The Emigrant's Farewell By Liam Browne Bloomsbury, 310pp. £12.99
There are three dominant presences in this novel. Joe O'Kane, a citizen of Derry, 30-ish, diffident husband of Eileen and father of Ciara, is the first. Next comes a 19th-century shipbuilder and surveyor, Captain William Coppin, one-time inhabitant of Ivy House (demolished in the 1990s to make way for a supermarket). The third major presence is the city of Derry itself, with its ever-changing fabric, its history of siege and bombardment, its built-over meadowland, its coal boats and emigrant ships, its forts and famine walls, and river light irradiating the buildings along the quays. And above all - or through all - winds the River Foyle, with its cargo of people, incidents, phantoms, lost times and historical associations, standing in for memory itself.
Liam Browne's present-day narrative is centred on a tragedy - the death of a child - and subsequent expedients for fending off despair. The child's parents go in different directions. Her mother starts to retreat into her own childhood. Her father, Joe, unemployed at the start of the book, soon obtains a post at a heritage centre ("research officer" is the job title) and immerses himself in the story of William Coppin and his efforts to locate the whereabouts of the vanished Franklin expedition to the North Pole. Efforts not without a measure of success. Out of provincial Derry comes a pointer to the truth of the matter, conveyed to Coppin (we're to believe) via his dead daughter Louisa ("Weesy"), whose wraith remains earthbound, at least for the time being, and signals its presence to Coppin's other children.
All this, the factual part of Liam Browne's novel, is pretty well-documented (though the chief account of the Coppin/Franklin business, a late 19th-century work by the Rev J Henry Skewes, perhaps owes a little too much to the "sensation" mode popular during the 1860s). And given the theme of The Emigrant's Farewell, it is easy enough to understand the fascination exerted on author and character alike by the "dead child" motif.
This part of the book, indeed, is handled with tact and restraint. But the Coppin element, a product of research, is a bit too obtrusively so at times. The two main strands of the novel aren't seamlessly integrated: it's more a matter of proceeding in tandem. But certain things are striking about this book - its deep-rooted concern, for example, with the nitty-gritty of Derry life, and, most auspiciously, the absence from its pages of any political or sectarian imperative. This is a post-terrorist novel that augurs well for the future.
Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore came out in paperback in 2004. Her Ulster Anthology will be published by Blackstaff next autumn
Fiction
Patricia Craig