Drawn to write about the Disappeared

Admittedly only two people expressed dismay at the subject of my latest novel, Where They Lie. Southerners to the core, both were directly not interested in anything to do with the Disappeared, or indeed anything to do with Northern Ireland. They were upfront and uncomplicated in their indifference and slight distaste. It was a kind of quick dismissal of something best put away and kept behind closed doors, or at least within the boundaries of the province of Ulster, never mind the Six Counties.

I was surprised. No writer automatically expects potential readers to whoop with excitement at the latest production, but I had never before encountered this feeling of having done something a little off-colour, in literary terms. These were exceptions, of course, and by and large the novel has been greeted with interest, and I’ve found myself answering more questions than I ever imagined I’d have to.

I have no personal knowledge of anybody who experienced a family member’s “disappearance” at the hands of the IRA. I was not raised in the North, although I did grow up near Monaghan town and was accustomed to life along the border, and to the frequent crossings over through Middletown or Aughnacloy during the Troubles, usually for social reasons.

The story itself actually developed out of two characters in the title story of my last collection of short stories, Storm Over Belfast. The protagonist in this short piece suffers from bipolar disorder. She is visited by her Dubliner ex-boyfriend, who has business in Belfast, and who takes a drive out to her home, only to discover her in a state of near-psychosis. The piece is about his coming and his going, and what ensues between them during that time. It also contains a dog.

Months after that collection appeared, I realised I remained quite interested in these two characters, and thought that perhaps I should have another look at them. What could I do with them? What did they really need to say that seemed to me important and yet ordinary? The ordinary interests me greatly, because within the frame of the ordinary we discover the most incredible, often heroic, aspects of ourselves, and the thing is: nobody notices.

I did realise though, that these unlikely characters – the woman a secular Protestant and the man a secular Catholic – would have to do something, or things, that they would have to be in a situation. At the time, I’d been thinking about the Disappeared, not alone those from the North, but on a global scale: children vanishing and murdered in Colombia, people murdered by the Mafia in Sicily, never to be seen again, and of course the unforgettable, mind-sawing knowledge particular to those who know their loved ones “disappeared” into dust during 9/11. This was in my head at the time, when it suddenly struck me that I knew something about the Disappeared in Northern Ireland. Not personally, of course. But I had a feeling about both place and people, because frankly, growing up along the border as I did during the 1970s, feelings develop, observations sharpen, awareness deepens. It is an awareness which, to be honest, I have never found an outlet for in my adult life. Being neither a politician, or a public debater of any kind, not being a newspaper columnist either, in other words not occupying the usual platforms from which people often explore their feelings on certain issues, I realised that I had been living in a kind of a blind alley, almost in denial about a subject which was and remains important to me.

Why is it important? It's important because certain small groupings, in an attempt to stub out the existence and spirit of those who did not perhaps hold identical points of view on political and religious matters, felt they had the right to eradicate their perceived enemies. I didn't live in the North, after all. But I lived near it, and I knew youngsters from across the border when I was young, and I heard the talk and the half-talk and the hints and whispers. I remember when Billy Fox was murdered, seeing his home on the road to a boyfriend's house back then, I remember being stopped by gardaí, their faces peering in the window as we approached the border heading north, or similar RUC faces peering in on our return.

This is how it was. Normal. What I thought of as normal. Meanwhile, people were being murdered. People were vanishing. The Shankill Butchers portrayed in Eoin McNamee's vivid novel, Resurrection Man, were alive and doing their worst. The IRA were alive too and doing their worst, tearing families apart not just in one generation but in a generational dissipation as uncles and then nephews were murdered, vanished, and lives were destroyed.

I was present in Monaghan town the evening the bomb went off there in May 1974, just a while after it had exploded in Dublin. I deliberately set part of the novel in that town, and the event is recalled by one of the characters.

But first of all I wrote my story: a Protestant family desperate to recover the bodies of twin brothers murdered rather late in the Troubles’ history, goaded slowly into action by Gerda, a journalist (modelled on the woman in my short story, but in no way psychotic in her new reincarnation). It is about a group of people teased along by the voice of a phone-caller who claims to have knowledge of the whereabouts of the bodies. The question is, does he?

Many of the tragic episodes in the history of the Troubles have had no conclusion, no tidy wrapping up. Some bodies have never been recovered. So what I was interested in was, how do people cope with grief and a sense of the past that may not be totally reliable? To what extent can we trust our own memories? To what extent can we trust what we tell our friends? Our lovers? Our own families? And that is the crux of my story. Memory and truth, and how people play around with both, often out of fear, or guilt, or simply pain.

Where They Lie by Mary O’Donnell is published by New Island.