Book review: Poking fun at Northern Ireland’s preoccupation with symbols and identity
Jan Carson: Her fiction incorporates elements of absurdism and magic realism.
- Quickly, While They Still Have Horses
- Jan Carson
- Doubleday, €16.99
The stories in Jan Carson’s poke delicious fun at Northern Ireland’s preoccupation with symbols and identity.
In the winningly-titled ‘One Hander’, the Red Hand of Ulster suddenly vanishes from flags and crests — and a bloody, dismembered hand, raw and wrapped in clingfilm, appears on a plate in a character’s fridge, on the same shelf as the cheese and margarine.
Elsewhere, entrenched tribal rivalries are skewered: a Protestant couple is discommoded when their daughter, Catherine, becomes involved with a member of the opposing community.
“It’s not just the lesbian thing that’s grating on them. Clodagh’s the other sort too. Her family’s from Letterkenny.” When Clodagh hears that Catherine’s family frequently have picnics in unlikely places, including once in a multi-storey carpark, she’s baffled: “Is it a Protestant thing?”
In a collection where all 16 stories are set in the North, this outsider’s perspective is an important refrain as it underlines the peculiarities of the place.
The title story, arguably the finest in the book, unfolds in a near future where horses are being eliminated from the UK.
The narrator lives in Camden and can’t persuade Paola, his unconventional Spanish girlfriend, to visit the North, his homeplace.
Desperately, he even suggests the Twelfth is “a genuine cultural experience”.
But Paola only goes to Belfast because it has the last remaining horse in the UK (“we get everything six months after the Mainland”, a character explains).
His hope that by visiting the city Paola will understand what it means to come from there is torpedoed when she expresses her contempt for Belfast’s rain, people, and their nasally and excessively fast way of speaking.
If they have a future together as a couple, he concludes, it won’t be in “this damp excuse of a place”.
Thirty years after the IRA ceasefire that ultimately led to the Good Friday Agreement, there is a sense throughout that the expectations created by the peace process are unfulfilled.
Born in Ballymena, Carson lives in Belfast.
Her fiction incorporates elements of absurdism and magic realism.
She has written two previous short-story collections, and , and three novels, , (winner of the 2019 EU Prize for Literature), and .
The stories in Quickly,… are variously told in the first, second, and third person, the focus is frequently on working class characters, and the book’s trademark is Carson’s use of the vernacular: “the paramedics were in with Marty round the corner (not Marty Barr, the other Marty, with the leg)”.
With a photographer’s eye for detail, she deploys striking images that reveal the eccentricities of her characters.
Senior citizens wanting to receive a cure from a woman who swims in their local baths linger “round the pool like elephants toeing the edge of a watering hole”.
A character disguises her weight by carrying an anorak in front of her “like a wine waiter’s towel” while another’s handbag flaps from her shoulder “like a chicken wing”.
Humour is in the foreground of most of these deftly-written stories, but occasionally heartbreak becomes the drumbeat.
Two of the most accomplished stories pivot on the birth and death of children.
Victoria and her husband’s plans to announce her pregnancy after rounds of IVF treatment are scuppered by a drama that embodies how her husband is always belittled by his family.
Meanwhile, in ‘Jellyfish’ a couple strives to salvage their marriage after a bereavement where the husband believes his wife was complicit in their loss.
“Loneliness,” the narrator suggests, “is the only thing we can give each other right now.”
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