Early in A Cold Eye, Carlo Gébler’s vivid and arresting diary as memoir, the author revisits the events of January 7th, 1991. He and his family have set off from London for Holyhead, the ferry to Ireland, the drive north to their home near Enniskillen.
Every part of this journey is tiring — but no element in the experience is as tiring as the attempt to get across the border from Cavan to Fermanagh in the winter darkness. Gébler’s heart sinks as journey’s end approaches: “The border was a contested space: things had happened there; none had happened to us, to me, but the body, if not the mind, knew things could go wrong there and was preparing for that possibility by putting me on my mettle.”
The first Border checkpoint is closed, although it is supposed to be open, and so the family detours to Clones, where the gates are also closed, with a tetchy note attached: “We apologise for the delay. Please do not blame us. Blame the Terrorists.” And then: “Please take your litter home with you.” In an addendum to this diary entry, Gébler writes that “hindsight being the fine thing it is, I see that night in County Cavan as a sign of failure, state failure, the blame for which can largely be laid at the feet of the country that ought to have known better.”
A Cold Eye is structured as a compendium of such diary entries: with one entry selected each year for 35 years. Gébler notes his debt to the German author Christa Wolf, who memorialised her own life and times by publishing her diary entries for September 27th over 51 years. And Gébler shares further characteristics with Wolf: a deeply felt sensitivity to his surroundings and the alterations, sometimes rapid and sometimes less so, in the societies and environments within which he lives and moves; an awareness of the drenching effect of ideology upon individual lives and on communities; and not least, a willingness to take on the work of intense and ongoing self-interrogation as a necessary element in a writer’s life.
Such a specific structure serves the book and the reader well, enabling a range of insights: macroscopic views across the decades; general takes on social and cultural mores; those observations of moments in time that will remain always in our memories. Where were you when the World Trade Centre in New York was attacked on September 11th, 2001? Gébler was ensconced in his writing room, with no radio, no TV, was some hours late to an event that — like the Kennedy assassination, he notes — brought viewers and listeners together.
[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window ]
Have you ever noticed the cultural differences between England and Ireland in the matter of death rituals? Gébler attends an Irish wake in Fermanagh on December 17th, 2006, pays his respects to the dead woman and her family, and burns with indignation at the medical flaws that almost certainly led to her early death. Two years later, on October 9th, 2008, he attends an Irish funeral Mass in Essex, alive to the ways in which the ceremony affects the different tribes within the congregation. One of these tribes is made up of a single individual: Gébler himself. “Catholicism is appalling, even though I will also take the communion […] but I can also see that for the suffering relatives of the deceased […] the service performed a miracle: it made the situation bearable.”
Gébler has long been an astringent observer of the North: and his position over many years as a writer-in-residence within the Northern Ireland prison service has afforded him deep and frequently troubling knowledge of republican and loyalist hearts, minds and ideologies. The entry for May 22nd, 1998 — the day of the referendums on the Belfast Agreement — encapsulates these insights and describes their effects upon Gébler himself. Voting Yes means voting for early prisoner release: the prisoners themselves have impressed this knowledge upon the author long ago and he reflects on his role in this transition. Inmates ask, “Why do you think you’re here helping us to write?” — telling him it’s because the British state has long since silently consented to the principle of early release. The inmates, then, are already preparing for the future and Gébler goes on to vote Yes, in full recognition of his role in the process.
Knowledge, self-knowledge, these are necessary elements in our lives and the catalyst for a writing life. As Carlo Gébler recognises: “The material fate gives, is all you get.”
Neil Hegarty is an author and critic. His latest book is The Jewel
