Years ago, I was stilled for a moment when a teacher declared that Northern Ireland, as we knew it, was home to one of Europe’s largest lakes, second only he supposed to Lake Baikal [situated in southern Siberia, Russia, making it an Asian lake]. Lough Neagh was something to be proud of (although later I discovered it was 34th, not second), as we were also to be proud of Harland and Wolff (once the world’s largest shipyard, later not quite) and the ropeworks (once the world’s largest, now long gone). The more our own troubled present was diminished, as it was in the discontent of others who didn’t seem quite as proud of the place as we were invited to be, the greater were the North’s claims on its native genius.
The bleak comedy of this supposition gives Jan Carson’s new novel, Few and Far Between, a surreal edge that has the air of historical truth. Carson has long been interested in the social quirks of people under pressure. Few and Far Between extends the panorama of her observations to the hidden heart of the North through that unlikely reservoir of submerged emotions, Lough Neagh. The unkind might say Antrim town and its hinterlands have not been seized of such imagination since the 1798. Carson surveys the territory with a prose constantly judging the distance between surfaces and depth. If sometimes that measurement is so precise as to give the writing a certain dry and contrary aspect, the forays Carson makes into the strange borderlands of the lough waters give the novel a weird brilliance, like Kevin Barry without the swearing.
The subject of Few and Far Between is a fantastical proposition to drain Lough Neagh, and so create a new county for Northern Ireland. The idea operates as a kind of comic colonisation, the recovery of subterranean lands a conscience-free addition to the ‘wee six’. Carson paints the conceit lightly, establishing the construction of a network of insular communities through their settlement and use of the land that appears.
Each island has a utility, some practical, some psychic. Together this archipelago, or Ark as it is nudgingly known, becomes a subconscious for the so-called mainland, the humour of which is played deadpan throughout. There is an island that absorbs whatever is dumped there, and which sometimes returns it. There is an island where the shades of those about to harm themselves can be seen, and sometimes rescued. There is an island where the surviving families live, ill at ease with those who leave and return. Collectively these include the Big Flat, the Small Flat and the Far Side, which comprises Tom’s Hard, the Middle, Church and Eglish Flats. Here the drama of the novel plays out, threatened at the last by a plan to flood the lough to save it from pollution.
READ MORE
Few and Far Between is a novel of big emotions caught in small words, and Carson weathers the line between fiction and fact with real skill. The Troubles long kept the North as a place in a holding pattern. In recent fiction, its waterways, hills and hinterlands have begun to emerge in new dimensions.
Few and Far Between unspools this territory further, the great unmaking of the binds that held us finding form in a bold and blustery novel that never veers from environmental reality. The Ark, after all, is threatened with a flood that will clean the lough’s toxic waters, which are presently so polluted as to be near total ecological collapse. Carson’s work frequently admits a language of biblical judgment to her stories, which fits the general atmosphere of apocalypse.
Few and Far Between goes beyond her earlier novels, The Raptures and The Fire Starters, by soaking such visionary zeal in the concerns of a little society lost in its own depths and soon to be inundated. The struggle in this book is less for salvation than survival, a mortal turn that Carson follows freely in her writing, open to ghosts and augurs.
Suitably for a novel that undoes the past, its central character is dead. RJ Connolly, anthropologist, chancer and misogynist, happened upon the Ark in his mid-career, and made a study of its islands after, bringing his family with him. The aftermath of his ambitions drives the narrative, with tragic consequence for his wife Ursula, and children Marion and Robert-John.
The general sense of wasted time is a familiar legacy of the North’s last half-century, which the rising generations still seek to escape. The literary means to do so can be familiar; an increase in empathy, a principled stand against domination, and the openness to take a chance on something different. Carson evolves this narrative into a compelling fiction by the close observation of her characters’ hidden feelings, and in a bravura act of imagination that makes Lough Neagh the heart of a new, and stranger, North.
Fittingly, the Ark’s secrets are uncovered by the digging of another visiting scholar, Alex Anderson. She grew up on the island too, and returns to the lough at a turning point in her own career. As relationships entangle around her, Alex is an uncertain barometer of the novel’s rising pressure. She is also the book’s questioning heart, and a character deep enough to carry the weight of the past in view of the future. This extends to the liberation of RJ Connolly’s survivors, who learn to make an archipelago of their insular lives, a transport that begins with self-understanding, and eventually self-forgiveness.
[ Seamus Heaney’s later years: Nicholas Allen explores his final poetry volumesOpens in new window ]
This is where Few and Far Between finds its purchase. Any literature can be given a co-ordinate and bearing, and sometimes a weather. Few and Far Between has all this, and something more, which is the imprint of a disappearing world taken shape in a new. Carson’s island worlds are little kingdoms of the mind, drawn together in the misplaced dramas of the everyday, which the novel stitches together with surreal dexterity. In so doing, Carson has written a novel of the larger island we all inhabit, adrift in a sea of uncertainty.
Nicholas Allen’s latest book is Late Heaney. He is Baldwin professor in humanities at the University of Georgia
