Troubled stories amid the Troubles

Fiction: Not that yesterday's history ever goes completely away. In the case of events in Northern Ireland, history remains even more statically topical than many are prepared to admit. The story of the 10 Republican prisoners who died in 1981 on hunger strike in an attempt to be treated as political prisoners, not criminals, introduced an element of medieval horror into what was, and remains, a saga of bloodshed.

It seems unlikely terrain for Louise Dean in which to set This Human Season, her second novel. Not because she is an English writer, but because her sharp but overrated first novel, Becoming Strangers, which appeared on last year's Man Booker longlist, seemed to have placed her far closer to the world of Joanna Trollope, than that of Ronan Bennett.

Nothing in her first novel suggested that Dean's next book would be particularly compelling. More importantly, nothing in that first novel indicated that she would be drawn towards the reality of events in the North.

Becoming Strangers examines a number of relationships between several ill-matched couples who arrive at a sun resort. The politics of desperate and despairing sexuality is central to the plot. Interestingly, this theme finds its place in This Human Season, but only after Dean has ensured that the seriousness of the ongoing political and cultural conflict is sufficiently in place that it will not be reduced to a mere theatrical back drop.

She also succeeds in creating the impression that the lives she is focusing on were going on long before the narrative begins. "When the soldiers came the time before, the father went off with them. He had the same name as his son, so he went in his place. After a few days he was released. Their son was far away by then, down South. This time the son was in prison and they didn't want the father."

The soldiers invade a household of which one son is a prisoner. He has offended the regime the soldiers represent. However, the family is also divided by other problems. The father is defeated, the mother is bitter.

Very quickly Dean changes the scene, and introduces John Dunn, who seems to be on the run from himself. Flight has brought him, a former British soldier "of twenty-two years standing", to a job in the Northern Ireland prison service.

He is not exactly a newcomer, having served three tours of duty in the North while in the British army. When he arrives for briefing in H Block, at the Maze Prison, Dean does not spare the details. "A step further and the smell of the place hit him. It was human excrement, a thick and knowing stench. It got stronger as he got closer and when the front door was opened, it was overpowering." Crude macho banter is exchanged between the various men who will be his colleagues. But Dunn gives little away.

A pattern of short chapters is quickly established and sustained. Dean's approach is traditional, bluntly straightforward. At a time when so much British literary fiction depends on gags and gimmicks, it comes almost as a relief to encounter a novelist so intent on shaping her work and her characters through the medium of ordinary, uncluttered domestic realism. The language is that of plain-speaking television drama; there are few literary flourishes. If the narrative is predictable, and it is, as it moves between the former-soldier-turned-prison-officer and Kathleen, the unhappy housewife of the opening page, it is not a major flaw.

As the story, or rather stories, unfold, Dean emerges as a writer intent on presenting ordinary characters well battered by life. John Dunn is not really that determined to reinvent himself; all he wants to do is fit into the East Belfast world to which Angie, his wife 10 years his junior, belongs. It is clear that there is a son from a long forgotten, casual encounter, poised to reclaim Dunn the drifter and that this will be a test of character.

Housewife Kathleen is more complex; her past has its own litany of betrayals. Her husband, Sean, has become pathetic; her older daughter has emigrated to England, and fears for her elder son, the prisoner, while her younger children have become strangers. Instead of comforting her, Kathleen has become trapped by the sexual appeal she can still call upon.

So Dean follows her two main characters within their respective circles. The more she reveals about Dunn and the closer she allows him to be studied when relating to others, the more remote he becomes. His emotional paralysis becomes central. With Kathleen, her desperation and ambivalence render her more convincing, if not quite as sympathetic.

There are moments taken from history. Dunn looks on as a prisoner draped in a blanket, outlines the famous five conditions, "our just and right demands" that make the distinction between political and criminal status. In fairness to Dean she does not try to explain the conflict in the North. At no time does the narrative collapse into well intended platitudes.

When Angie remarks to Dunn's son, "Just because a person wants a united Ireland doesn't make him more Irish than me. You see the difference is we're happy with our lot. We've got our own ways here in Ulster. What we have here, and it's not very much, we've worked for, so we have. Why should we give it away? Let them go down South if that's what they're after", she succeeds in sounding like a working class Protestant woman who is making conversation, not delivering a speech.

There is a workmanlike quality to the novel; the prose is flat and the sexuality has a rawness. Kathleen's dilemma has all the shifts and ambiguities of real life. Several of the scenes in which she battles her husband are well handled, one in which he parodies Santa Claus is excellent.

Dean looked to a situation strangle-held by tribal hatreds but has been sufficiently shrewd and humane not to offer any easy answers in a convincing narrative that is honest and stylistically unpretentious.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times