Reading in the Dark: A Novel (Paperback)

Reading in the Dark is a story of ghosts, of legends, and most of all, of secrets...Irish secrets. The narrator, whose name we never learn, struggles to unravel the truth of those secrets and as he does, he learns what it really means to grow up in Northern Ireland, surrounded by the shadows of political turmoil.

Although I really didn't identify with any of the characters in this book, I found them very engrossing and came to care about them deeply. Some of the characters are quite well-fleshed out while others remain only fragments of the author's imagination. Most make only brief appearances in the novel, although one, Liam, shares the spotlight with the unnamed narrator.

Reading in the Dark is a different sort of coming-of-age story. It is beautiful, lyrical, brutal and truly unforgettable. And truly the work of an Irish mind.

Seamus Deane, born in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1940, and now a professor at the University of Notre Dame, rescues his first novel from this downward spiral with his ability to transform stereotypical storylines into shattering new tales. Deane masterfully subverts the IRA theme of glory and honour; of fighting and dying for Ireland. He gives us the story of the narrator's Uncle Eddie, introduced as an IRA hero who either escaped from or was killed in a shoot-out with Protestant policemen, but who has not been seen or heard from since.

Deane plays with this contrived, glorious IRA getaway story, tempting the reader to take the anecdote at face value, to romanticize Eddie as a hero. He then inserts a twist -- we learn that Eddie does not have a hero's reputation outside of his family, but is seen as a police informer, a "stooly," by the Catholic community. This reputation stains Eddie's entire family, including the nephew that he never met. The boy is ostracized by his community when, about to be beaten by a gang of boys, he throws a stone at a passing police car in an attempt to escape.

"Once and informer, always an informer," the Protestant policemen sneer.

"F----- stooly," shout his friends.

"Is there something amiss with you?" his father asks.

Deane's layered treatment of conflict is gripping. Hiding beneath each layer -- political, religious, familial, and parent-child -- is a secret, founded partly in myth, partly in history, and considered sacred by the novel's adults. Deane turns the centrality of myth and history in Irish society from a charming tale, as it is most often seen, to a source of great turmoil for a young boy.

The narrator, skeptical of the myths that he is bombarded with, and determined to uncover the truth about his family and world, asks questions in a society in which blind faith is required. This throws him and, to an extent, the reader into conflict with everyone around him. The novel's structure, a series of snapshots of events in the boy's life, puts the reader and the boy on even ground in their quest for the truth. Both are privy to the same limited sources of information, both are told the same stories, and both must piece these tidbits together to make sense of the novel's new Ireland.

Deane, like James Joyce, is a writer who cannot be separated
from his native Ireland. Reading in the Dark is the first-person
narrative of a boy, who, like Deane, grew up in Derry in the 1940s and
1950s. Although the dust jacket says this book is a novel, it reads
more like a beautiful, meditative and intensely personal memoir. We
are never told the boy/narrator's name, but there are many named
characters in the book: Ellis, Una, Dierdre, Liam, Gerard, Eamon.
There is an Uncle Manus and an Aunt Katie. Additonally, the place
names serve to identify this as an unquestionalby Irish book, taking
place in Derry.

The structure of Reading in the Dark is deliberately
jagged but never jarring. There are short chapters that are further
divided into ever shorter episodes. We are introduced to all of the
narrator's many borthers and sisters but only one, Liam, becomes a
major character throughout the course of the book. The other
characters deliberately come and go and some are even forgettable,
while others are not.

The first vignette is dated "February
1945" and the last "July 1971." All the other vignettes
fall within this time frame. But Derry, the reader must remember, is
in Northern Ireland, where the past can never really be separated from
the present. Remembering is an essential part of life in Derry and
the past is the present in the fear, the death, the haunted faces of
friends and family. Most of all, though, the past of Derry is present
in that most hurtful of all human hurts: betrayal.

We first meet the
narrator and his mother when she is standing on the landing in their
house. The boy, who is standing on the tenth step says, "I could
have touched her." The mother, however, stops him, saying,
"Don't move...There's something there between us. A shadow.
Don't move." The boy, who sees no shadow, nevertheless obeys.
With the passing of the years, however, we, along with the narrator,
come to plumb the secrets of this mother's heart; as we learn how her
secrets have come to define and torture her, we also learn how they
have come to define and trouble her son.

The shadows and ghosts in
Reading in the Dark come to haunt the narrator in many ways. As he
hears his family speak of events that took place in Derry years before
he was born, he comes to wonder why these events happened and why they
happened as they did.

We learn the answers to some of the
questions but we never learn more than the narrator does. If
something remains to haunt him, it also remains to haunt us. For the
narrator, as for us, the answers come in fragments and not at all in
any easy manner. Together, they form the boy's coming-of-age and they
serve to deepen our own understanding of the true nature of human
trust and betrayal, the two emotions that most serve to strengthen or
destroy the bonds of love.

Like other writers of contemporary Irish
fiction, Deane's novel breathes life, Irish life, in all of its
heartbreaking fullness. Although very different from Frank McCourt's
Tis: A Memoir, Reading in the Dark shares the same refusal to pull
back from the sordid in life. We are exposed to all the dirty
streets, the sewers, the vermin, the sickness, the death. Although
Deane's book is relieved with some humor, it is certainly not
Rabelaisian gusto. We are treated instead, to the artful and elusive
chuckle of a Celtic twilight.

And, while McCourt's father literally
sung the praises of the Irish folk stories, the father in Deane's book
goes one step further by actually taking his sons to visit the places
both sacred and haunted. One, The Field of the Disappeared which lies
near the border of the Irish Free State serves to sum up the
narrator's Irish heritage: "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 born. Any human who entered the field would suffer the same
fate...."

The language in Reading in the Dark is spare, but it
is also very poetic and lyrical. Deane weaves beautifully-crafted
stories within his story and even when their relevance to the main
plot is not immediately made clear, we still feel their connection,
for this book tells the tale of a shadow world, one inhabited by
ghosts and demons and spirits, one that lives under the constant
threat of political and moral treachery.

The title of the book is a
masterful stroke of brilliance. In a vignette called, "Reading
in the Dark," the narrator tells us how he had to turn out his
light even though he was in the middle of reading his very first
novel. Lying in the dark, he thinks about the book and holds a
conversation with its characters. "I'd lie there, the book still
open, reimagining all I had read, the various ways the plot might
unravel, the novel opening into endless possibilities in the
dark." The narrator's life unfolds in much the same way as he
seeks to tie the disparate threads, one to the other, in an effort to
find their meaning.

Ultimately, Reading in the Dark is a beautiful
triumph; a gorgeous book, poetically written that reveals much about
the nature of mankind's greatest mystery, the mystery we call...Life.