I first read Seamus Deane's novel-memoir, Reading in the Dark, shortly after it was published in 1996, and I must confess it did not make much of an impression on me. Despite rave reviews--Seamus Heaney called it a "sudden, brilliant book," and other critics were similarly awed by Deane's story of how a Catholic family living on the Northern Irish border during the 1940s and '50s was torn apart by political strife--I just didn't get it. I didn't know much about Irish history, I had never been to Ireland myself, I had not read much Irish literature, and the whole thing just went miles over my head.

Since then, I have become deeply interested in Irish history and Irish writing. Part of that interest is genealogical (I began doing serious research on my family history about four years ago, and discovered that I have four great-great grandparents who were famine immigrants); part of it is intellectual (Irish history is inherently interesting, and Irish writing, at least from the late nineteenth-century onward, is frequently remarkable); part of it is experiental (I've spent considerable time in Ireland over the past several years, living in rural villages near where Deane's novel is set).

So it's not surprising that on re-reading Reading in the Dark, my thoughts about it are entirely different from what they were the first time around. Deane's is indeed a "sudden, brilliant" book--elegaic and angry at once in ways that I have come to associate with some of the best Irish writing of the late twentieth century (John McGahern, Roddy Doyle, and Heaney come particularly to mind). I won't belabor my recommendation by trying to string along persuasive or intriguing comments about the book; I'll just recommend it and let it speak for itself.

Here's the first chapter:

STAIRS
February 1945

On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence.

It was a short staircase, fourteen steps in all, covered in lino from which the original pattern had been polished away even to the point where it had the look of a faint memory. Eleven steps took you to the turn of the stairs where the cathedral and the sky always hung in the window frame. Three more steps took you to the landing, about six feet long.

"Don't move," my mother said from the landing. "Don't cross that window."

I was on the tenth step, she was on the landing. I could have touched her.

"There's something there between us. A shadow. Don't move."

I had no intention. I was enthralled. But I could see no shadow.

"There's somebody there. Sombody unhappy. Go back down the stairs, son."

I retreated one step. "How'll you get down?"

"I'll stay awhile and it will go away."

"How do you know?"

"I'll feel it gone."

"What if it doesn't go?"

"It always does. I'll not be long."

I stood there, looking up at her. I loved her then. She was small and anxious, but without real fear.

"I'm sure I could walk up there to you, in two skips."

"No, no. God knows. It's bad enough me feeling it; I don't want you to as well."

"I don't mind feeling it. It's a bit like the smell of damp clothes, isn't it?"

She laughed. "No, nothing like that. Don't talk yourself into believing it. Just go downstairs."

I went down, excited, and sat at the range with its red heart fire and black lead dust. We were haunted! We had a ghost, even in the middle of the afternoon. I heard her moving upstairs. The house was all cobweb tremors. No matter where I walked, it yielded before me and settled behind me. She came down after a bit, looking white.

"Did you see anything?"

"No, nothing, nothing at all. It's just your old mother with her nerves. All imagination. There's nothing there."

I was up at the window before she could say anything more, but there was nothing there. I stared into the moiling darkness. I heard the clock in the bedroom clicking and the wind breathing through the chimney, and saw the neutral glimmer on the banister vanish into my hand as I slid my fingers down. Four steps before the kitchen door, I felt someone behind me and turned to see a darkness leaving the window.

My mother was crying quietly by the fireside. I went in and sat on the floor beside her and stared into the redness locked behind the bars of the range.

Erin, have you perchance read "Year of the French" by Thomas Flanagan? It's a novel based on the abortive uprising in County Mayo in 1798, and I think the writing is truly exquisite.

An amazon.com reviewer named Ralph Peters referred to the book as "the finest historical novel written in English, at least in the twentieth century"...I believe this is the same Ralph Peters who is the noted terrorism export and a prolific author of novels in his own right.

David,

Flanagan is amazing. I read his Tenants of Time, which centers on the Fenian Uprising of 1867 and its long regional aftermath, last summer, and The Year of the French is actually next on my list, after John McGahern's Amongst Women, for reading this summer.