Neil Hegarty on Inch Levels, his fiction debut: Catching the light

An object appears and reappears in the pages of Inch Levels. A copper bowl, glimpsed in various places as the story is told. A farmhouse kitchen in Donegal: the room is dark, the roof is low, the chimney smokes, the bowl is placed on the dresser where it can never catch the light. Later, the bowl sports a dent, a bruise on its lip – but now it is placed on a high shelf beside a broad window in a modern suburban house: and now it gleams red in the sunshine.

This bowl, in my story, has no starring role: it is glimpsed fleetingly, now and again, but it represents many things. It forms part of a scanty dowry, and so love and togetherness; a precious form of self-respect and pride in a life without much in the way of material wealth. Later, it comes to underscore the loss of these virtues; later still, a life rebuilt – at a price. The copper bowl represents continuity, and its loss; it travels through time and through space, and it witnesses much. It possesses a mute eloquence, as layers of memory and meaning accrue in its form.

I mention this occasionally glimpsed copper bowl because the meaning of Inch Levels, for me, fits inside it snugly enough. Some years ago, I sat down to rough out the form of a novel. It was to be the story of an Irish family: several generations, the tracing of a handful of lives. Of the relationships between them, their ability – their need – to keep a lid on things: by keeping secrets, by maintaining silence, at all costs.

It was to be set in and around my own home place: the border between Derry and Donegal, where urban, suburban, coastal and rural meet and mingle – a combination of worlds which has set me in good stead. Different people, different landscapes, different tones, accents, values and intricacies of society: I have an eye for, an interest in all of this – lucky me, to have it on my doorstep.

Soon enough the story assumed a form and then another and another. Threads presented themselves in random ways: money from the European Union enabled a network of footpaths to be established across Inch Levels, a land- and seascape on the edge of Lough Swilly, just a couple of miles beyond the western suburbs of Derry. I went walking there, marvelling at the beauty and unique lines of the place, and much flowed from these walks.

One day I went poking around the (now defunct) Workhouse Museum in Derry, and took in its display on the Battle of the Atlantic, and the crucial role that the port of Derry played in guarding the western approaches for Allied shipping during the war; another day, I read about the torpedo explosions that formed a regular part of life on Ireland’s western seaboard during the Emergency. I listened to my parents and my aunt; and I read about the bodies which, in their dozens and hundreds, washed up routinely on the coast in these years – a hellishly abnormal situation that was dealt with discreetly by the Irish authorities.

I dug into own memories too: of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, when armed foot patrols of soldiers passed along the road, and sometimes cut through our garden, and were at all times to be studiously ignored; when helicopters racketed deafeningly overhead day and night; when shops were there one day and pulverised by a bomb the next; and bedroom windows buckled in their frames as the sound wave from a bomb impacted against the walls of the house. Meals were prepared and examinations sat and all the patterns of a life went on just the same, of course: normality and abnormality coexisting in what appeared to be perfect ease.

And so the novel began to assume a form. Two generations – one living through, or glimpsing the impact of, the second World War on Ireland; the other setting out in life several decades later, as a part of Ireland enters a state of chassis. How they lived, and thought, and moved. The earlier generation represented by a girl – Sarah, I named her – who is first introduced growing up in Donegal; who learns how to keep a secret; and whose life I traced as she weathered and changed. The later generation represented by Sarah’s son Patrick, who must work with the difficult hand dealt him. And others: they remember and they forget; their memories consist of shreds and fragments, and I wanted to reflect this element in the story too.

These are lives, and this is what writers do: we write accounts of lives, the better to make sense of the world; and we breathe life into dead bodies, who alive never had the chance to speak for themselves, or be heard, or attended to. Derek Mahon describes such lost lives “begging us, you see, in their wordless way, to do something, to speak on their behalf, or at least not to close the door again”. Adrienne Rich describes diving into a long-submerged wreck “carrying a knife, a camera, a book of myths in which our names do not appear”. The moral purpose of writing rests for me on such ideas.

Inch Levels, then, moves through time – or rather, my telling of the story shifts backwards and forwards in time. It took time to decide how the tale would be told: it became a story with several narrators, with a restless narration. The cliche declares that history is told always from the viewpoint of the victor: but this novel is not concerned with victories – far from it – and I wanted its history to unravel in a way that reflected this. One character speaks, and then another – and the reader comes to the truth of the matter, in the end.

This has to do with memory, and how it works. We remember our lives not as a smoothly gliding, uninterrupted whole, but as a mixed bag consisting of whatever is retained. So much is lost, or glossed over, or elaborated upon. It is never wise to depend completely upon our recollection of this or that event: and it is for this reason I wanted to distil such a sense into the book, with episodes repeated, retold from the perspective of one character and then another. It came to me as the natural and inevitable way of telling this story.

More than anything, I wanted to show how a secret can become an intolerable burden. It freezes, it calcifies the heart: the present is distorted, but so too is the past – and worst of all, these distortions and contortions are passed on to our children. Better to pay attention, and to name: we cannot live in the present until the past has passed. I wanted to suggest that to fence ourselves in – from the world, from the intimacy that comes with trust; and from what to us is the truth, even if it is a painful truth – brings only pain, and no possibility of redemption.

I wanted to show that redemption is the right of everyone, if we are prepared to examine the stuff of our lives. None of this is easy – but it is not supposed to be easy. Rather, it is complex: but this is where the satisfaction lies too, in reflecting a world where the light can sometimes shine through a gap, to gleam red on the polished curve of a copper bowl.

Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty is published today by Head of Zeus, £14.99. Houman Barekat reviews it in The Irish Times this Saturday. The author will read from his work at a celebration to mark its launch on Monday, September 12th, at 6.30pm, in Dubray, 36 Grafton St, Dublin 2