Reading In The Dark

READING IN THE DARK

by Seamus Deane

 

Nominations: Booker Finalist 1996, Dublin Longlist 1998, LA Times Finalist 1997

 

Date Read: May 4, 2023

 

Childhood is challenging enough without violence erupting outside your window, being beaten by your teacher or having family betray you. In Reading In The Dark, Deane contrasts the innocence of childhood with the need to grow up all too quick in a politically unstable country, such as Ireland in the 1940s and 50s.

 

Like all kids, our unnamed narrator wants to know his family’s history and secrets but once he does know, he wished he didn’t. What’s worse is, knowing all the betrayal that occurred within their family forces a wedge between him and his mother because she’s terrified he will tell.

 

In a village like Derry, where everyone pretty much knows everyone else, some family are informers, some are trying to save their own skin, some are trying to save their family’s skin and others are out for their own gain. All of these motives collide in our narrators family, where most notably, narrator’s uncle Eddie, his father’s brother, is assassinated because of his grandfather’s, his mother’s father’s mistake. Some of the peripheral family were also involved but to a lesser extent.

 

This secret has haunted the family, unbeknownst to the father, for their entire lives but only after the passing of the grandfather and his deathbed confessions does it rear its ugly head again. In a series of vignettes, the mysticism, romanticism and brutality of Ireland during that time is conveyed. Add in a healthy dollop of Catholicism and you can layer mortal guilt on top of everything else, where the clergy are in cahoots with the corrupt police.

 

Deane doesn’t sugar coat his experience but he also instills a yearning for a place that could be so beautiful if only humans and their squabbling hadn’t fucked it up.  Ultimately, though, children just want to be children regardless of what’s happening outside their front door.