Reopening the affairs of this magazine’s Business Section after some fifteen years in abeyance, it would feel delinquent to history did I not begin proceedings with a small nod in the direction of my predecessor in this role. Gerard Keenan, Jude the Obscure, debuted this column in 1971 and, subsequently, went on to steer its course continually until 2003. In doing so, Keenan established arguably the most sustained critical voice in British and Irish letters of the late twentieth century, missing only one edition of the magazine in over three decades of literary and cultural appraisal. The Business Section was not, however, his first appearance in the magazine; in late 1970 a letter, appearing under another of his pseudonyms, ‘Joe Biggar’, was published by editors Frank Ormsby and Michael Foley. While praising the magazine’s take on literary affairs, the letter established a standard for the evaluation of authorial worth that was as muscular as it was enigmatic: ‘the only thing worse than an amateur is a professional. The only thing worse than a professional is an amateur.’ The search for literary and critical light between the crushing circularity of this statement was to form the defining preoccupation of Keenan’s career, a median point between the polarities of judgement he eventually came to term ‘the other thing’, a phrase that would eventually come to title a collected edition of his essays in The Professional, The Amateur, and The Other Thing, published in 1995. In his quest for this elusive, almost spiritual quality, Keenan could possess a messianic tendency when presented with those he felt deficient their capacity, as in his appraisal of W.R Rodgers who, in that same first letter, he dismissed as having “wrote nothing […] He was not a poet, why did he write?” Before going on to address the entire 20th Century: “so smug about itself, will have to grow up someday and have the guts to throw away 90% of the rubbish it swallowed as art in its adolescence.”

     The purpose of this meander down the back-roads of Irish literary history is to emphasise the contextual setting for this column and its progenitor to serve both as a touchstone of its past, and a point for its departure to the present state of literary criticism, such as it is, in the opening decades of the 21st Century. The instantaneous nature of communication such as now exists may have visited many advantages, if not mere conveniences, upon our times but reflection and consideration in analysis or discussion are not among them. The white noise of a planet in angry, opinionated motion is accessible, though not necessarily avoidable, at any place or time as may be demanded. As such, to rennervate this column solely to offer up a performative pastiche of the highly combative and at times overtly aggressive style of critique for which it became renowned would offer little to the contemporary register of debate. Moreover, on a personal level, the present writer’s position regarding the nature of literature and art are rather less concerned with a severe policing of artistic pieties as a central determiner for the evaluation of literary merit. I am, insomuch as it matters, interested by that in writing which seeks to divine meaning from the viscera of human experience. At its best, literature is the foremost means of intellectual and emotional illustration known to humankind and need not demonstrate or prescribe or hector or preach to prove its worth. Literature, at its most elemental: the telling of stories, the relaying of tales, the building of mythologies, represents some of the oldest human behaviour still practiced on this earth; it is the signature of civilisation, and all and everything entertained between. 

     At this point it would seem appropriate to introduce the main preoccupation of today’s column, namely Jan Carson’s recent novel The Fire Starters. Published this April, the book has won international acclaim for its intriguing treatise on contemporary Belfast, with Carson having subsequently been awarded the European Prize For Literature. With the novel’s form taking shape at askance angles, through a series of fragmentary accounts and perspectives, and chiefly revolving around the disparate connections of two East Belfast men, interspersed by occasioned vignettes that visit the lives of the achingly well-named ‘Unfortunate Children of East Belfast’. The diffuse, rippling style of narrative development complements the lockjaw paradox of a city Carson simultaneously introduces and conceals in the same sentence: “THIS IS BELFAST. This is not Belfast.” The ensuing description captures an essence of the irreducible contradictions that continue to pervade so much of Belfast and Northern Irish cultural life. Indeed, one of the novel’s great triumphs is its compassionate articulation of the often crabbed, one-step-forward-two-steps-sideways nature of Northern Ireland’s journey through the opening decades of this century. In this success, the story is well served by Carson’s deft manipulation of the Magical Realist style. At first glance, the physical geography of what she terms “the inner East” seems an unlikely setting for a novel that encompasses be-winged girls and a boy who sees the future in all liquid surfaces; its architecture is of dark brick and orderly pattern, bolstered robustly by numerous churches, while its social history holds dear a pedigree and esteem for the heaviest of heavy industries. However, as the book begins its exploration of contemporary Loyalism through the haunted figure of ex-combatant Sammy Agnew, the style adds a welcome nuance to the author’s observations of the contrasts between the physical and cultural infrastructure of East Belfast. Carson herself has spoken at extensive and eloquent length about the out-sized nature of Loyalist symbology and its capacity for exaggerating the touchstones of historical reference at times of tension and uncertainty. In her drawing of Agnew, she merits particular praise for avoiding the all too familiar caricatures of Loyalist masculinity; a demographic frequently derided and demonised in equally contemptuous measure. Among the recent upswing in Northern Irish writing, there remains a noticeable lack of male Loyalist characters whose development rises much beyond a brutal, monochrome violence. While in no way attempting to whitewash the brooding spectre of paramilitarism from Agnew, Carson endows him with a touching humanity by rooting his path to redemption in a desire to live a life more ordinary: to be a loving and attentive husband, and a protective and present father.

     Parenting, fatherhood especially, dominates much of the novel’s thematic matter. Here, once more, Carson warrants applause for her willingness to assume male viewpoints for her main characters. At a time when so much self-appointed commentariat froths with a shrill condemnation of artists and writers who look to engage with avenues of experience beyond the immutable happenstance of their own existence, her decision makes for a bold and fresh reading of a heavyweight subject. Art ultimately profits nothing from incest, and cultures will not prosper when walls are built around them. Few places know this more pointedly than Belfast, and the book’s representation of Northern Irish fatherhood offers up a fascinating exposition of the persistent legacy of political division, and the potential for the heritability of trauma. Besides Agnew, the novel’s chief protagonist is emotionally stunted, chronically insecure Dr. Jonathan Murray. Born to distant, disengaged parents who ultimately abandon him at their earliest legal convenience, Jonathan finds himself floundering, unable to register or maintain any meaningful emotional connection with another person. This will ultimately lead him into the arms of a Siren, who he meets while making a house call, and who in true sirenic fashion, manages to control him entirely by using her voice. The pair end up having a child together, with the Siren living for some nine months in Jonathan’s bathtub before abandoning him soon after their daughter is born, leaving him both struggling as a single parent, and stricken with anxiety about the moment his child will start to speak. 

     Simultaneously, Belfast is hit with a rash of arson instigated at the behest of a sinisterly enigmatic internet personality named the Fire Starter. Here, Carson draws skilfully on the imagery and tensions attendant to the bonfires of Eleventh Night, leaving an East Belfast polity for who “it is part of their culture to burn things” wrong footed as to their moral and practical response to infernos they did not create and can neither control or set to any ideological purpose. Agnew quickly becomes convinced the Fire Starter is his own son, Mark, in who he senses a violence of similar standing to that which drove his own thuggish past as a paramilitary carjacker. It is while grappling with these weighty themes of contested culture, sin, and redemption from violence, that the kaleidoscopic qualities of the novel’s stylistics are at their most effective, as they highlight the shifting nature of experience when subject to a contingency of perspective.

     While Agnew struggles to come to terms with the corrosive effects of his son, the guilt of his past, and his drifting marriage, Murray becomes increasingly desperate at the vast, destructive potential of his daughter. His desperation leads to his encounters with a support group of sorts of unusual childhood conditions. It is here he encounters the full extent of the ‘Unfortunate Children of East Belfast’; children with remarkably offbeat capabilities who leave their parents floundering as to how to accommodate them. Here, Murray’s inability to form empathetic or emotional connections with others renders him unable to find solace in the group, or for their respective situations to offer any guidance as to his own plight. This isolation leads him ultimately to the tortured conclusion that he must cut out his daughter’s tongue in order to keep from unleashing her on the world. This resolution, so protracted in its gestation, is ultimately undone in an instant, with her first and only utterance of the book, “da”. Here, the fathomless potential of parental love is laid bare as a means to make anew those small parts of the world that are within our grasp. Meanwhile, Agnew’s own reckoning comes as he resolves to take the blame for his son’s actions. Trading on his own murderous past, he reveals his plan to Mark: “I’ve told them it was me. They’ll believe me. I’ve got history. They never sent me away before. I was part of the deal […] I don’t mind doing it. I’m your dad. It’s what I’m meant to do.” Only to be met with a callous and high-handed rebuttal by his son: “You haven’t the intelligence to do what I’ve done. Did you really think you could swan in here like Christ on a cross and take the blame? You an even bigger idiot than I thought you were.” With salvation rendered redundant, and the slow realisation by Agnew that his violent tendencies are his alone, and not something he had bequeathed his son, he finds himself freed momentarily from the need to repress the instinct, leading him to batter his Mark into unconsciousness. As he waits for the police, cradling his son, Agnew reflects on the essentialism of parenthood, on the catharsis of projected and reflected guilt, shame, and atonement all stripped away, leaving the common core of humanity as a raw vital stump: “he feels closer to his son than he has for decades. He knows him, surface skin to devil core. And his feeling Is not love but something more essential, like the knowing of his own bastard head […] He knows without reason or regret that he will still be feeling the heavy burn of Mark years later, still carrying the dead of him in his blood and bones. For this is what it is to be a father and he cannot give back the privilege.” In these twin encapsulations of familial sacrifice and resolution, if not quite redemption, Carson successfully transcends the context of post-ceasefire Belfast to probe tellingly at a live wire of universal experience. In doing so, she has written a fascinating book that engages successfully on multiple levels, and one that will surely provoke consideration and study for many years hereafter.