Adrienne Pilon–Northern Ireland in Fact and Fiction
Brexit may not be an obvious inspiration for creating a reading list, but I’ve been deep into works from and about Northern Ireland, a region that has been one of the biggest sticking points in sealing the deal for the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Reestablishing a “hard” border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic has social and financial implications for citizens on both sides. It also reignites issues associated with the Troubles, when checkpoints and armed guards and walls were flashpoints for conflict and violence.
I was thinking of this when I turned to a tour de force of reportage, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. The book takes as its starting point the abduction and disappearance of a Belfast widow and mother of ten, Jean McConville. Thought to be an informant for the British, McConville is taken from her home by IRA paramilitary forces. The twist and turns in this historical narrative had me gasping. Equally compelling is how Keefe establishes the atmosphere of paranoia that accompanied the fervent patriotism and obsession with fealty to the cause of independence that characterizes the IRA’s core membership.
Anna Burns’ Booker prize-winning novel, Milkman, is a fitting companion piece to Say Nothing. Set in the 1970s, the town, the country and even the characters are nameless, though we know the novel to be inspired by Burns’ life growing up in Belfast. The protagonist, “middle sister,” is an eighteen year-old who compulsively reads 19th century novels. Through her, Burns has created a unique narrative voice that tells a story of the paranoia, fear, and silence that permeated life during the Troubles. Violence, and the constant threat of violence mark every exchange, every relationship, every action; there is no respite. Overlaying this is societal misogyny the protagonist experiences as part of the constant unease and overall menace. There are cameras hidden in bushes; cars lurking around corners; men watching, and waiting. Burns is skillful at elucidating the isolated and cramped atmosphere. Even the protagonist’s seemingly innocuous outing to watch the sunset with her boyfriend is fraught: “I wouldn’t, of course, mention this to anybody because I wasn’t confident that a sunset was acceptable as a topic to mention to anybody. Then again, rarely did I mention anything to anybody. Not mentioning was my way to keep safe.”
Knowing I’d been reading about Northern Ireland, an acquaintance recommended the work of Adrian McKinty, a native of Belfast. His Dead I Well May Be is a horrifically violent, gorgeously written novel of crime and Irish mobs in New York. Protagonist Michael Forsythe emigrates illegally to the US from Northern Ireland in 1990 in search of work and ends up in the underworld of crime and drugs. An early scene depicts Forsythe carrying out disciplinary measures on one of his countrymen who has run afoul of the boss, using something called a “Belfast six-pack,” of which I will spare you the details. Despite brutal and gruesome scenes, this is a book of tremendous beauty, as the protagonist’s flights of fancy, wandering thoughts and descriptions of places and people are nothing short of transcendent, but it a transcendence still marked by cruelty, despair and horror. The violence and the menace of Belfast is a weight that Forsthye, and all those around him, carry no matter where they are. As Forsythe tells us,“[i]f someone grows up in the civil war of Belfast in the seventies and eighties, perhaps violence is his only form of meaningful expression.”
Thankfully, though, the work of these authors would belie this statement. Their writing reminds us that politics of our place and time affect us in all we do; politics charges the atmosphere and changes our conversations and impacts the art we make. It is not a realm apart, though we sometimes wish it were so. We will see how the next generation of Irish navigate their uncertain future. What works will come out of the period in which we currently live? As one character in Milkman says to those around her, “…your unease, it can only mean progress. It can only mean enlightenment.”