The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane
Eamonn Wall

Seamus Deane. Reading in the Dark. Knopf, 1997. 246 pp. $23.00

Deane’s first novel arrives in the wake of the numerous volumes of poetry and criticism which have gained him an international reputation as an original, complex, and sometimes controversial writer and thinker. Although his work as both poet and scholar has distinguished him, this previous work is dwarfed by the magnificence of Reading in the Dark, a novel which seems destined to be regarded as one of the great Irish novels published this century. The novel is set in Derry, Northern Ireland, between the 1940s and 1960s. On one level it is a coming-of-age novel which traces the growth into manhood, knowledge, and experience of a male hero. However, in addition to coming to terms with body and soul, this young man is forced to discover and accept the hard secrets which have burdened his family and to come to grips with the history of Derry and Ireland. Out of a natural curiosity, the boy discovers the roles played by members of both his maternal and paternal families in the I.R.A. and how both families and their interrelationships have been undermined by desertion, treachery, and wrongful execution: “You poor Child—My poor family,” his mother tells him. The boy learns all of these family secrets, becomes their repository, but must become a man before he can learn to live with them.
What makes this novel succeed so magnificently is the quality of the writing. Each chapter is brief, generally no more than 1500 words in length, with the narrative growing more complex as the boy grows older. Deane seems to distill from Derry all that is important in both public and family life and to relate one to the other. He provides a deep sense of how claustrophobic and difficult it can be to grow up in the turmoil of Northern Ireland and how past events can draw in and destroy the lives of the living. By his adroit use of a first-person narrative, Deane underlines the truth that in the less-well-off neighborhoods of Northern Ireland there can be no separation of the personal and the political. Each short chapter is carefully and elegantly written and complete. However, the novel also accrues in power from chapter to chapter with a kind of deep, tragic sense of doom. In some respects one is reminded of Joyce’s Portrait, of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, of the works of Faulkner: Reading in the Dark is that good. This is a novel which comes to America with a big reputation and one that is completely deserved. [Eamonn Wall]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane Eamonn Wall Seamus Deane. Reading in the Dark. Knopf, 1997. 246 pp. $23.00 Deane’s first novel arrives in the wake of the numerous volumes of poetry and criticism which have gained him an international reputation as an original, complex, and sometimes controversial writer and thinker. Although his work as both poet and scholar has distinguished him, this previous work is dwarfed by the magnificence of Reading in the Dark, a novel which seems destined to be regarded as one of the great Irish novels published this century. The novel is set in Derry, Northern Ireland, between the 1940s and 1960s. On one level it is a coming-of-age novel which traces the growth into manhood, knowledge, and experience of a male hero. However, in addition to coming to terms with body and soul, this young man is forced to discover and accept the hard secrets which have burdened his family and to come to grips with the history of Derry and Ireland. Out of a natural curiosity, the boy discovers the roles played by members of both his maternal and paternal families in the I.R.A. and how both families and their interrelationships have been undermined by desertion, treachery, and wrongful execution: “You poor Child—My poor family,” his mother tells him. The boy learns all of these family secrets, becomes their repository, but must become a man before he can learn to live with them. What makes this novel succeed so magnificently is the quality of the writing. Each chapter is brief, generally no more than 1500 words in length, with the narrative growing more complex as the boy grows older. Deane seems to distill from Derry all that is important in both public and family life and to relate one to the other. He provides a deep sense of how claustrophobic and difficult it can be to grow up in the turmoil of Northern Ireland and how past events can draw in and destroy the lives of the living. By his adroit use of a first-person narrative, Deane underlines the truth that in the less-well-off neighborhoods of Northern Ireland there can be no separation of the personal and the political. Each short chapter is carefully and elegantly written and complete. However, the novel also accrues in power from chapter to chapter with a kind of deep, tragic sense of doom. In some respects one is reminded of Joyce’s Portrait, of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, of the works of Faulkner: Reading in the Dark is that good. This is a novel which comes to America with a big reputation and one that is completely deserved. [Eamonn Wall]

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