Despite its geographical proximity, I really haven't read much literature from Ireland, and I don't know too much about it either. I did the whole Seamus Heaney poetry thing as part of my English a-level, but I've rarely stretched out beyond that.
Set in Derry, Reading in the Dark is a coming of age story, stretching from the main character's boyhood in the 1940s up to the 70s. With a background of The Troubles, the book dips into a lot of Irish folklore and the need for small town gossip. The reader starts the book innocent of any knowledge of the boy's family history, as the boy does himself, but as the book progresses the darkness and violence of the past leaps out in suspicions and confidences told to the boy by his family.
Following an unnamed main character makes you a little distanced from the story in my opinion, but it almost serves as a reminder that this could be any Derry child growing up in the Troubles. At the heart of the novel is religious and familial divide. It opens up to the reader how fraught these times were, and how knowledge is not always a good thing.
There have been suggestions that the book is too similar to Seamus Deane's own upbringing and early life for it to be anything more than a memoir. Whether there's any truth to this or not, I enjoyed the book in its relative simplicity. We followed a boy starting (and struggling) to understand the world in which he lived, his loss of innocence and introduction to politics. It's a good read if you want a fairly simple insight to life as a child during the Troubles, and I enjoyed it although I didn't find it very gripping. I've given this 3 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment