The pain of not-knowing and of knowing (Books - Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane)

Friend Sheila enthusiastically recommended Seamus Deane's 1996 novel of growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 50s, Reading in the Dark, and I echo her enthusiasm. Deane renders the indignation of a child who knows he is excluded from the mysteries of adulthood with great conviction. In the case of this novel, these are not just the work-a-day mysteries of sexual relations or violence considered too great for a child's understanding. Our first-person narrator is aware of deep secrets that rule the internecine feuds within his family, secrets of informing and murder that haunt his parents' every waking action. They flavor his life like a strong spice one can taste in every bit of a stew and yet not know what it is. He learns the full story in dribs and drabs, sometimes from unknowing truth-tellers. Deane's talent, is withholding it from his reader as well in such a fashion that the not unfamiliar story of an Irish childhood becomes riddled with suspense, and his coming of age filled with the regret that accompanies the realization that being excluded from this knowledge is no less tormenting than possessing it.

The great pleasures of Deane's many short chapters are his sense of humor, the wisdom his narrator grows into about people and their burdens, and absolutely crack writing.

...But our celebrations were not official, like the Protestant ones. The police would sometimes make us put out the fires or try to stop us collecting old car tyres or chopping down trees in preparation. Fire was what I loved to hear of and to see. It transformed the grey air and streets, excited and exciting. When, in mid-August, to commemorate the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven, the bonfires were lit at the foot of the sloping, parallel streets, against the stone wall above the Park, the night sky reddened around the rising furls of black tyre-smoke that exploded every so often in high soprano bursts of paraffined flame. Their acrid odour would gradually give way to the more fragrant aroma of soft-burning trees that drifted across the little houses in their serried slopes, gravelled streets falling down from the asphalted Lone Moor Road that for us marked the limit between the city proper and the beginning of the countryside that spread out into Donegal four miles away. In the small hours of the morning, people sitting on benches and kitchen chairs around the fire were still singing; sometimes a window in one of the nearby houses cracked in a spasm of heat; the police car, that had been sitting in the outer darkness of two hundred yards away, switched on its lights and glided away; the shadows on the gable wall shrivelled as the fires burnt down to their red intestines. The Feast of the Assumption dwindled into the sixteenth of August, and solo singers began to dominate the sing-along chorusing. It marked the end of summer. The faint bronze tints of the dawn implied autumn, and the stars fainted into the increasing light as people trailed their chairs reluctantly home.

Some of his paragraphs could be sung, so beautiful are the processions of simple words that accomplish his rich and deeply-felt descriptions. This memoir-like novel is tinged with deep sadness, but the way Deane renders his story is shear pleasure.