The final motif I examine within the theme of the gaze sums up the role of
watching in Belfast. Martin’s reflections on a photograph of his daughter are positioned
throughout Swallowing the Sun. A close examination of this motif within the larger
discourse of the gaze reveals a poignant expression of Park’s interest in attitudes towards
loss, the past and possible futures that draw upon those losses. In his initial reflections on
the photograph, which had “always been his favourite” (13), Rachel is
…about four years old and wearing a blue dress covered with white, yellow-
centred flowers. She has no shoes on her feet and she’s holding a small camera
to her eye. But the camera is the wrong way round – she’s looking through the
lens and he likes to think of the light of the world flowing into her eye. All of the
light of the world. Light and the future, more than he’s ever known. More than
he could ever grasp for himself (14).
The photograph here represents a hope for the future that Martin feels is denied to him,
but which will be enacted through the academic achievements of his clever daughter.
Holding the camera the wrong way is symbolic of the knowledge and potential of the
world pouring into his daughter, as subject and object are inverted in a positive
interpretation of the inward gaze. A second reflection takes place in the room where
Martin must identify his daughter’s corpse. This time the image is grim and a spectacle
of horror:
217
In the photograph she’s wearing a blue dress patterned with white and yellow
flowers. She holds a camera to her eye. She’s got it the wrong way round. He
looks at her closed eyes again. He never understood until now. There is no
future – here is only past – and what flows into her eye isn’t light but the
darkness of the world (98-99).
This time the spectacle of death necessitates a re-write of his ‘secret’ knowledge.
Rachel, and by proxy, the future, has become the symbol of death rather than of life,
interwoven with the mummy “who swallows it (the sun) whole every night” (243).
Rachel here represents the gaze into nothingness, the self-devouring stare that Martin
identifies as a possible view of the future for himself, and by association, for Belfast. In
his final reflection, these two binaries of optimism and despair are replaced by a more
muted vision: “He thinks of the photograph where she’s trying to look at the world
through the lens of the camera, trying to look at the world which gave her life and then
took it away again” (195). This reflection seems to be an example of the kind of positive
mourning advocated by Melanie Klein; “a process of transformation if not addition or
multiplication of emotions”.313
In his final vision of the photograph, which has come to reflect the different
stages of his mourning, Martin sees that it may also be about recognising that one has
simply looking at things the wrong way around, and that though we are connected to
the world, we are not ultimately in control of our lives within it. Finally, the small
details of the photograph, “a blue dress with white and yellow flowers. No shoes on her
feet” (195) function as a testament to the secret at the heart of these reminiscences, these
313 Kathleen Woodward, referring to Melanie Klein’s work on mourning in “Grief-

Work in Contemporary American Cultural Criticism,” in Discourse: Berkeley
Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Vol.15, No. 2 (1992-3),97.
Melanie Klein reference from this article: “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-
Depressive States,” (1940) in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell,
(New York: Free, 1986).
218
gazes upon a captured moment from the past, that it is a reminder not just of death, but
also of who remains alive to remember: “grief…suffuses our very sense of ourselves as
being, precisely, alive, not dead”.314
I read the gaze in Swallowing the Sun as a means of exploring the role of the
spectator in Park’s Belfast, and all the acts of secrecy that accompany that role. This
spectator may watch violence but refuse to act to stop it, gaze at a television screen
publicising a death but remain unmoved. It is only when the gaze is turned inwards to
the self that the spectators may see their connection to those they have been previously,
secretly, watching.
Preservation and the archive
[T]he question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past, the question of a concept
dealing with the past which might either be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archival
concept of the archive, but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question
of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow…A spectral messianicity is at
work in the concept of the archive and like religion, like history, like science itself, this ties it to a
very singular experience of the promise.315
The second theme I wish to examine in Swallowing the Sun, preservation and the
archive, surveys the numerous acts of preservation found in Swallowing the Sun, the
repercussions that inevitably arise as a result of these acts and the links that can be made
between the desire to preserve and secrecy. I have chosen to introduce this section with
Derrida’s comments on the archive, as they seem to me to relate to this novel and its
particular treatment of the secret in a number of ways. Swallowing the Sun explores
both individual and state archiving in Belfast and what these archives signify in terms of
human relationships to each other and to history. The archive here is most obviously
represented through the Ulster Museum. While a museum is not an archive in the
strictest sense of the word (a place where public records or other historical documents
314 Woodward, p. 100.

315 Jacques Derrida. “Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne,” (Paris:
Galilee,1995), http://www.hydra.unm.edu/derrida/arch.html
219
are kept) it does hold records of public history in the form of artefacts, tools and objects
from various pasts. It can be read as an archive in two ways, firstly through what it
initially represents for Martin, as a site of detached preservation, rather than as a
recommendation of involvement with the past: “He considers it to be a vocation-
preserving the best things of the past, keeping them safe for the future. Safe for people to
look at. He believes, too, that looking is what a museum should be based on-looking and
learning” (23).
Even more significantly, the museum can be read as a symbolically realised
example of the city’s attitude towards the past, and what that signifies for the future. In
this reading of the archive (the one that is promoted by Derrida) the archive is not only
the public record of the past, but the decisions that accompany that record keeping, and
the attitudes held towards what is preserved and what is forgotten, or kept secret.
The Ulster Museum is initially presented as a sanctuary from the rest of Belfast,
a secretive, yet familiar space where Martin feels safe:
The whole of the museum is open to him and he feels as if he shares ownership
of everything it contains. He loves the very building, its smells and surfaces, the
way there is an inner catacomb of corridors and rooms that the public never get
to see, the way the outer galleries fit perfectly over this inner body like a tailored
suit (22).
The museum is also a place where a particular past of conscientious labour is preserved
and put on display: “he thinks of sixteen polished axes, their heads grey and smooth like
fish; weaving looms from the linen mills; giant steam engines with pistons, valves and
dials” (11). For Martin, the museum has functioned as a refuge from his violent past, a
place where history is carefully contained behind glass cases, and where he, like his
mother before him, can become almost invisible (23), another “face hanging ghostly
behind the glass” (5). It is also a place of looking and learning, a place for reading the
220
world from a safe distance. Martin at first disapproves of more interactive forms of
education:
His unvoiced opinion is that it’s a gimmick, a cheap card trick that results only in
disrespect and in the young a belief that everything must fall inside their
entitlement of their reach and so he is fearful of where it will end (24).
The museum represents stability, safety and routine, the opposite of the unpredictable
rages of his father. Even more significantly, the museum can initially be read as a
symbolically realised example of the general attitude towards the past, and what that
signifies for the future that Park depicts as the current state of affairs in Belfast.
Suzanne Keen has noted “most importantly for Derrida, the quality of a
democracy can always be evaluated by the “participation in and access to the archive,
its constitution and its interpretation”.316 She also notes “[a] Foucauldian understanding
of the archive requires the researcher to acknowledge the social, political, economic and
personal circumstances that condition any truth-claim or announcement of
discovery.”317 In line with Derrida’s concept of a “spectral messianicity at work in the
archive”318 the items preserved in the Ulster Museum in Swallowing the Sun can be
read as clues about not only Belfast’s past, but also its present and future. The particular
choice of artefacts on display lays down a kind of ghostly blueprint for the city’s future
means of relating to its own inhabitants and to the world around it. The ongoing
316 Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2001) p. 60, in reference to Derrida’s work Archive
Fever, and on page 51 in reference to Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of
Knowledge, (1971) trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books,
1985).
317 Keen, Romances of the Archive p. 51 in reference to Michel Foucault, The
Archaeology of Knowledge, (1971).
318 Jacques Derrida. “Mal d’Archive: Une Impression Freudienne,” (Paris:
Galilee,1995), http://www.hydra.unm.edu/derrida/arch.html
221
questions about sovereignty and nationality in Northern Ireland are symbolised through
the looted treasures of other countries and the re-working of past sufferings so that they
are presented in a more positive light. The museum can also be read as a space in which
the past is preserved for future generations in order to avoid an engagement with the
realities of the present. This is certainly the way Martin views the museum in the first
half of the book, seeing it as a place where he has a vocation, “preserving the best things
of the past, keeping them safe for the future” (23). In reading the preservation of the past
as a vocation’ Martin represents the ‘messianic’ aspects of Derrida’s reading of the
archive, watching over the past while waiting for a better future when that information
can be put to good use.
Baudrillard, in rather typically gloomy fashion, extends and darkens ideas about
the archive through his reading of the museum as the ultimate sign of the emptiness of
the present:
(Museums)…are already there to survive all civilizations, in order to bear
testimony. But to what? …The mere fact that they exist testifies that we are in a
culture which no longer possesses any meaning for itself and which can only
dream of having meaning for someone else from a later time.319
The initial presentation of the museum in Swallowing the Sun does depict a site
disconnected from the violence, neglect and poverty that have marked Martin’s past,
but also from the empty materialism that is synonymous with its present. Only small
traces of these creep in, such as “the Sunday afternoon fathers”, whose kids are
“pumped up on fast-food lunches and fizzy drinks…while their fathers struggle to keep
up, their showy attempts at fatherhood being ignored” (24-25).
319 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant
(London: SAGE Publications, 1993), p. 185.
222
Martin’s job as a security guard at the museum is also highly symbolic in nature.
Like Derrida’s crypt keeper, once again, he guards the secrets of the past from intruding
too by the present, and must daily patrol its borders in order to do so. His job also
alludes to the watching and spying found in the conventional thriller mode. Michael
Denning has noted on the spy thriller that it is:
a symptom of (the imperial) crisis …the fortunes of the spy thriller are intimately
tied to the task of managing and resolving this crisis in the popular
imagination…if the adventure tale was the energizing myth of English
imperialism, the thriller became a compensatory myth of the crisis of
imperialism.320
While Martin is not a spy employed by the state to uncover international intrigues, his
position as a guard within a museum dedicated to presenting the actions of the past in a
positive light, and his later investigations into his daughter’s death casts him as a new
kind of espionage figure – one who must operate within the confinements of the
prevailing hegemony with whatever tools he has at his disposal. The “crisis of
imperialism” is here conveyed both through the aesthetics of the museum, its choice of
exhibits and means of arranging them, and through the historical details it chooses to
leave out. There is no mention in the novel of exhibits on the Troubles in the museum,
suggesting that they are almost ‘outside history’, too controversial to be archived, and
thus, like Martin’s childhood fight with his brother, best overlooked, kept secret.321
320 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller,
(New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 37-39.
321 These gaps and omissions can also be found in the ‘real’ history of the Ulster
Museum and its exhibit choices. In 1996 Richard Kirkland opened his book on
literature and culture in Northern Ireland since 1965 with an examination of the
museum’s distinctive approach to history. Remarking on the museum’s absence
of coverage of the Troubles, he noted: “[O]ne is led directly from 1920 to an
exhibition of dinosaurs followed by the micro-colonial instant represented by the
mummy of Takabuti. As a metaphor,or even a joke, the resonances are telling.”
223
The museum preserves carefully selected versions of history but also acts as a
buttress against the distasteful events of the present, reinforcing through its lack of
representation the view of the Troubles as a temporary aberration perpetrated by
criminals, ignoring any of the social and economic unrest that can be linked to the
violence. Conversely, the museum is a site that preserves and honours various forms of
historical oppression; mill girls singing, the coffin from Egypt and other prizes from
imperial explorations are all part of a discourse of preservation that hides the darker
aspects of the past.
Park refrains from making any direct statements about the future of Northern
Ireland in Swallowing the Sun but does imply through the ambiguous treatment of the
artefacts taken from former British colonies in the museum, in particular the figure of
the Egyptian mummy, Takabuti, that Northern Ireland’s relationship with Britain is
neither straightforward nor free from guilt. A direct link is made between the
encroachments of imperial England upon the world and Martin’s abusive past through
the figure of the mummy Takabuti, who holds a particular fascination for him, and
whose image often appears in association with disturbing memories from the past. The
mummy of Takabuti, the museum’s most prized exhibit, is another figure within the
larger trope of preservation. This mummy actually exists, in the real Ulster Museum322,
Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland since 1965: Moments of Danger.

(London: Longman1996),p.2. The museum reopened after extensive renovations
in 2009, with refurbished exhibits and a new area dedicated to the Troubles, but
still comes under criticism for its relatively sparce approach to that history: See
“Minimal Troubles at Ulster Museum”, Fionola Meredith The Irish Times,
(Saturday October 24, 2009),
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2009/1024/1224257361514.ht
ml
322 “Takabuti was first brought to Belfast from Egypt by boat in 1834 by a wealthy
young Holywood man named Thomas Greg.He bought the mummified remains
at a 'mummy market' in Thebes (now Luxor) and on his return home he donated
the mummy to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society.Takabuti
then went to the Ulster Museum.” “Face of Belfast mummy is revealed.” BBC
News Channel (16 October, 2009).
224
and Park’s use of her can be read in a number of ways. Takabuti functions as a direct
signifier of Belfast’s connections to larger past of British imperialism and of British
interest in and appropriation of relics from its former colonies. She is also a referent for
both death and life in the novel. Her body is preserved in order to grant her entrance
into the Egyptian afterlife, yet this process has been disrupted by the removal of the
mummy from Egypt to Belfast, and her audience now is not the gods and goddesses of
the Egyptian cosmos but rather the daily hordes of school children who come to see her.
Takabuti is a body existing on the border of life and death – seemingly
permanently preserved yet also a constant reminder of the presence of death in life.
These dualities are further complicated by the hieroglyphs and paintings found upon
her coffin. On the lid of her coffin is painted the Egyptian goddess of the skies, Nut, who
is referred to several times in the novel, but never named directly. According to one
myth Nut gave birth to her son the Sun-god daily. He would pass over her body before
arriving at her mouth, into which he disappeared and would pass through her body
before being re-born the following morning, a rite that is alluded to in the novel (99).
Nut, and by association, Takabuti, thus becomes the “swallower of the sun”, the means
by which both darkness and light are brought into being. The subsequent association in
the novel of Rachel with Takabuti raises questions in the novel about the preservation of
the dead, and whether any form of commemoration can truly release us from the
darkness of the void.
Takabuti is a figure of the underworld, preserved and prepared to consort with
the gods who live below the earth. Yet other underworlds also shadow Martin’s life.
Rachel dies after taking an Ecstasy tablet and over-heating in a night-club, figuratively
becoming the girl who swallowed the sun. Martin traces the supplier of these drugs to a
figure from his past – a former paramilitary man turned organised crime boss – whose
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couriers and messengers work in the alleys and abandoned buildings of his childhood
suburb. The underworld exists both outside and inside the museum, and Takabuti is a
symbol of the interconnectedness of these different realms, reinforced by Martin’s
association of the mummy with his daughter’s body. These connections serve to
illustrate the widespread nature of crime in the city, refuting the idea that some suburbs
are immune from danger, or that the Troubles can be neatly sectioned off into
geographical locales or periods of time.
Aaron Kelly sees the revelation of the inter-relationship of one part of the city to
another as a key contribution by the thriller genre to an unpicking of previously
established assumptions about the Troubles: “What the social symbolism of the thriller
achieves, I shall argue, is the incrimination of the whole of Northern Irish society as a
totality of forces and relationships in the historical moment of the conflict.”323 In the
works that Kelly examines this is achieved through the geographical sweep of the
Troubles thriller, which establishes the city as “a criminalized and total network of
power relations”324 rather than as a place where crime can be neatly sectioned off into
different suburbs. This connection is also made in Swallowing the Sun, as the crimes
that occur in one suburb can be seen to have connections and repercussions in other,
wealthier ones. It is particularly highlighted in the final pages of the book when Martin
builds his own installation on his daughter’s life within the museum, bringing the
realities of the Troubles and of the particularly private price he has had to pay for them
into the place that had previously kept out such histories. This inter-connectedness is
also evident in the novel’s splicing of domestic and territorial violence. Martin’s failure
to find atonement, symbolically played out in his traumatic return to the figure of the
mummy, is a sign of his own involvement in the violence of the past as well as of the
323 The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (Hampshire:
Ashgate, 2005)(Studies in European Cultural Translation Series.), p. 17.
324 Kelly, p. 109.
226
state’s inability to mourn effectively. He becomes victim and perpetrator, the secret
agent and the wanted man, a doubled figure who hunts for himself as much as for the
external criminal. Martin haunts his home in much the same way that he tracks down
his enemies and in so doing epitomizes the interdependent nature of domestic and
sectarian violence in Belfast. Staring into the hollow eye of Takabuti can thus be read
as a moment of this realisation, as the mummy embodies the fact that it is Martin,
rather than his daughter, who is living in the Underworld.
Martin, as a man initially defined by his efforts to stave off the past and later by
his wishes to re-narrativise them, represents an exploration of different kinds of
approaches to the artefact and to the act of preservation. In the early sections of the
novel, Martin identifies strongly with the particular ordering of the past he finds in the
museum, to the point where a mnemonic chant of the museum’s contents serves as a
form of relaxation:
He tries to calm himself as he always does by thinking of the objects he watches
over every day, anchoring himself by focusing on their physical reality, the cases
where their permanence is preserved and stored…he thinks of sixteen polished
stone axes, their heads grey and smooth like fish; weaving looms from the linen
mills; giant steam engines with pistons, valves and dials (11).
Martin’s frequent internal listing of the items in the museum serves a two-fold purpose:
it is a means of staving off his own, carefully stored and unwillingly opened secrets, but is
also a public record of what Belfast chooses to remember. Even the Mill factory slogan
that he chants “Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening” has
a chilling, fatalistic quality underlying its brisk surface, as the hardships of the Mill girls’
lives are translated into a Protestant work ethic which demands a benign countenance in
the face of suffering. Park employs a materialist view of history in passages like this, and
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seems to be arguing that while there may be many different ways of reading the past,
certain things do happen which we prefer not to read about.
Martin’s lists denote the elements he relies upon and favours in the particular
szujet that is his initial means of narrating the world about him. Order, productivity and
a de-humanised mechanism are carefully arranged and contained to ensure that
everything is understandable, expected and anticipated by the viewer. In the museum
there are no nasty surprises, nothing springing out of the case to demand a re-reading of
the past or your own relationship to it. When Rachel jokes “You belong in a museum
Dad” (22), we can see that Martin is aligned not just with the past, but also to a
particular version of that past – one where the patterns of evolutionary development are
neatly mapped out and read as “truth” by the leading institutions of the day –
institutions that Martin not only relates to but also resides in. He has become, or at least
likes to believe that he has become, the ordered state, the status quo to which the
conventional thriller desires a return.
Yet it is evident even in the structural ordering of the novel that this state is
tenuous, ultimately untenable. As discussed earlier, the novel opens with a violent
primary scene, or fabula, (if we take Rickard’s psychoanalytic reading for this term),
which can also be read as the fabula for Belfast itself.325 Belfast’s sectarian history, and
the British government’s involvement in the Troubles, as well as its subsequent frequent
silences in regard to that involvement can be traced in miniature in the scene, where
two brothers are set against each other by a powerful parent, while another watches
from the sidelines but does not speak out. This scene becomes a determinant for
Martin’s attitude to the past, in which whatever is out of kilter with the present must be
325 “The other model for reading narratives that Brooks constructs from his reading of
Freud is his suggestion of psychoanalytic transference as a model for the working
out of a coherent narrative or sjuzet in response to an incoherent fabula, an
irretrievable primal scene.” John S Rickard, “Introduction,” in Peter Brooks,
Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 7.
228
closed off and kept secret. Stunted by the violence of his upbringing, it takes a
subsequent tragedy to shock Martin out of his zombie-like existence, allowing him to
become knowledgeable by re-experiencing what has been done in the way of suffering,
and in this pathos, in resuffering the past, “the network of individual acts is transformed
into an event, a significant whole”.326 This is partly achieved through the installation
that initially attracts Martin’s attention and later developed more fully through his own
installation based on daughter’s life.
The initial presentation of the museum as a refuge from the past, and Martin’s
role as a keeper of that function is troubled by the depiction of a temporary installation
in the museum, and by Martin’s sexual encounter with the installation artist. The first
installation re-interprets the notion of the archive, creating spaces in which the
archivist/creator and the visitor have a more inter-active relationship (30-33). Martin
realises this installation makes him feel good and wishes to compliment the artist, but
“he knew the words wouldn’t come out of his mouth” (33). At first the installation seems
to represent a shift in the nature of the archive, and the function of the museum. Highly
interactive, it encourages museum visitors to enter its spaces and experience its meaning
for themselves, rather than being told through labels what it is about (33). It is also,
unlike that other exhibits that Martin is so familiar with, a tribute to the natural, rather
than the industrial world, and appeals not just to the visual sense:
Outside black, inside white. Everywhere white and, running and circling round
the walls from some kind of projector, clouds and colours and images of sky and
land and seascape…Sky ran across her face…Her body was the waves of the
326 Harold Schweizer, “Introduction,” in Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling,

p. 11, quoting Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1973), p. 28.
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sea…He wondered what was on his own face and body but when he looked
down all he could see were undulating ripples of light (32).
Beautiful, calming and sensuous, the installation provides for Martin a temporary entry
into a previously suppressed world of emotions and passion.
The installation and his subsequent sex with the installation artist act as a vivid
counterbalance to the controlled, masculine sterility of the world Martin and the
museum have previously stood for. Yet it fails to provide a complete answer. Something
is missing in the details, a real connection to the past that Martin has experienced which
emblematises the relationship between subject and state in Belfast. Driving home from
the installation artist’s house Martin comes to see the artist’s work as a seductive
scheme: “The colours, the moving frieze of images, the scents, the music – all of it
conspired to drug him and detach him from the world in which he lives” (40). His
feelings of unease and guilt are accompanied by another image of emotions projected
upon a screen: “the flail of swear words streams once more against the windscreen” (40)
in a private echo of his earlier experience in the installation. His thoughts “ (splash)
back against his face” (40). These images reinforce the idea that Martin’s (and ultimately
Belfast’s) most fitting installation needs to be more than a simple sensory experience
providing escape from present surroundings. What is needed is one that engages with
those surroundings with insight and compassion.
Martin’s subsequent building of an installation in order to commemorate his
daughter’s life can be thus read as an individual example of the larger need for open
public communication and recognition of suffering as well as a call for the
acknowledgement of small moments in people’s lives, the traces that are destroyed and
forgotten. His own act of preservation, his secret and unauthorised installation, which
will be examined in closer detail in the final section (‘display’), is an attempt to find a
language that adequately expresses loss. It fails in one sense, as Martin cannot reach his
230
daughter, and must ultimately accept the finality of death. It does serve the vital role of
acting as a testimony to his daughter’s life, and in so doing, calls attention to what is
often forgotten or overlooked in the more official discourses about Belfast’s past, the
price paid by a society that is disconnected from itself. Other examples of archiving and
preservation in the novel – Martin’s carefully locked memories of childhood abuse and
violence, and his daughter’s collection of shoes – speak of more private systems of
record-keeping, but are no less telling in terms of what has been preserved, as well as
what has been made secret, and left unspoken. Martin’s memories repeatedly confront
him with his own involvement in domestic violence, but fail to provide him with the
reasons for his inability to move beyond that involvement. Rachel’s collection seems on
the surface to be a sign of her love for her family and security in her own childhood, but
the inevitable images of Holocaust victims that arise with the description of a collection
of children’s shoes suggest loss and tragedy. In each case, the surface plot of preservation
can be unpicked to look at what lies festering underneath: colonial theft, the exploitation
of mill girls, familial mistrust and abuse and public exoneration of that abuse.
Consumption
The title of this novel encapsulates Park’s interest in the idea of a figure literally eating
away the light, devouring all that illuminates. Multiple references to forms of hidden
consumption in Swallowing the Sun build up a picture of a society where eating is a
form of escape and connected to a loss of identity, as the more one consumes the more
one can attempt to eliminate the elements of reality one finds disturbing. Martin’s
overweight son Tom eats compulsively and in secret, both at school and at home in
order to escape the misery of his victimisation at school. Alison, Martin’s wife, swallows
tranquillisers as a means of deadening herself to the tragedy of her daughter’s death.
Rachel becomes, figuratively, Takabuti herself, as she swallows ecstasy, a drug
renowned for its mood enhancing properties, before she falls into a coma and dies. In
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this way, the body, as a vehicle for absorbing and reproducing society’s ills, is one of the
means through which Park explores secretive and public consumption in Northern
Ireland. References to food in the novel are frequently unpleasant, as gorging on junk
food becomes synonymous with a diseased state, feeding itself on unsustainable
practices.
Material status is also measured by the kinds of food one is surrounded with.
Alison’s lack of education means she must work in a horrible school canteen to bring in
some money for the family. The passages describing Alison’s work in the canteen depict
a hellish environment in which foul food and ungrateful customers create a sense of
almost visceral entrapment: “the hours of heat and cooking in the canteen, the rawness
of pans and ovens, the slop and leftover mess, the unrelenting noise of children” (56).
The food being consumed is unhealthy, and often wasted, there seems to be no joy in
cooking, preparing or eating, rather just filling a void with greasy slop. This is a society
disconnected from feeling alive, living on easy fixes, rather than long-term solutions.
Leaving behind this kind of food is seen as a step away from this social class; changing
classes means removing yourself from a physical, visceral world to a more detached one:
A few things are clear now. She knows she’s not going back to work in the
canteen. Too many smells, too much heat burrowing into her, too many faces of
other people’s children pressing into her. She thinks she’s like to go back to
education and take some night classes, get better qualifications and look around
for a different type of job. She smiles as she wonders whether, if she worked
really hard, she could come close to getting a star. That would be something.
Really something. Then perhaps she might get some kind of office job where she
had her own desk and chair, where there wasn’t a scream of voices constantly
shouting, where she didn’t have to brush up food trodden into the floor (224).
232
Park complicates any easy equation between social mobility and healthier consumption.
When Martin visits the house of one of Rachel’s wealthier friends in an effort to re-
trace the exact circumstances of her death; another figure of secretive consumption is
brought to light. The girl, Joni, is suffering from anorexia: “Her face is hollow, and even
through her clothes he can see that her body is stick-like, fleshless” (151). Joni’s body is
consuming itself, and her presence is made more vivid through what is absent. A link is
made between Rachel and her through a reference to a lack of colour in her face, that
suggests both girls are now living in the realm of the dead, and that greater wealth
doesn’t guarantee immunity from suffering (152). Tom Waring, Martin’s son, is the
most obvious figure in the book’s mural of secretive consumption. Viciously bullied at
school, he assuages his daily loneliness and humiliation through secretive gorging on
sweets and junk food. His parents notice his ballooning size but avoid addressing its
source, offering instead slightly pathetic bribes and admonishments about losing weight.
The link between his overeating and a dysfunctional society is brilliantly illuminated in
the passage where Martin takes Tom to see an ice hockey game. At the game Tom
buys junk food, offering his father some in what Martin knows is “the bribe for allowing
him to consume what he wants” (72). It is not just the food that seems out of place,
however, for Martin feels that here “everything is bigger than he imagined it – the
stadium, the crowds, the merchandising, the whole scale of it” (72). Tom’s alienation
from his surroundings is captured in a single moment at the game, when they fail to
connect with the crowd’s Mexican wave: “Tom tries to copy the way they form the
letters, before finally he gives up, slumps back into his seat and waits for the game to
start” (74). When asked later how the game went, Martin replies: “It’s the end of the
Troubles…They’ve finally cracked it because there’s no Catholics or Protestants any
more. Everyone’s American. It’s the end of sectarianism” (76). This highly ironic
comment, in combination with Tom’s earlier failure to fit into the crowd, points out the
extent to which sectarianism is fuelled by mob mentalities, and by a lack of acceptance

233
of anyone or anything that is different. It also makes the point that rabid consumption
can be just another guise for sectarianism.
Park also examines secretive consumption in another way through its interrogation
of the suppression of certain elements from material and political history, a figurative
“eating away” of what has gone before – and the impact these suppressions have on the
ways in which individuals read their pasts and negotiate the future. Throughout
Swallowing the Sun, Park subtly highlights the link between personal alienation and
material and cultural inequities – with a particular focus on the damage that is done by
leaving this link unexamined. Park’s insights into the ease with which sectarian violence
has been replaced or exchanged for criminal violence also suggests that all violence is
really caught up in systems of exchange which are in themselves a much deeper form of
oppression. This suggestion is initially reinforced through the various connections made
in the novel between a perceived lack of self worth and a past of material and cultural
impoverishment. When revisiting his childhood neighbourhood Martin experiences a
kind of epiphany about the interrelationship of sectarian violence and economic decay:
He’d never seen so many flags, not even in the heart of the Troubles. They’re on
every pole and post, turf-markers in the new wars. Dogs pissing on their
territory. But everywhere he looks, despite the redeveloped houses and the
walkways, there is only deterioration and decay and part of him wants to tell
every flag-waver that they’re fighting the wrong bloody war, that they should be
making something better for the kids (67).
Park is careful to avoid easy solutions to the ongoing nature of such problems. Martin’s
son’s belief that economic success will be the answer to the torment he has received so
far in life for being overweight can be read as a form of tragic escapism, rather than as a
viable solution:
234
And he’s started to realise where it is he wants to go and it’s in pursuit of
money and a decent job because its money helps you to run fast, takes you
anywhere you want to go in the world. That its money in the wall that keeps you
safe (226).
The specific features of Tom’s fantasy reveal the extent to which this imagined utopian
future is still bound into the strictures of the present. It is “money in the wall” – hidden,
secretive, encased like hoardings of paramilitary weapons – that will be the imagined
means to his future security. Park’s refusal to treat economic success without underlying
social reform as the answer to violence in Northern Ireland is further developed through
Martin’s act of retribution upon the crime figure indirectly responsible for his daughter’s
death. As he pisses into the jacuzzi in which the man is sitting Martin states in response
to a demand for more respect: “Respect? That much respect” (233). Park carefully
negotiates responsibility for ongoing suffering between individual practices and
underlying political and material structures. Neither the state nor the individual is
totally to blame for the perpetuation of violence in Belfast within this novel, but
principally the relationship between the two.
The final, and perhaps the most significant aspect of what I read as the extended
theme of secret consumption in the book can be found in Martin’s appalled fascination
with the consumed body of Takabuti. Park challenges the “stagnant” Troubles thriller
format through this text’s treatment and production of the consumed body, or corpse,
traditionally the focal point in the thriller for the spectacle of violence. In the thriller, the
manner of death and the arrangement of the corpse are often interconnected with the
crime that has taken place but also often with the text’s underlying ideologies and
agendas.
Allen Feldman’s work on the interrelationship of the body and political terror in
Northern Ireland argues for a reading of bodies as signifiers of both past and present
235
structures of violence in the state: “The body, altered by violence, re-enacts other
altered bodies dispersed in time and space; it also re-enacts political discourse and even
the movement of history itself”.327 Although Feldman’s work concentrates on real,
historically recorded deaths, prison rites and tortures, and I am looking at a work of
fiction, I believe that his arguments can be applied here, for the treatment and display of
the body in the Troubles thriller can often be read as a signifier for the work’s
underlying ideological positions. While the mummy’s sarcophagus is richly decorated, it
is “her face black and wizened like a walnut” (14) that Martin’s thoughts repeatedly
return to. On one level, this image simply functions as a grim foreboding of his
daughter’s untimely death, as Rachel will become another young woman frozen in time
in the memories of others. Park describes Rachel’s final moments, but not the reaction
of others around her at the time. We are given a brief description of Rachel’s body
when Martin must identity it as that of his daughter – it is “blue” and “cold” – but the
overall sensation surrounding her death is one of a kind of numbness rather than the
bloody and cinematic spectacles found in other Troubles fiction.
All of these things raise several questions: can Rachel’s death be called a crime?
If so, who was the perpetrator? What is an appropriate course of vengeance? How are
we, as readers positioned in relation to this event? Are we excused or simply saddened?
The thriller’s usual voyeuristic position taken in relation to the body is refused here and
replaced with a sad detachment, a lack of affect that can be read as a metaphor for the
reaction of the state as a whole to the repeated losses of the Troubles. The repeated
association in the book of Rachel with the Egyptian Mummy Takabuti, the Ulster
Museum’s prize exhibit, further complicates this position. Park’s decision to use
Takabuti as the dominant image of the body in this work is replete with suggestiveness.
Takabuti literally and fascinatingly reinforces Anne Cranny-Francis’ claim that “the
327 Feldman, p. 7.
236
sarcophagus is one of the earliest examples of the body as a text”.328 In linking the
mummy to the human body in the book connections are also drawn between ‘mundane’
deaths – the overdose of a young girl – and a larger past of imperial expropriation.
These links again work to weaken the barriers traditionally established in the Troubles
thriller between the exotic world of the secret agent or master paramilitary figure and
the banality of every day life. The image of Nut on Takabuti’s sarcophagus, replete with
references to consumption and labour, also implicates the crimes in the novel within a
wider context of material production and consumption.
The black, wrapped and sunken face of Takabuti is a death mask, an exhibition
of both mortality and attempts to escape it. This half-consumed body exists in a liminal
space, lying on the border of the present and the dark underworld. She is also a
constant reminder of the impact of death upon those who remain alive. Death leaves its
indelible mark upon the survivors, attesting to the belief that “loss known only by what
remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read and sustained”.329 After
Rachel’s death, Martin often envisages Takabuti’s face interchanging with that of his
daughter’s, and his installation can be read as a contemporary version of the Egyptian
burial chamber, complete with personal mementos and treasured objects. In an
extension of this image the Waring house is silent, tomb-like, after Rachel’s death. Her
mother Alison feels that if she doesn’t connect soon with her husband and son, “there
won’t be any family left, only three people vaguely connected by name and a common
past, three people who move about and through each other like ghosts” (201). Takabuti
is a reminder of not only the inescapable, and most secret consumption of death, but
also of the way death is read, interpreted and assimilated into the lives of those who
328 Anne Cranny-Francis, The Body in the Text (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1995), p. 28.
329 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in Loss: a
Politics of Mourning (Berkeley, University of California, 2003), p.2.
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carry on living. Through Takabuti and her fascinated visitors who may look but not
touch, Park epitomises the state of spectatorship that is posed as the most insidious
threat to young lives in Belfast.
Display
“To enter memory, the traumatic event of the past needs to be made “narratable”330
The final theme I wish to examine in relation to the secret in Swallowing the Sun is
concerned with exhibition and display. In Swallowing the Sun the secret is brought into
the light, and displayed for public consumption, inciting onlookers to speak and take
action in regard to what they see before them. Park gradually builds up a number of
images of display in the book, with each one integrally connected to ideas about history
and identity in Belfast. Display in Belfast, and in Northern Ireland as a whole, has been
a continuously central means of establishing and maintaining identity in the face of
conflict and debate about history, territory and sovereignty. Studies of sectarian murals,
banners and parades in Belfast have noted the key role visual display has played in
ongoing struggles over interpretations of the past. In his study of Northern Ireland
sectarian murals, Neil Jarman has found that they are “one of a range of material
objects that are used in the construction of divided and competing social and political
identities and are part of an extensive commemorative process in Northern Ireland”.331
Jarman also argues “in contested societies symbolic displays and ritual events take on a
meaning that they lack in other contexts”.332
Images or associations of display in Swallowing the Sun can be found in the
descriptions of sectarian regalia Martin sees when returning to his childhood
330 Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, eds. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall
in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), p. x.
331 Jonathan McCormick and Neil Jarman, “Death of a Mural,” The Journal of
Material Culture (2005), 10-49, [4].
332 McCormick and Jarman, “Death of a Mural,” p. 20.
238
neighbourhood: “He’d never seen so many flags, not even in the heart of the Troubles”
(67). His observation that there are even more flags now than before is striking,
suggesting that the uneasy truces arrived at in the Belfast agreements have not translated
to any real changes in the construction of identity in hard-line neighbourhoods. There
may be less violence now, but perhaps that is only because of the barriers and distances
increasingly constructed between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods, rather than
from any deep shifts in attitudes to the Other. The Ulster Museum in Swallowing the
Sun is a site of preservation and display, where images and items from the past are not
only stored but also exhibited for public viewing and consideration. Rachel Waring’s
academic success is carefully acknowledged in her middle-class school’s awards
ceremony, which is also a form of public display and approval, a place where working-
class Martin feels ill at ease: “he averts his eyes, looks at the floor and then in a sudden
moment of panic he thinks that he doesn’t belong here” (10). Display is synonymous
with the world of the museum, where artefacts from the past are carefully arranged in
mini-narratives for the public gaze. Unlike his childhood experiences, the museum
represents a world where what is on display is safe, controlled and contained, with
Martin now taking the role of the detached watcher, rather than the exhibit itself. His
work at the museum is viewed with scorn by Jaunty, who reads it as emasculating and
feeble:
Rob says you’ve been workin’ in the museum. Thought he was pullin’ me leg.
The fuckin’ museum!’ he says, looking at the two men who smile at him as if it’s
some kind of joke. ‘Marty and me go a long way back,’ he says to the. ‘Used to
be a bit of a hard man’ (109).
Display is also associated with material success in Swallowing the Sun. When visiting
the homes of Rachel’s wealthier classmates, Martin is at first embarrassed by mental
comparisons between their homes and his: “His eyes travel round the room, taking in
239
nothing but the overall effect of money and what he knows is considered good taste. It
makes him wonder if Rachel was ever ashamed of her home” (149). Tom’s vision of
escaping bullying is coded in terms of money and material success: “when in the future
he sees Chapman, Rollo, Leechy and all the others like them standing on the same
street corner, he’ll be smiling out at them from the wheel of his black car with its tinted
glass” (226). This image is also memorable for its allusions to the Belfast underworld.
Tom’s fantasy car is “black…with tinted glass”.
While the museum is a safe, institutionalized and carefully guarded display site,
other, more ostentatious forms of display in Swallowing the Sun are testament to the
successful conversion of paramilitary activity into big business. The visible trappings of
success mark out Jaunty as the ‘top man’. When Martin questions his brother Rob
about Jaunty’s activities, legal and otherwise, Rob says “he has a house here (on the
estate) but he’s another place along the coast. It’s supposed to be worth seeing, big gates
like Stormont” (194). Jaunty’s success is on display, his material status “worth seeing’”
Park subtly builds in connections in these passages between criminal and political
activity. It is telling that Jaunty’s house has “big gates like Stormont”. The implication is
made here that the two often go hand in hand, each protecting the other. A
consequence of this is the cultivation of secrecy or the ability to look the other way when
criminal activity takes place. When pressed as to Jaunty’s role as a drug boss, Rob tells
Martin “with a guy like Jaunty, it’s better not knowin’ too much or asking too many
questions” (194). These suggestions are reinforced in the descriptions of the leisure
complex that Jaunty attends, which is an upper-class haven from the violence of his
formative neighbourhood. The car park is full of expensive cars (228). It is, fittingly, here
that Martin experiences his epiphany into why he is investigating Rachel’s death:
It feels a different world through the doors, a world that is far from his own and
one in which he doesn’t belong. It stirs a new sense of his anger because he
240
knows there are people out there whose lives never cross the rigid boundary lines
which separate them from what is dirty or unpleasant, people who never get
closer than their television pictures. But then if someone had offered him the
chance to join them, to be a member of their club, he would have taken it. But
no one’s going to ask him…With this knowledge comes no sense of loneliness,
instead only a feeling of lightness and the freedom to do what has to be done.
Before he told himself that it was for Rachel, but it was always a lie and he
knows that it’s for him…for the future that’s been ripped from him (229).
Through this passage Park maps out the class barriers that exist in Belfast and the
devastating effects they can have upon the construction of identity. Martin’s realisation,
that his anger has really been about what he has been denied, links loss and mourning in
Belfast to the particular set of material imbalances that ensure some will always lose
more than others. Confronted with the display of what he may never have, Martin finds
a kind of peace in finally seeing that situation for what it is, and not for what it has been
packaged. The glossy, leisure complex lifestyle is available to the establishment and the
successful criminal alike, but will always shut out the poor and the visibly neglected.
Martin’s visit to the Leisure Centre forms part of the first resolution to the book.
In this resolution he uses his experiences as a former hard man to gain revenge upon
Jaunty. In order to exact his revenge Martin returns to his childhood home to get a gun
he had hidden in his attic many years ago. In these passages that the book most strongly
resembles the conventional Troubles thriller. Jaunty’s men set alight to the house while
Martin is in the attic and he must escape by the connecting attics of the neighbouring
houses:
‘Why don’t you come out now, Marty?’ a voice suddenly calls…He doesn’t
answer but tightens his grip on the gun. ‘We haven’t got all night, Marty and
patience is runnin’ out. So why not stop skulking up there like a rat in a pipe’…
241
There is the raking, breaking surge of a fire taking hold and a snarling crackle as
it starts to consume the dried-up kindling of the house below. He knows now
that they’ve sprinkled petrol, thrown in a match, intend to burn him in it (219-
220).
Martin’s last minute escape and subsequent confrontation with Jaunty – in which he
urinates in the health resort spa Jaunty is reclining in – also seem at first to fall in line
with a conventional ending reinforcing stereotypical ideas of good and evil and a future
in which enemy elements should be hunted down and exposed for what they are. Yet
small details of this escape signal hidden connections between the criminal world and
the world of the ordinary citizen that make the separation of these two a little more
difficult. As Martin moves through the attics and away from the fire, he comes across a
room where the doors and windows are boarded up:
He has no choice but to switch on the torch to search for an opening and as he
does so the light catches the litter of beer cans and polythene bags. It’s
somewhere kids have been using to drink and sniff glue. The walls are paint-
sprayed with their names and everywhere there is the acrid smell of piss. As
soon as he puts his hand to the back door it flops open like a turned page in a
book and when he steps into the yard he gulps deeply, trying to expel the taste of
smoke (221-222).
In this passage the hidden rooms or underworld that the reader discovers belong to
children, who have marked their secret territory in a manner similar to the sectarian
slogans sprayed on the walls outside. This room is shut away, its presence and function
only visible to those in the know, a spatial signifier for the unseen, self-entombing future
that faces these residents of Belfast and a stark reminder that the greatest enemy of the
state may well be the state itself. The room is a dramatic contrast to the aspects of
242
criminal life that are put on display: the grand homes, expensive cars and memberships
of exclusive leisure centres, which serve as a comforting and socially sanctioned mask of
the suffering they hide.
The final act of display in Swallowing the Sun can be found in the closing pages,
in the description of Martin’s spontaneous and unauthorized installation and
commemoration of his daughter’s life at the museum. Martin wishes to preserve his
daughter by arranging artefacts from her life into a museum display of his own. His
careful re-creation of her bedroom in a museum gallery, “he starts with the furniture
and it’s the bed he puts together first…checking that everything’s where it should be”
(237-238) calls for an acknowledgement of lives that are overshadowed by more
powerful figures and practices. The attention to detail through an exact re-creation of
an intimate and private space stresses the importance of the small things, and is a
moving tribute to a more human scale. The installation is an example of a “spontaneous
shrine…(it) insists on the personal nature of the individuals involved in these issues and
the ramifications of the actions of those addressed by the (shrine)”.333 By placing his
installation in the middle of a museum gallery Martin insists upon the relevance of his
daughter’s life, and the significance of that loss, to a potential public gaze.
The installation is a space for the voices of the dead to speak, a site where,
“instead of a family visiting a grave, the ‘grave’ comes to the ‘family’ – that is, the
public, all of us”.334 Official investigations, televised appeals and Martin’s own personal
retribution upon Jaunty have all fallen short of doing this work, of bringing the dead
back, if not to life, at least into the public eye. The personal nature of the installation
challenges the mass consumerism that threatens to swallow up identity outside the walls
of the museum, the “Everyone’s American” (76) mentality. Martin’s installation echoes
333 Jack Santino, “Performance Commemoratives, the Personal and the Public:
Spontaneous Shrines, Emergent Ritual and the Field of Folklore,” Journal of
American Folklore Vol.117, No. 466 (Fall 2004), 364.
334 Santino, p. 368.
243
the personal tribute found at the site of a road accident or paramilitary murder, as the
domestic life of the victim speaks out over larger, less intimate issues: “It seems as if
people are reacting to the mass industrialization of death and the alienation of
contemporary society with new folk traditions, rituals and celebrations”.335 Rachel’s life
is reclaimed, as she becomes something other than an ecstasy overdose or another
victim of criminal activity in the city.
To a certain extent this creative act also allows Martin to confront the secrets of
the past that have bound him into silence and inactivity. However the fact that the
installation is illegal and will primarily be read by others as an intrusion or act of graffiti
ensures that Martin remains a figure caught within a culture of secrecy and lies, whose
visions for escape can only be constructed through the tools that culture provides:
The act, despite its recuperative possibilities, remains tied into the narrative
frameworks of ‘traumatic memory’ which; has no social component; it is not
addressed to anybody, the patient does not respond to anybody; it is a solitary
event, not even an activity.336
After he has finished the installation, Martin, exhausted, falls asleep on Rachel’s bed.
His dream, in an echo of Rachel’s dying moments, is initially a kaleidoscope of images, a
multi-sensory screening of the inhabitants, machines and rituals of Belfast’s preserved
past, as the museum comes to life:
Shoals of orange fish glide over beds of gold coins and then at some wordless
command, the great water-wheels which stand fixed in the building below begin
to turn after their century of stillness, and droplets of silver water glisten against
the brass and shoot off the metal in whispering sprays. And each turn is
335 Santino, p. 368.

336 Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, p. x.
244
accompanied by the rising voices of women who sing in the mills and their
voices and the fall and sluice of water echo each other (241).
These beautiful images present an idealised world, where work is done in harmony with
nature, and performed to a historical score. It is as if Martin has cut through the vines
surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle and brought the place to life, as “[e]verywhere
there is the rising tide of light, running through the shadowy corridors and everything
which is burnished by its touch throws off the shackles of sleep” (241). By performing
this work, Martin is waking up from a living sleep, and calling upon the inhabitants of
Belfast, the visitors to the museum to do the same. The dream does not end here
though, taking on, like Rachel’s before him, the qualities of a nightmare:
But now there’s something wrong-she’s got too far ahead, the sound of her feet
are growing fainter…his feet are weighted and he’s slowing down, and the
singing voices of the women are fading like the mist of the morning as the sun
rises and strengthens (242).
Faced with the impossibility of crossing the boundary between the dead and the living,
Martin’s dream finally comes full circle, arriving once again at the Takabuti’s death-
mask. He realises now the secret that Takabuti holds, that the dead may be
remembered, but they are ultimately unreachable:
in his dream he’s standing at the foot of the glass case where the young woman
Takabuti sleeps, wrapped tightly in her linen dress, one hand and one foot
exposed, her black wizened face with its walnut eyes looking at him as if awaiting
his arrival. But when he looks again, it’s the face of his daughter and the lighting
above his head is a relentless glare that washes her skin blue and cold. Then the
light blinks and stutters out and when his eyes are able to see, he’s looking at the
painted breast of the coffin where a beautiful young woman is kneeling with
245
outstretched wings. It’s the goddess of the skies who wears the bright ball of the
sun in her hair, who swallows it whole every night and then pours it out each
dawn. It’s where the sun goes, he tells Rachel. It’s where the sun goes and she
tells him she understands but then she’s fading from his sight and as hard as he
tries to hold her image in his head, it’s drifting into the darkest spaces of the
night where the stars are frozen and fixed in silence…
The silence is inside his head. He has no voice to call her… (243)
The mummy here functions as a symbol for a recognition of mourning, and of the ways
we might live with grief, but never leave it behind, particularly when material and
political circumstances remain the same. In Alison Waring’s case, a private mourning
ceremony that involves slipping into the darkness provides solace: “her lips moving in a
silent song, calming her child, stilling her beautiful lost child into the safe waters of
sleep” (225). But silence for Martin is representative of a return to suffering, rather than
a release from it. In this sense he seems to me to be the character most representative of
the troubled state itself. What is preserved becomes, once again, a signing of the future,
a kind of prediction about what may take place next. Park also makes us deeply aware
that Belfast’s greatest tragedy is that there is no audience yet ready to be moved by such
an understanding. Display, seen by Martin as a means of ensuring his daughter’s
memory is kept alive, is also a means of preserving loss and ensuring that grief is
timeless. The act is an attempt at making his daughter immortal: “He tells himself she’s
safe now, held in the arms of a place that won’t let her be discarded on the pages of a
tattered paper, or brushed aside into the faded yesterdays of people’s memories” (240).
The museum is a place where “the past is cared for and preserved, where nothing is
allowed to decay or be destroyed” (240). Martin’s careful display of his daughter’s room
allows her past to be acknowledged, not forgotten, but also deflects attention from the
246
realities of the present. In commemorating the dead, the gaze is drawn away from the
immediate problems of the living, both within his own family, and in Belfast as a whole.
Endings
Martin’s final tragedy is that he is a figure defined by mourning for both the loss of his
daughter Rachel and the earlier loss of his own childhood self. Swallowing the Sun
examines the role that mourning plays in establishing and re-forming identity, and
Martin is granted a limited heroic status in the end of the novel as an outcome of such
mourning. This status is tempered by the lack of an audience for Martin’s final act, and
the sense that the kind of body that is produced by the relationship between people and
power in Belfast remains the one that continues to haunt him- the shrivelled and
encased Mummy, forever swallowing the light. Park’s use of a number of plot devices
and familiar elements from the Troubles thriller is a means of grounding these
revelations in the gritty realities of contemporary Belfast. Through Martin’s visits to the
places of his past, we are given access into the connections between domestic violence
and paramilitary activit, and between criminal acts and material success. The myth of
the Troubles as being somehow outside of history is stripped away. Finally, in the use of
the Ulster Museum as both a refuge from these realities and the site where they are
dramatically put on display, Park connects the preservation of the damaging secret in
Belfast to the institutions that produce Belfast’s official histories, and with the visitors
who look on in comfort, but do not intervene.
247
Conclusion
The writing of this conclusion has taken place during a time in which public affairs in
Northern Ireland have seemed eerily related to some of the central issues in my thesis.
The last few weeks have seen, in multiple newspapers, television documentaries, chat
shows and editorials, the breaking of the revelations and scandals surrounding the
affairs, both intimate and financial, of Iris Robinson, the wife of Peter Robinson, until
recently the First Minister of Northern Ireland and leader of the Democratic Unionist
Party. Both the secrecy that surrounded these affairs in the year in which they were
conducted, and the subsequent public excoriation of Peter Robinson by the media, seem
of a piece with the central trope I read in each of the four novels in this thesis – the
secret as spectacle. What was hidden becomes a matter for public display, interwoven
with allegations of further misdoings, hints at other lovers, and much speculation on
what the future might hold (or not hold) for the Robinson family. This scandal was
preceded by the stories hinting at allegations of child abuse on the part of Gerry Adams’
brother, along with debate over the extent of Sinn Féin’s knowledge about such
allegations. A Stormont party member was reported as saying recently “You couldn’t
make it up.”337
The point I have tried to make in this thesis is that writers of contemporary
fiction in Northern Ireland can, and do, indeed do just that. In the novels I examine,
material from the real, public and private worlds in Northern Ireland is turned into
works that provide complex and challenging meditations on the nature of secrecy,
disclosure, intimacy and disconnection there. Political scandals are of course not unique
to Northern Ireland, nor are public spectacles, although it could be argued that the
337 Mark Simpson, “Political and personal crises collide at Stormont.” BBC News. (16
January 2010).
248
particularly dramatic nature of the fall from grace of the Robinson family is a legacy of
their previously established image as leaders in the DUP, a staunchly conservative
political party. What is perhaps striking in relation to Northern Ireland is the extent to
which issues concerning public and private secrets are examined in contemporary
fiction from that place, suggesting that these issues preoccupy a fairly widespread
number of people living there. In a recent Australian newspaper article, a journalist
wrote that he found in several writers of contemporary Irish literature:
…a form of remembrance that will not awaken the old demons of Irish history,
whether personal or political. Their writing has cleared an imaginary space that
could later be colonised by the real citizens of Ireland. They have found a means
of forgetting the past so that their countrymen might safely remember.338
In my thesis I concentrate on writers and novels from Northern Ireland, rather than the
Republic of Ireland, as this journalist does. Since the statement could be read as having
equal application to writers from Northern Ireland, I wish to stress the difference of my
own view. I believe that writers of contemporary fiction (in both the Republic and
Northern Ireland) have remembered and engaged with “the old demons of Irish
history”, rather than avoided them. In my readings, what is admirable is the extent to
which writers have faced up to the traumas of the past in Irish history, and produced
inventive and insightful commentaries on them. I believe that it is not finding “a means
of forgetting the past so that their countrymen might safely remember” that is the real
achievement of these writers, but their willingness to closely scrutinise issues that might
have been more comfortably, but less healthily, swept under the carpet.
I found the central trope, or subject, of my thesis, the secret, to be an invaluable
entry-point into many of these issues and traumas. The very nature of the secret, its
338 Geordie Williamson, “Ireland’s New Guard,” The Australian (23 January, 2010).
http://global.factiva.com.ezproxy.library.uwa.edu.au/ha/default.aspx
249
liminal and ambivalent position as half way between silence and the spoken word,
means that it can be found repeatedly in situations where trauma has occurred, mistakes
have been made and hushed over, or private and hidden spaces created. Exploration
of secrecy in the four novels I read closely was fascinating as an exercise in itself, but also
for what it revealed about a number of other subjects including the operation of
memory, the responses of the physical body to violence, mourning and loss, and the
survival stratagems individuals adopt in traumatic environments.
In a recent interview on BBC radio, Seamus Heaney spoke of his early intention
as a poet to “make space in the official langage…(to establish) a language in
common…a negotiable space.”339 Heaney refers here to his work with words that were
widely familiar to many in Northern Ireland, and to his experiments with phonetics in
these words in order to create “ a negotiable space” for alternative meanings. This he
achieved through the innovative use of words that were familiar to all members of the
community, regardless of their political orientations. He wished to work creatively with
what was known, in order to provide a new vocabulary that challenged previous
preconceptions, without alienating or shutting out groups or individuals from those new
ideas and meanings. I feel that something similar is achieved to varying degrees in the
approaches to the secret in the four novels I examine in my thesis. While it is not the
stated intention of any of my key authors to establish “a negotiable space” through the
treatment of secrecy in their works, it is possible to read these works as achieving just
that. New spaces and ways of thinking about life and identity in Northern Ireland are
opened up through the treatment of the subject of secrecy in each of these four novels.
The contributions I read each novel as making to this “opening up” are tied
both to the authors’ differing narrative techniques, and to the particular circumstances
339 Seamus Heaney speaking to Lawrence Pollard in “The Interview with Seamus
Heaney,” The BBC World Service (16 January, 2010).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0005rwnv
250
of the times and places in which each work is set. Heaney speaks, in the same interview,
of the conditions that produced his early poetry. He states: “what made the poetry for
my generation was not the Troubles but the silence and repression of speech about
reality which preceded the Troubles.”340 This statement could be equally applied to
Reading in the Dark. Deane is a contemporary and friend of Heaney’s, (it is surely an
essay of Heaney’s, written “by a country boy”, that is referred to in the book) and
attended the same school as him. The time-period that takes up most of Reading in the
Dark, 1945-1961, is pre-Troubles, but also widely acknowledged as being a repressive
and unjust period for Catholics in Northern Ireland in terms of employment
opportunities, housing allocation and freedom of speech. The period has been noted as
a time when
Catholics and nationalists were clearly regarded as second-class citizens, as
intrinsically dangerous to the state, and as being less deserving of houses and jobs
than their Protestant neighbours…and there was no means of redress for
Catholic grievances, no avenue of appeal against either real or imagined
discrimination.341
Both the injustices of the period and the enforced traditions of silences around those
injustices can be found in Reading in the Dark. Deane creates a picture of a world
where to speak out about wrong-doing, or to pry into what has been kept hidden, is
disapproved of by both home and state. The narrator, his father and brother are beaten
by the police, but cannot speak out about it, or write to the press. His father’s pension is
unfairly cut off when he has a heart attack a year before retirement. This
neighbourhood is plagued by rats, but “[t]he City Corporation did nothing” (77).
340 Seamus Heaney, “The Interview with Seamus Heaney”.
341 David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles, pp.16-17.
251
The secret in Reading in the Dark is like the return of the repressed, a space of non-
speaking that is returned to again and again, as part of the narrator’s attempts to come
to a greater understanding of the unhappiness that haunts his family. Concentrated and
re-iterated through the site of Grianan, the secret in Reading in the Dark is also a space
for mediation that enables the narrator’s working through of anxieties and
misunderstandings. The predominating associations of the secret in Reading in the
Dark are, however, with what is taboo or forbidden, epitomizing the wider suppressions
and repressions of the period that led, so swiftly, to the subsequent outbreak of the
Troubles in 1969.
The intensity of the atmosphere of the time-period in which Burning Your Own
is set, the summer of 1969, is reflected in the book’s compressed sense of time, and in
the depiction of the increasing strains and tensions of the Belfast estate upon which most
of the book is set. The depiction of what is secret is slightly more open to positive
possibility in Burning Your Own than in Reading in the Dark. Mal Martin’s secret and
friendship with Francy Hagan is representative of a kind of “good”, private secret that
provides opportunities for the healthy development of the Self, in an enquiring and
open relationship with the Other. The dump, in Burning Your Own, can also be read as
a secretive space of possibility, a heterotopic site from which the rest of the estate, and
affairs in Belfast in general, can be viewed more objectively. Yet even here, what has
been Francy and Mal’s secret knowledge becomes a savage spectacle, forcing others on
the estate to confront the consequences of their narrow-mindedness.
The setting of No Bones in Ardoyne, in the most violent decades of the
Troubles, produces an understandably violent work. Yet Burns – like all of the other
authors in this study, is careful to identify the roots of violence and trauma as springing
both from the home and the public arena. The secret in No Bones is most vividly
enacted through the starved and damaged body of Amelia Lovett. The relationship of
252
the body to its surrounds in No Bones adds complexity to Allen Feldman’s findings in
his anthropological studies of Northern Ireland:
…in Northern Ireland the body is not only the primary political instrument
through which social transformation is effected but is also the primary site for
visualizing the collective passage into historical alterity.342
Feldman’s comments refers to the multiple uses to which the body has been put to use in
Northern Ireland as a political instrument – paraded in regalia, beaten in gaol or as part
of paramilitary punishments, spoken of in terms of anxiety and warning – and also to its
connection to group activities that envisage different constructions of the Self and the
nation, achieved through the body, and most obviously enacted in the carefully
executed hunger-strikes in the Maze prison. While this uses are found in large numbers
in No Bones, Burns problematizes their availability to all through the figure of Amelia,
who starves for her own “very personal and private reasons”, and who wishes, more
than anything, to be simply left alone. The secret in No Bones also functions as that
which is integrated into Ardoyne daily life but never spoken of, traumatic activities that
come to be accepted as normal through their constant repetition.
The setting of Swallowing the Sun in the years following the 1998 Good
Friday Agreement ensures that the book has a slower, more meditative pace than either
No Bones or Burning Your Own. The immediate violence of the worst years of the
Troubles has been replaced by an uneasy peace. Park’s decision to include a tragedy in
a book that is set “post-Troubles” is an interesting one – suggesting that he is skeptical
about the levels of real change achieved. While the death in the book is one that could
have occurred in any modern city, Martin Waring’s various means of atonement and
revenge for his daughter’s death evoke both past and future Belfasts. The gradual
342 Feldman, p. 9.
253
revelation of secrets from his brutal childhood and years as a paramilitary thug are
balanced by his engagement with new forms of mourning, expressed through the private
and intimate appropriation of a public site. What remains open to debate at the end of
Swallowing the Sun is the extent of Martin’s transformation, as well as questions about
the readiness of the rest of Belfast to move on.
These four works offer deeply satisfying meditations on life in Northern Ireland
at different periods over the last seventy years. They are distinctive in terms of their
author’s narrative skills, as well as in the range and depth of issues that they survey.
Reading these works through the trope of the secret illuminates a number of issues in
relation to living in a culture of sustained secrecy and violence. All four authors
acknowledge that certain practices of secrecy can be damaging and that suffering is
brought about through a lack of openness. There are forms of private and public
“retaliation” for speaking out. Each work alludes to the number of inter-woven factors
that sustain a culture of secrecy, suggesting that complete disclosure in a violent and
traumatized environment is not always possible. Yet, despite this awareness, these
authors do offer suggestions for escape. Tentative gestures are made in each novel
towards a healthy reclamation of the self, the creation of spaces for healthy privacy, and
openness in communication with others. All four authors provide insights into the
difficulties inherent in repressive societies, and deeply engaged ideas on how to change
them.
254
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Concealement and Escape in Contemporary Fiction

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Secret Passages: Concealment and Escape in

Contemporary Fiction from Northern Ireland.

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the

Discipline of English and Cultural Studies

as a means of escape in difficult or dangerous circumstances – and textual passages: texts

as striking and innovative fictional responses to a culture of secrecy. The historical

and the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

insights into aspects of the nature of consciousness in contemporary Northern Ireland,

as well as each writer’s subtle suggestions for change.

Publications generated from this thesis vii

Introduction: Surveying the Shadows 1

Chapter One: Reading in the Dark 63

Chapter Two: Burning Your Own 111

Chapter Three: No Bones 161

Chapter Four: Swallowing the Sun 202

Cover Image: “Imagining secret.”

thriller.” Irish Studies Review Vol.17, Issue 3 (August 2009) 331-345.

much, and simply could not have done it without them

I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Andrew Lynch. His thoughtful guidance,

awarded me a grant, facilitating the presentation of a paper at their conference in

University of Western Australia (UWA). In particular I wish to acknowledge Assistant

Linda Cresswell and Hui Chuin Poa.

as part of a presentation at the Canadian Association of Irish Studies Conference

Thanks must go to my extended family, which provided encouragement, laughter,

Duncan Barnes, Richard Martin, Cathryne Sanders, Wendy Grace, Zoe

enjoyable and rewarding one.

containing secrets in multiple forms. I do not subscribe to a view of Northern Ireland as

irredeemably caught up in conflict, mired in old patterns of recurring violence, or

1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

personalised, interpretations of events.

in very different ways.

Ireland, and compelling commentary on life in that province.

fiction from Northern Ireland.

larger, damaging, repressions.

These four works contain inconsistencies and contradictions in terms of what I

thoughtful mediation between openness and reticence.

of violence and dysfunction depicted in these novels.

outlines my ideas on the importance of secrecy, with an emphasis on secrecy as spectacle

or partial display, as a central and recurring feature of public interaction in Northern

fascinating components of public and private life in Northern Ireland.

Secrecy and spectacle in Northern Ireland public life.

phenomenon is sharpened in Northern Ireland, with its repertoire of personal, political

creation of centres in peripheries deprived of stable anchorages”.7 Signs of a culture of

1988 and 1994:

interviews or direct statements from proscribed paramilitary groups in NI, from

who support or invite support for these.8

the Peace Walls.10

Frequent legacies of such institutionalised secrecy are deeper social divisions as

well as individual suppression of the particulars of traumatic situations. Living with

even when it is unspoken:

In therapeutic work it is evidenced that trauma is both personal and

be experienced directly or indirectly. What often compacts the trauma is the

by them…what is often missing is an empathetic understanding by the adult of

filled by a child’s fantasies.14

originally intended to contain:

The process of not talking about or actively forgetting traumatic experiences

12 Peter Shirlow, “Ethno-sectarianism and the reproduction of fear in Belfast,” Capital

without a cognitive verbalised framework for making sense of themselves in