Irish FictionPost-Celtic Tiger Ireland is spawning many new fictional modes. Chief amongst them are postmodern fables and virtual histories. Another Sky, Colm O'Gaora's second novel, also breaks with fixed traditions as, unusually, it is a Troubles fiction written by a Southern writer.
This is a daring departure which has attendant risks. Eschewing the thriller plots or experimentalism adopted by many Northern writers, O'Gaora composes instead a resonantly symbolist narrative. The condensed lyricism that characterizes Another Sky seems as much a token of the unease of Southern Ireland with regard to the recent history of the North as a signature of the author's distinctive style.
Charting the story of a Catholic family living in Portnew, O'Gaora traces how the Troubles gradually impinge on and eventually destroy the lives of all of its members. Even though the plot inevitably revolves around the murder of a favourite uncle by Loyalists, the narrative tries to dispel reflex responses by simultaneously presenting a teasingly elusive story. Michael, the central figure, is captivated by two women, Frances, a fellow-teacher in his London school who evades his attentions, and Catherine, a sister who mysteriously goes missing, never to return home again, as sectarian divisions gather momentum. Their haunting absences suggestively sketch out the trauma of political violence.
The narrator movingly describes the effects of grief both on his parents and himself. The repetition compulsion of their lives testifies to the vacuum left by family members who have been brutally snatched away. Silences and empty rooms function as signs of losses that cannot be assuaged. In the aftermath of his brother's murder, Michael's father symbolically gives up carpentry, the craft that had been his livelihood and his passion, to become a window-cleaner. He ekes out a precarious existence as he is spurned by his local community because of his teenage daughter's secret relationship with a Protestant boy. His struggle for existence and diminished stature capture the family's economic and emotional decline as well as the mounting effects of sectarian antagonisms.
In addition to its political themes, Another Sky may be seen as a story about memory and painful self-realization. As in A Crooked Field, O'Gaora's previous novel, the family is depicted as a site of bruising psychosis. The selfhood of his figures is incestuously bound up with familial relations from which they cannot extricate themselves.
At the end of Another Sky, the narrator reflects on his fragmented recollections of his lost sister. He realises that time has not diminished her for him but that paradoxically "with each memory she is taken further from me". The shared bond of family history seems both an unavoidable condition of being and a dreadful form of entrapment.
The social milieu that O'Gaora depicts is rendered in shorthand. His novel shifts uneasily, but deliberately, from historical precision to symbolic allusiveness. His writing similarly veers between spare and uninflected narration and vividly lyrical bursts of description. Many of his social settings remain shadowy due to this stylistic economy. His characters come most to life in outdoor settings and when observed through the prism of skilfully rendered accounts of the natural world.
O'Gaora's foray into the genre of the Troubles novel has lots to commend it. Its bittersweet lyricism and filigree portrayal of lastingly damaged existences linger in the imagination and emotively capture the effects of a traumatic history that refuses to be buried.
Anne Fogarty lectures in the Department of English, University College, Dublin, and is director of the James Joyce Summer School
Another Sky By Colm O'Gaora Picador, 184 pp, £10.99