This brilliant short-story collection confronts the knotty truths of Northern Ireland’s bloody past. The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney’s North (1975) to Anna Burns’s Booker-winning Milkman (2018). The latest addition, a slim debut by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, shares the brilliance of those books but with a fundamental distinction: Ní Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that ended the Troubles.
Throughout the book, the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully alive. In the title story, narrator Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment of his uncle and grandfather, and by loyalists hijacking his parents’ car when his mother was pregnant with him. When his father fell ill and entered a vegetative state, this “lax and unmoving” figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history.
There is space for other concerns and registers. In Novena, second-generation Irish Moll’s grandmother texts her: “Said special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.” But the church announces the impossibility of single funerals due to a lack of priests. In Russia, a psychic tells a client: “Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You’ve, none of youse, you’ve no concept of how this works.” Ní Chuinn’s humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use.
The same story describes anonymous protests at a museum, where flowers of remembrance are left at exhibits containing human remains. This broadens the book’s preoccupation with the past, linking ancient violence with sectarian murders. Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man’s obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. His cousin Shane says: “It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.” But Rowan rejects the urge to leave the past behind, insisting: “It’s not both sides, it’s this huge fucking army, this huge fucking state.”
