SEAMUS DEANE's first novel reads as a work long in the gestation. An intensely personal book, it creates a haunted world of childhood and adolescence in the Derry of the Forties and Fifties and has the charged and painful air of a memoir. It makes for an edgy and claustrophobic read.
Deane starts off conventionally enough with a lyrical evocation of the narrator's early childhood - his mother standing on the stairs rapt in the presence of ghosts in the house, the child's eye view (from under the kitchen table) of the wake for his sister who dies of meningitis.
These fragments come with epigrammatic titles as if in a boy's comic book - "Pistol", "Fire", "Accident". They are sharply drawn, reminding us forcefully of Deane, the poet. The "dismembered streets ... aching with a long, dolorous absence"; the "faint bronze tints of dawn"; the catalogue of childhood illnesses - rubella, scarlatina, polio - which the narrator likens to the names of Italian opera singers.
But it soon becomes clear that Deane has an intent other than mere nostalgia.
The image of the boy's mother transfixed by ghostly presences is not merely a poetic device; her marriage is literally haunted by the death of her brother in law which lies, a secret betrayal, at the heart of this family.
The narrator discovers that his father's brother, Eddie, long hailed in family mythology as an IRA volunteer who died in an explosion at a distillery, is not the simpler hero the boy has always believed him to be, and that his death is the source of the "clear painful silence" between his parents.
It is knowledge that both fascinates and cripples the young boy.
He cannot declare what he has learnt for fear of betraying one parent to the other, and yet he cannot leave it alone either; as if it were a sore, he returns again and again to it.
The unwanted information creates a distance between him and his parents, a distance he never really manages to bridge again.
Throughout the novel there is the dominating presence of sectarianism in a city of hidden guns, police informers, bonfires, marches and feuds in a community under siege. When he and his friends stray into nearby border country to glimpse the Free State just over a hump backed bridge, "even when no one could be seen, we felt we were being watched."
But there is a rich subtext of other, more unlikely and gothic influences, too. Stories of the fairies who could make children disappear, the Fianna of legend whom the boy and his companions incorporate into their games, even the teachings of Ignatius Loyola, whom the narrator sees as a source of certainty, "a star, sure and yet troubled". "But when I imagined him so, then I would see myself again in a dither of light and dark, see my father again, see Eddie, rerecognise my mother, see them blur and fade, know that I was too blurred, was astray for not knowing how to choose."
As a novel, Reading in the Dark seems very loosely bound together, fragmentary and episodic as it is. The confessional tone makes one suspect it is disguised autobiography and the reader comes away from it with a sense that this was a book Deane needed to write. But that conviction alone gives the novel a real urgency.
Deane captures the essence of the dark Fifties, the gloomy back streets, the political and cultural introversion of the time and he gives us a melancholy portrait of a family riven by betrayal and trapped in silence.
But what lifts Reading in the Dark beyond social documentary is Deane's lyrical rendering of the spiritual and imaginative dimension of his characters' lives. It is the mythical netherworld peopled by the Fianna, the fairies and the ghosts (dangerous territory for any novelist) which informs the boy narrator's story that stays in the mind beyond the bread and butter realism, and gives this fine novel its compelling and hypnotic charm.