Randall Curb

Reading in the Dark, by Seamus Deane. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 246 pp.

Seamus Deane,a historian and anthologist of Irish literature and an accomplished poet, was bom in Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland, in 1940. As this, his first novel, reveals, he is a writer inseparable from his geography. Narrated in the first person by a boy coming of age in Derry in the 1940s and '50s, Deane's book would appear to be a memoir if it weren't for the words "a novel" on the dustjacket. The boy's first name is never disclosed, though the book is full of Christian names that identify its place unequivocally. His sisters are Ellis, Una, and Deirdre; his brothers Liam, Gerard, and Eamon. There's an Uncle Manus and an Aunt Katie. If any of these are actual members of Deane's family, we are not told, nor do we know if the boy who tells this remarkable story is in large measure Seamus Deane himself. Understanding it as fiction, we feel it as fact. But we experience the book through its language-which is spare and poetic-and we remember it as mystery, which is to say, life.

Reading in the Dark is not the kind of novel that sweeps you up; you are not likely to lose yourself in it. Its structure is deliberately jagged: parts divided into short chapters that are then divided into episodes, some no more than two pages long. We meet all the siblings, butonly one, Liam, is a majorcharacter. People come and go, and when someone appears a second time you might have to flip back to distinguish him or her. The veryfirstepisodeis dated "February 1945" and the last "July 1971," with all the other vignettes coming chronologically between those two datelines. But this is Northern Ireland, where the past and all its "troubles" (upper and lower case) are forever present-in a face, a look, a remembered death, a fear. Whereveryou are in time, something is being remembered. Sometimes the past looms most menacingly of all in that great human hurt, a betrayal.

The effect of Deane's narrative technique is cumulative in at least two senses. Because he is at pains to tell his story anecdotally, we only gradually come to an emotional comprehension of the sorrows of his characters'- lives. When we first meet the boy and his mother, she is on the landing in their house. The boy is on the tenth stair-step going up and says "Icould have touched her." But she stops him, saying, "Don't move ... There's something there between us. A shadow. Don't move." The boy sees no shadow but obeys. As the scenes accrue and the story sometimes haltingly progresses, the mother's fear-her neurosis, really-is plumbed. With passing years, her life descends into fits of sobbing and an emotional freezing-out of most of the family, while the psychology behind her erratic behavior is peeled away. Her secrets both define and torture her, and come to define and trouble her son.

On the more or less linear plane of plot, the cumulative effect is integral. We start with a shadow-a ghost-and neither we nor our young narrator can be satisfied until that ghost is brought to light. In its bones, the story is one of detection. The crucial questions come to the boy naturally, as he hears his elders speak cryptically about events in Derry that took place twenty years before he was bom: What really happened to his Uncle Eddie, a gunman for the IRA who disappeared after the explosion of a local distillery in 1922? What's the truth about Aunt Katie's husband McIlhenny, who ran off for good shortly after he got Katie pregnant? Had McIlhenny really been in love with Katie's sister? What's the source of the enigmatic "feud" in Father's family? Who killed the policeman Billy Mahon and why? What is Crazy Joe Johnson, who talks like a demented professor of English literature, concealing about any of these matters? What did who know and when did they know it?

The reader will learn the answers to most of these questions but will never know more than the boy does. The boy will learn them painfully and in fragments-from a deathbed confession, from something Crazy Joe lets slip, from the way his mother begins to treat him as she guesses at what he has put together. They will form his coming of age. In the end, the disclosures are fascinating but not more unusual than those we have come to expect from other writers of Ireland and Uster-Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, William Trevor. In the twentieth century at least, a traitor seems always to lurk around the sad heart of most Irish fiction.

Dean's novel is akin to those of his contemporaries from the Republic of Ireland in its solid sense of felt life. Things observed here have a tangibility achieved through fine-tuned attention to the right physical details. Frank McCourt's 1996 memoir of growing up in Limerick in the 1930's, Angela's Ashes, has been deservedly acclaimed for its relish in presenting-often with seemingly incongruous humor-the grimmest of human circumstances. Reading in the Dark is set in a different town and in later decades, among families of somewhat greater means, but both books refuse to flinch at dirty streets, sewers, vermin, sickness, death. Deane's book is not without humor (particularly in its portrayal of pompous priests and schoolmasters), but its hallmark is not Rabelaisian gusto. It is rather a novel of sensibility and updated Celtic twilight, artful and elusive.

The father in McCourt's book sings and rhapsodizes about Irish folk heroes, patriots, and legends. The father in Deane's story actually takes his sons to visit history-haunted geographical places, such as The Field of the Disappeared. Here, near the coast that Deffy shares with Donnegal (in the Irish Free State), there is a profound superstition:

There was a belief that it was here that the souls of all those from the area who had disappeared, or had never had a Christian burial ... collected three or four times a year-on St. Brigid's Day, on the festival of Sunhain, on Christmas-to cry like birds and look down on the fields where they had been bom. Any human who entered the field would suffer the same fate .... (pp. 53-54)

Such legends shape the boy's imagination and reinforce the power of his own family's mysteries and disappearances. There are beautifully realized stories within the main story as well, and they often involve ghosts and demons. One story, of two orphaned children who are possessed and later, chillingly, claimed by their dead parents, is told by Aunt Katie. Its thematic relevance to the plot is ambiguous, but that doesn't matter. It's an unforgettable, terrifying tale in which daily life converges with the supernatural. Given our protagonist's shadowy world, darkened by threat of political and moral treachery, such phenomena don't seem entirely beyond the pale. He lives in aplacewhere an ancient fort orcastle, shrouded in mysteries only half-remembered, can also be the site of recent terrors and executions.

Seamus Deane's title is a brilliant stroke. Early in the novel is an episode also called "Reading in the Dark," in which the narrator tells us about the first novel-a historical romance-he ever read. Forced to turn off the bedroom light by his sleepy brother, he lies under the covers and thinks about the story, even mentally talking to its characters. "[I'd] lie there, the book still open, re-imagining all I had read, the various ways the plot might unravel, the novel opening into endless possibilities in the dark." In a few years he will find the thread of his own life unraveling in just such a manner. In school, he will write a precocious essay "full of long or strange words I had found in the dictionary" but will envy the story of a country schoolfellow who writes simply of his mother and himself setting the table with milk and potatoes and butter, waiting for the father to come home. The simplicity of such an "ordinary" story is disarming; he can't forget it. Can life be so pure, as direct as a "Dutch interior"? His life, clearly, cannot.

That title, Reading in the Dark, has a Biblical resonance in St. Paul's "But now we see through a glass, darkly." Things are revealed piecemeal, and often we grasp for understanding like a man with neither lamp nor candle, feeling his way across an unlit room. In this book about innocence and its shattering, Seamus Deane sees through the groping eyes of a boy becoming a man. He can never gain absolute understanding, but the glass his creator gives him illuminates with the mind and heart of an artist.

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