Irish Fiction: One of the many resonant images of happiness in David Park's new novel is of a childhood visit to a closed museum on a Sunday. In this protective space the past, for once, is unthreatening.
Martin Waring, the hero of Swallowing The Sun, is on a flight from his family and his one-time self. He finds comfort, though, in his job as an attendant in a Belfast museum, as he thinks that this is the only location in which memories can be made safe for the future. However, the ambiguous figure of Takabuti, a blackened mummy on exhibit there, haunts his imagination. The talismanic figure of the goddess on the sarcophagus is a symbol both of life and death; she controls the sun but also swallows it when night comes round.
This multi-layered and skilfully structured novel clearly belongs to what is fast becoming a new genre: post-Troubles fiction. However, it handles the familiar themes of memory, guilt, and the legacy of a violent past with great dexterity and winning originality. Park is not so much interested in conveying a gritty realism as in capturing the psychological density of the inner worlds of his characters and in generating stories that are threaded together through an interweave of symbolic images.
The death of a prized teenage daughter, after one ill-fated experiment with ecstasy, is the pivotal tragedy of this novel. Martin, her grief-stricken father, is forced, as a result, to confront the ghosts of the past: the memory of his own abusive, alcoholic father; his mother's passive connivance; and his later involvement with Loyalist paramilitarism. Park is equally effective at rendering the mental worlds of Alison, Martin's wife, and of Rachel and Tom, his teenage children. Each longs for an untrammelled security: Alison harks back to a blissfully uneventful family holiday in a caravan; Tom - who is being bullied because of his weight - takes refuge in Lara Croft video games; and Rachel longs to enter the glass globe of the snowstorm keepsake that she prizes.
The myth of a happy, upwardly-mobile family is not enough to quell the past or, in the eyes of Martin, to permit him to evade the shame and punishment that are rightfully his lot. In an ironic and fateful circularity, the tablets that killed his daughter were supplied by former Loyalist consorts of his who have turned to "legit crime" such as drug trafficking and protection rackets now that the Troubles are over. He himself is further caught up in self-perpetuating cycles of violence when he returns to his erstwhile ferocity in order to wreak revenge on the architects of her death.
A cataclysmic dénouement sparked off by his dogged vendetta is coupled with a search for reconciliation as he transfers the entire contents of his daughter's bedroom to an empty exhibition space in the museum. The desire to obliterate painful memories is shown to be painfully counterbalanced by the struggle to hang onto the fragile traces of the child he has lost.
Park's beautifully rendered fiction is at once a wholly engrossing human drama and a subtle meditation on the current state of Northern society. The achieved artistry of Swallowing the Sun and its philosophical penetration establish beyond doubt that David Park is one of the most gifted writers in contemporary Ireland.
• Anne Fogarty is a lecturer in the School of English, University College Dublin, and academic co-ordinator of the XIX Bloomsday 100 International James Joyce Symposium, which will be held in Dublin, June 12th-19th, to mark the centenary of Bloomsday