Autumn sees the reissue of not one but two books by the Cullybackey-born writer Ian Cochrane. Following the success of their 2018 reissue of F For Ferg, Turnpike Books is now publishing his 1973 debut novel, A Streak of Madness, alongside The Last Word, a collection of Cochrane’s award-winning short stories.
Much celebrated during his lifetime, with accolades including second place in the Guardian Fiction Prize, Cochrane’s work fell out of print after his untimely death in 2004. His stories occupy a unique position within the Irish literary landscape. The majority of his work focuses on the rural, working-class, Protestant experience in Co Antrim. It’s a community and locale somewhat under-represented in prose fiction. As such, Cochrane’s writing is both long overdue a revival and ripe for academic analysis. His influence on writers such as Pat McCabe and Maurice Leitch is clear and ongoing. Personally, I’m indebted to Cochrane. I drew heavily on his use of place and language when writing my last novel, The Raptures.
Cochrane’s work is sometimes playfully referred to as Cullybackey Gothic. It’s irreverent, dark and unflinching. His writing is characterised by an acidic brand of humour and a celebration of the absurd. Occasionally repetitive, yet always marked by a hard-won authenticity, his stories circle round the same familiar preoccupations: the family, religious hysteria, youth, mental health and repressed sexuality. Cochrane had an uncanny ability to reveal the worst in people whilst retaining a fondness for humanity.
In his novel, A Streak of Madness, Cochrane employs one of his characteristically unsentimental child narrators to chart the progress of a working-class family as they move from rural isolation to a recently built council house in a country village. Despite his parents’ scepticism, the eldest son Ralph is intent upon pursuing his art instead of acquiring a “proper job”. Encouraged by a progressive teacher modelled on RL Russell – the teacher who nurtured Cochrane’s own early creative inclinations – Ralph not only accepts a place in art college but also challenges the hypocrisy of his parents’ religion and opposes the cruel way in which they treat a young cousin with a learning disability.
Nothing escapes Cochrane’s analytical gaze in this hilarious and brutal story of rural life. There’s an excellent, but incredibly disturbing, account of the young narrator’s first week working at the local mill, a mortifying description of his early sexual encounters and several colourful anecdotes about the family’s run-ins with the clergy. It’s a slim novel, packed with larger-than-life characters. Cochrane manages to critique the hypocrisies of his upbringing while simultaneously revealing his love for this community.
The stories in The Last Word explore similar themes. Cochrane’s landscape is inhabited by an almost biblical smorgasbord of sinners and lost souls. Murderers, drunkards, blasphemers and fornicators populate the countryside, so Co Antrim seems less of a rural idyll than a dark and threatening place for children to grow up in. Many of these stories reminded me of fairy tales for adults, though they’re more likely to end in eternal damnation than happily ever after.
Dark as Cochrane’s pen might be, his language is so energetic, so uniquely angled towards the dialogue of his home place and so thickly peppered with bawdy humour that none of his stories drag their heels. As such, this collection will appeal to fans of Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan’s earlier work. Fans of Flannery O’Connor and Southern Gothic will resonate with the way Cochrane lends the grotesque grace, questioning the culpability of even his most vile character.
Each individual is presented as a victim of circumstance, simply trying to navigate the harsh realities of their own existence, using drink, sex or religion as a means of escape. Once again, the child appears as a repeated motif, not so much symbolising innocence as the ability to question and imagine and perhaps, in doing so, escape the legacy of trauma they’ve been born into.
The collection concludes with an interview for Jennings magazine which Cochrane gave to Paul McGrath in 1985. Admissions such as, “I allow the writing to move its own way” reveal his naturalistic writing process and the way Cochrane drew heavily from his own life experience, homing in on his childhood in Co Antrim before moving to London as a teenager. Philip Taylor provides a helpful and concise yet comprehensive afterword, outlining Cochrane’s intriguing journey as a writer and giving welcome insight into his ongoing relevance and influence.
It would be remiss not to point out that some of Cochrane’s preoccupations may seem somewhat unpalatable to contemporary readers. In satirising mid-century attitudes towards women, sexuality and mental health issues he occasionally walks a fine line between condoning and critiquing, and there are some passages which definitely made me squirm. However, Ian Cochrane’s work speaks so boldly, brilliantly and uniquely about rural, working-class life in the North that he fully deserves another day in the sun.
