I first read this in January 2020 for the Irish Writers book group. Burns’ style is fascinating. The narrator has an almost academic reserve. Characters don’t have names and are instead referred to by their roles. We get lists of terms, foods, euphemisms…. The book is very funny and very sad. It’s especially brilliant on the paradoxes and self-cramping of a world of violence – “the man who didn’t love anybody” is the kindest of all.
I re-read it in January 2023 for the Second Monday book group. Now that I had assimilated the style, it didn’t seem as novel; it was great in a different way. But I marked more passages.
In this book I looked up:
- crombie – three-quarter length wool overcoat
- Julie Covington, “Only Women Bleed“
- Jeyes Fluid – want to smell it, but it sounds like the odor has changed
- housey-housey – bingo
- Bamber the Pig – couldn’t find in 2020, still can’t find!
- Paris buns
- wilucs – whelks?
Short quotes
- “In those days, in that place, violence was everybody’s main gauge for judging those around them”
- “This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.”
- “Although I loved running, the monotony of the wheelrun told me I didn’t love it that much” (ie running laps)
- “you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to”
- Maybe-boyfriend’s decamped parents “had written a note, said the neighbours, but had forgotten to leave it; indeed primarily they had forgotten to write it”
- “keenness and initiative get stifled here, turned to discouragement, twisted too, into darker channels”
- “Never did it occur to them that my powers of acuity and deception might have exceeded their own powers of acuity and deception. People can be extraordinarily slipshod whenever already they have made up their minds.”
- “‘Are you saying it’s okay for him to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?’”
- “‘Have you been fecundated by him? … Imbued by him?’ she elaborated. ‘Engendered in. Breeded in. Fertilised, vexed, embarrassed, sprinkled, caused to feel regret, wished not to have happened – dear God, child, do I have to spell it out?’”
- “marrying in doubt, marrying in guilt, marrying in regret, in fear, in despair, in blame, also in terrible self-sacrifice was pretty much the unspoken matrimonial requisite here”
- “how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult”
- “Sister exploded into advanced asterisks, into percentage marks, crossword symbol signs, ampersands, circumflexes, hash keys, dollar signs, all that ‘If You See Kay’ blue french language.”
Longer quotes
I didn’t know whose milkman he was. He wasn’t our milkman. I don’t think he was anybody’s. He didn’t take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn’t ever deliver milk. Also, he didn’t drive a milk lorry.
At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment. I had a feeling for them, an intuition, a sense of repugnance for some situations and some people, but I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near.
The banned names were: Nigel, Jason, Jasper, Lance, Percival, Wilbur, Wilfred, Peregrine, Norman, Alf, Reginald, Cedric, Ernest, George, Harvey, Arnold, Wilberine, Tristram, Clive, Eustace, Auberon, Felix, Peverill, Winston, Godfrey, Hector, with Hubert, a cousin of Hector, also not allowed. Nor was Lambert or Lawrence or Howard or the other Laurence or Lionel or Randolph because Randolph was like Cyril which was like Lamont which was like Meredith, Harold, Algernon and Beverley. Myles too, was not allowed. Nor was Evelyn, or Ivor, or Mortimer, or Keith, or Rodney or Roger or Earl of Rupert or Willard or Simon or Sir Mary or Zebedee or Quentin, though maybe now Quentin owing to the filmmaker making good in America that time. Or Albert. Or Troy. Or Barclay. Or Eric. Or Marcus. Or Sefton. Or Marmaduke. Or Greville. Or Edgar because all those names were not allowed. Clifford was another name not allowed. Lesley wasn’t either. Peverill was banned twice.
Mainly though, I could bear it because of the ‘maybe’ level of our relationship, meaning I didn’t officially live with him and wasn’t officially committed to him. If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do would be to leave.
Teacher suggests “sky can be more than blue” (an especially brilliant set-piece):
It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be.
She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.
They killed [the dog] because it liked them, because they couldn’t cope with being liked, couldn’t cope with innocence, frankness, openness, with a defencelessness and an affection and purity so pure, so affectionate, that the dog and its qualities had to be done away with. Couldn’t bear it. Had to kill it. Probably they themselves would have viewed this as self-defence. And that was the trouble with the shiny people. Take a whole group of individuals who weren’t shiny, maybe a whole community, a whole nation, or maybe just a statelet immersed long-term on the physical and energetic planes in the dark mental energies; conditioned too, through years of personal and communal suffering, personal and communal history, to be overladen with heaviness and grief and fear and anger – well, these people could not, not at the drop of a hat, be open to any bright shining button of a person stepping into their environment and shining upon them just like that.
And that was why the dogs [IRA soldiers] were necessary. They were important, a balancing act, an interface, a safety buffer against instant, face-to-face, mortal clashes of loathsome and self-loathsome emotions, the very type that erupt in seconds between individuals, between clans, between nations, between sexes, doing irreversible damage all around. To stay it, to evade it, to push away those bad memories, all that pain and history and deterioration of character, you hear the barking, the onset of that savage, tribal barking, and you know then to wait indoors – quarter of an hour thereabouts – to let that soldiery go its way.
I’d assumed that how my face looked, how I was making it look, how I presented it outwardly, was down to me, under the control of me, the ‘I am’ deep in the council chamber. I thought this real me was in there, in charge, hidden from them but directing from the undergrowth. Thought too, I’d chosen a subordinate to assist me and not some rebel to turn tables and override me. That though, was what happened and it happened first with the face.
… my lifelong stubbornness in refusing to tell nosey bastards what it wasn’t their business to hear. ‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘It’s not to do with them and anyway, I haven’t done anything.’ ‘Lots of people haven’t done anything,’ said longest friend. ‘And still they’re not doing it, will always be not doing it, in their private coffins down at the usual place.’
‘Just because I’m outnumbered in my reading-while-walking,’ I said, ‘doesn’t mean I’m wrong. What if one person happened to be sane, longest friend, against a whole background, a race mind, that wasn’t sane, that person would probably be viewed by the mass consciousness as mad – but would that person be mad?’ ‘Yes,’ said friend, ‘if they persisted in their version of life in the stacked-up odds of an opposing world.’
Ordinary murders were eerie, unfathomable, the exact murders that didn’t happen here. People had no idea how to gauge them, how to categorise them, how to begin a discussion on them, and that was because only political murders happened in this place. ‘Political’ of course, covered anything to do with the border, anything that could be construed – even in the slightest, even in the most contorted, even something the rest of the world, if interested, would view as most unlikely – as to do with the border. Any killing other than political and the community was in perplexity, also in anxiety, as to how to proceed.
…kind people here, not used to phones, not trustful of them either, didn’t want to be rude or abrasive by hanging up after just one goodbye in case the other’s leave-taking was still travelling its way, with a delay, over the airwaves towards them. Therefore, owing to phone etiquette, there was lots of ‘’Bye’, ‘’Bye’, ‘Goodbye, son-in-law’, ‘Goodbye, mother-in-law’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘’Bye’, ‘’Bye’ with each person’s ear still at the earpiece as they bent their body over, inching the receiver ever and ever closer on each goodbye to the rest of the phone. Eventually it would end up back on its hook with the human ear physically removed from it. There might be further insurance goodbyes even at this stage, out of compulsion to seal and make sure the matter, which didn’t mean the person who’d gone through the protractions wasn’t contorted in body and exhausted in mind by the effort of detaching from a phone conversation. What it did mean was that that conversation – without any anxious ‘Did I cut him off? Will he be hurt? Have I hung up too soon and damaged his feelings?’ – had finally reached its traditional end.
‘I’d sit in that chair without complexity, without any sense of consciousness even, that there I was, sitting in it. It was just a chair; not notable to be registered as tormenting to the psyche. I’d lower myself in, then, when done, I’d higher myself out of it. All normal. Not now, daughter. Now, there’s a searing mental pain anytime I have doings with the chair because slightly my rear brushes the armrest of one side as I’m lowering myself in or highering myself out of it, or else my rear brushes similarly the armrest of the other side. These armrests aren’t capable of articulation,’ she stressed. ‘They’re stuck fast to the body because it’s a one-piece chair and of course the chair itself can’t have gotten smaller which means my rear’s gotten bigger but it’s gotten bigger without the concomitant modification to a new way of negotiating furniture and instead is still acting from the retention of the memory of how smaller in the olden days it used to be.’