It’s been wonderful to see so much great literature being written by Northern Irish women in recent years.The big ticket item was Anna Burns winning the Man Booker in 2018 for Milkman, but authors such as Susannah Dickey, Lucy Caldwell, Medbh McGuckian, Louise Kennedy, Wendy Erskine and Rosemary Jenkinson – to name just some – are producing great plays, short stories, novels and poetry in a mood that’s sometimes been described as “post-conflict”.
Jan Carson’s second novel, The Fire Starters, won the EU Prize for Literature Ireland in 2019. Her new novel, The Raptures, is set in Ballylack, a small town in Northern Ireland where it’s 1993 and Hannah Adger has just turned 11. In a village with “half a dozen other churches” Hannah is the only child from an evangelical charismatic sect. The summer holidays have just begun when the children in Hannah’s class begin to sicken with a mystery illness.
Having an 11-year-old narrator is always a dicey proposition – it’s easy to tip over into unbearable cuteness or to invest the child with implausible amounts of insight – but The Raptures is narrated with enormous charm.
In a world that’s already rigidly segregated, Hannah is more separate than any other child and her acceptance of all the things she can’t do – going to the panto, the cinema, learning about dinosaurs, celebrating Halloween – is conveyed with a spirited innocence. (“Cinema starts with sin,” Hannah’s dad tells her, which makes her wonder about his ability to spell.)
All of this plays out against the backdrop of the Troubles, the violence so everpresent it’s almost mundane. One of the few things Hannah is allowed to watch is the news: “There’s never a night when nobody dies.” Then suddenly death moves much nearer – the first child dies.
In her fiction, Carson has used magic realism with breezy conviction. So it is here. A sickly classmate called Ross shows up in Hannah’s bathroom, surprising her having a middle-of-the-night wee. Hannah isn’t so much freaked out by Ross’s being dead as mortified that he witnessed something private.
Worse, Ross isn’t enjoying being dead and soon she’s scared by his distress. In a tragicomic scene, she tries to bundle him out the front door, reaching for the polite phrases her parents might use to bounce visitors who’ve overstayed their welcome. “Always here if you need a listening ear.” Then, as she slams the door in his face, “Thanks for dropping by. Don’t be a stranger.”
At this point the novel’s focus shifts to Alan Gardner. A local farmer, Gardner “is not a bad man”. He tells himself this a lot, even though he doesn’t – can’t – love his son. Or, indeed, his wife. He “got his wife from an old folk’s home”. Maganda, originally from the Phillippines, had been taking care of his elderly mother. He’d needed a substantial woman who was capable of hard work; he wooed her by telling her she had good strong teeth.
Maganda has made a good wife. He only has to mutter “Megan” and whatever he needs – “Food, clean socks, a quick fumble at her ample breasts” – and she’ll understand and immediately oblige. His brutal pragmatism is breathtaking yet grotesquely believable. The Raptures is dense with such devastating observations, yet the whole thing slips down easily.
As the children in Ballylack continue to sicken, Hannah watches, wondering when it will be her turn. Among the adults, long-established identities begin to unravel: meek wives suddenly find their mojo, while godly men find the idea of violence taking on a new, sparkly lustre. Powerless and searching for a solution, a cure, nobody in the town wants to involve the RUC, the paramilitaries or the politicians; instead they fall back on their respective religions.
This is a novel about faith – and its limitations. It’s also a story of love. Hannah – and indeed all the children – are loved with fierce tenderness; their parents’ agony is conveyed with visceral effect. But painful as it sometimes was, I could not stop reading. There’s enough playfulness, wit and empathy to sweeten the pill.
It’s almost impossible to categorise this novel. Is it a coming-of-age story? An exploration of faith – its comforts, its abuse, its limitations? A depiction of day-to-day life in a war zone? A dramatisation of living with a plague (something we’ve all had to become used to)? It’s every one of these and more.
Original and vivid, The Raptures is its own beautiful, unique thing.
Marian Keyes’s latest novel, Again, Rachel, is out next month
