READING THE DARK

By Seamus Deene

246 pp., $12

Vintage

The terrain of Seamus Deane's new novel can be stunningly lovely, as green and verdant as one would expect the Emerald Isle to be. His young narrator, never named, frolics though ferns and splashes in streams in near-idyllic countryside whenever he gets the chance to slip off with his friends. Yet all is not serene in this seeming pastoral; each crossing of the clear and shallow brook is a violation of the law. The narrator lives on the border of the Irish Free State, and the river hems him into his native Northern Ireland.

Furtive infrequent forays into the Free State aside, the narrator spends most of his days in less resplendent parts of Northern Ireland than stream's edge. His is a rather drab, traditional world, where the Catholic Church is the final arbiter of any question, but where religious allegiance must be downplayed to avoid the attention of the Protestant authorities, who are especially vigilant in the years following World War II in which the book is set. Old grudges are fresh in this society, and memories of the not-so-distant rebellions are almost more vivid than the events of daily life.

In this fragmented land, the narrator must cope with his fragmented household. "So broken was my father's family," he claims, "that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet," but native childish curiosity drives him to push for answers. His father's family, with its tragic breakup and its missing brother, who may or may not have been an IRA hero, holds a score of riddles, and his mother's, which is mysteriously bound to his father's by more than their marriage, is just as puzzling. No adult will speak to him directly of the families' history, and his knowledge of the troubled family story emerges from half-heard whispers and details gleaned from emotional outbursts. His desire to rip through the fabric of dense half-truths and "cooked up" stories becomes nothing less than a quest, a constant crusade for answers inextricably linked with his gradual maturation.

The answers come erratically, as a scrap of conversation here or a deathbed confession there, and Deane's irregular structure mirrors the gradual unfurling of the family secrets. A series of brief vignettes spanning more than twenty years, unevenly spaced and heavily concentrated in the days of the narrator's extreme youth, reveals information as the narrator learns it, Deane writes with all the immediacy and intrusive intimacy of a diarist, and even the wildest, most implausible developments in the tale seem like mere fact when conveyed in his narrator's steady voice.

Deane's narrative seems so plausible because he immerses the reader in all the murk and fog that his narrator experiences. The book is a slow starter, because all the ignorance and bafflement the boy would naturally feel in his extreme youth are certainly shared by the unwitting reader, who must view the store through the narrator's skewed vision.

But as the narrator grows older and more pieces of the familial puzzle fall into place, the novel starts to slowly simmer. The vignettes, always sharp and memorable even when their point is nor readily apparent, become increasingly lucid as the mystery unravels. Cavalcades of transient images fill three or four pages at a time and then vanish, but their aftereffects are less ephemeral. The constant aggregation of detail that comes with passing years explains exactly the boy's gradual understanding of his tortured familial history.

Although the novel certainly does center on the travails of the narrator's family, in no way does that limit the interest of Deane's far-flung vignettes. Within the framework of the controlling mystery, Deane comments on everything from Catholic School to the violence plaguing Northern Ireland to this day. One of his most disturbing but beautiful scenes occurs when the narrator watches the men of the neighborhood set bonfires to burn rats out of defunct air raid shelters. Imagine the wonders he can work when satirizing a sadistically strict math teacher or when describing the ghost of the narrator's little sister. Another ghost story, related by the narrator's aunt by way of Henry James' Turn of the Screw, gains spookiness in the retelling. And the sex talk kindly given the narrator by an avuncular priest, which leads the boy to conclude that "love is in Latin, lust isn't," is uproarious.

One day in class the narrator's teacher praises a simple yet effecting essay written by a country boy, while the citified narrator is chagrined by thoughts of his own, which "had been full of long or strange words [he] had found in the dictionary." Although Deane himself uses a sufficient number of twentyfive-cent words to be considered a "literary" author, for whatever that's worth, his style is as down-to-earth as any country boy's. His lovely prose reads effortlessly. Another writer would drown such a tenuous, fragile plot with the dense description Deane favors, but Deane makes observations like "a pulse passes up and down from my head to my toes as though someone had slashed me from behind" or "the armchairs on either side of the fire [were] now mute and emptied of all confidences in the whitened light of...the tall windows" seem not only unaffected but completely natural. Hmmph, that's exactly how I would phrase it myself, one thinks wishfully.

Deane's silken prose eventually weaves the thousands of shards of the narrator's family together into a whole, however unhappy. His blend of the happy and solemn is moving at times, worrisome at others and fascinating always. Although Deane, a professor at Notre Dame and a published critic and poet, is no stranger to writing, Reading in the Dark is his first venture into fictional territory. The boundary between poetry and fiction, especially for Deane, with that glowing prose, is not as stringent as that between the two Irelands; with any luck, this novel will not be his last.