Product Description

A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
Winner of the Irish Times Fiction Award and International Award

"A swift and masterful transformation of family griefs and political violence into something at once rhapsodic and heartbreaking. If Issac Babel had been born in Derry, he might have written this sudden, brilliant book."
--Seamus Heaney

Hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.

The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."

Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20854 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-24
• Released on: 1998-02-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375700231
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers, and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him. And hovering over all the violence, poverty, and despair of 1940s Northern Ireland is the specter of the "Troubles." The hero of the novel is an unnamed young man whose life turns upside down when a policeman frames him. Deception becomes his only means of self-defense. But the initial lie on the part of the policeman and the narrator's corresponding trickery are only part of the tangled web Deane weaves here. Early in the novel we learn that Uncle Eddie, an Irish Republican Army gunman, was blown up in the town distillery in 1922. In addition to sorting out his own problems, the narrator seeks the truth about his uncle's death.

Reading in the Dark sounds grim, and in some respects it is, yet leavening is provided by infusions of the Irish folktales and legends that inform the characters' daily life. And then there is the language. Deane is a poet, and his prose shows it: sex is like fire, "glinting with greed and danger"; ice snores and candles are swathed in a "thick drapery of wax." Readers looking for a thoughtful, serious, and beautifully written novel will find one in Reading in the Dark.

From Publishers Weekly
Deane is a poet and a celebrated literary historian, and this, his first novel, was deservedly shortlisted for England's Booker prize last year (it did win the Guardian Fiction Prize). At first glance, it covers familiar turf: an Irish family riven by the political strife of the 1920s trying to live with the legacy of bloodshed and betrayal?all seen through the eyes of a sensitive young boy as he looks back 20 years later. But Deane has a poet's eye, which transforms the most everyday material into something eternally rich and strange: "The rain lifted away, the sunlight lay piebald on the path for a brief time, then the rain shuttered us in again." And he watches the long struggles of the family with the same kind of patient endurance they themselves display. Gradually, their story emerges from the mists in which it has been wrapped for a generation: an uncle who in family legend had fled to Chicago had in fact been executed, mistakenly, as an informer on the IRA by members of his own family; the real informer, who had been loved by the boy's mother and had briefly married her sister, had escaped, tipped off by the police. Mother and father each know some of the story, and realize that knowing all of it will drive them apart; their life together is a long, loving grief. All this is glimpsed by the narrator in hints and flashes, combined with hilarious surges of comic relief?a lecture on the facts of life by a well-meaning priest, an incomprehensible math lesson at school, the brisk tirades of a local madman, a sly way of getting back at a hated policeman by way of the bishop. In Deane's hands, the language leaps and quivers, and the life he illuminates is at once achingly sad and transfixingly real. 35,000 first printing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA. The narrator of this coming-of-age novel lives in Derry, Northern Ireland, and is the third oldest child in a large Catholic family that has been loosely connected with the IRA since its inception. The narrator's earliest memories begin in February 1945, when he first starts to perceive the secrets within his family. Each chapter is short, dated with a month and year in which some new comprehension or perception of the world outside opens up to him. There is pathos as he remembers his sister's death, his Aunt Ena's death, his grandfather's deathbed confession, and his mother's growing depression, but there is also humor. Each episode is linked to another with various personalities emerging to weld these links to the narrator's understanding of the life around him and his family's role in it. Superstitions, spells, myths, fairy eyes, the Fianna, the old fort of Grianan, the Catholic Church, and always the storytelling blend themselves in this contemporary look at life in County Donegal through the eyes of one young boy. The underlining mystery, the novel's readability, and the experiences of this protagonist make this fictional memoir highly recommended for all YAs.?Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Like a Poignant Memoir
This beautiful book reads more like a poignant and heartbreaking memoir than a novel. It's difficult to believe the incidents described are really fiction and not the author's reality...they are described so well and in just the right detail.

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.

A Brave New Ireland
Reading in the Dark might merely have been one more "miserable Irish childhood" story, sandwiched between Angela's Ashes and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and dismissed. Seamus Deane's unnamed boy author -- nameless, it seems, because his world can't be bothered to notice him -- fits squarely between Frank McCourt and Paddy Clarke in era and in social class. He does not suffer Frank's horrific poverty, nor does he own the books that he reads, as Paddy does. The boy's life in a large working-class Catholic family, with its minimal adult supervision, at least one parent who cannot cope, cruel priests for teachers, and the necessary string of funerals, initially seems to be heading down the literary path to deja-vu.

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.

A Beautiful Triumph
Seamus Deane is a wonderful poet as well as a historian and
anthologist of Irish literature. Reading in the Dark, however, is his
first novel. It is both a triumph of literature and of the human
spirit; one of the most beautiful books anyone could ever hope to
read.

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.