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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I re-read it in January 2023 for the Second Monday<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t know whose milkman he was. He wasn\u2019t our milkman. I don\u2019t think he was anybody\u2019s. He didn\u2019t take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn\u2019t ever deliver milk. Also, he didn\u2019t drive a milk lorry.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t either. Peverill was banned twice.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Mainly though, I could bear it because of the \u2018maybe\u2019 level of our relationship, meaning I didn\u2019t officially live with him and wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Teacher suggests “sky can be more than blue” (an especially brilliant set-piece):<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n They killed [the dog] because it liked them, because they couldn\u2019t cope with being liked, couldn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 quarter of an hour thereabouts \u2013 to let that soldiery go its way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d 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 \u2018I am\u2019 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n … my lifelong stubbornness in refusing to tell nosey bastards what it wasn\u2019t their business to hear. \u2018Why should I?\u2019 I said. \u2018It\u2019s not to do with them and anyway, I haven\u2019t done anything.\u2019 \u2018Lots of people haven\u2019t done anything,\u2019 said longest friend. \u2018And still they\u2019re not doing it, will always be not doing it, in their private coffins down at the usual place.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2018Just because I\u2019m outnumbered in my reading-while-walking,\u2019 I said, \u2018doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m wrong. What if one person happened to be sane, longest friend, against a whole background, a race mind, that wasn\u2019t sane, that person would probably be viewed by the mass consciousness as mad \u2013 but would that person be mad?\u2019 \u2018Yes,\u2019 said friend, \u2018if they persisted in their version of life in the stacked-up odds of an opposing world.’<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Ordinary murders were eerie, unfathomable, the exact murders that didn\u2019t 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. \u2018Political\u2019 of course, covered anything to do with the border, anything that could be construed \u2013 even in the slightest, even in the most contorted, even something the rest of the world, if interested, would view as most unlikely \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n …kind people here, not used to phones, not trustful of them either, didn\u2019t want to be rude or abrasive by hanging up after just one goodbye in case the other\u2019s leave-taking was still travelling its way, with a delay, over the airwaves towards them. Therefore, owing to phone etiquette, there was lots of \u2018\u2019Bye\u2019, \u2018\u2019Bye\u2019, \u2018Goodbye, son-in-law\u2019, \u2018Goodbye, mother-in-law\u2019, \u2018Goodbye\u2019, \u2018Goodbye\u2019, \u2018\u2019Bye\u2019, \u2018\u2019Bye\u2019 with each person\u2019s 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\u2019t mean the person who\u2019d gone through the protractions wasn\u2019t contorted in body and exhausted in mind by the effort of detaching from a phone conversation. What it did mean was that that conversation \u2013 without any anxious \u2018Did I cut him off? Will he be hurt? Have I hung up too soon and damaged his feelings?\u2019<\/em> \u2013 had finally reached its traditional end.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n ‘I\u2019d 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\u2019d lower myself in, then, when done, I\u2019d higher myself out of it. All normal. Not now, daughter. Now, there\u2019s a searing mental pain anytime I have doings with the chair because slightly my rear brushes the armrest of one side as I\u2019m lowering myself in or highering myself out of it, or else my rear brushes similarly the armrest of the other side. These armrests aren\u2019t capable of articulation,\u2019 she stressed. \u2018They\u2019re stuck fast to the body because it\u2019s a one-piece chair and of course the chair itself can\u2019t have gotten smaller which means my rear\u2019s gotten bigger but it\u2019s 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.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,15,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-irish-writers-book-group","category-quote-dump","category-second-monday-book-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1855"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5154,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1855\/revisions\/5154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}In this book I looked up:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Short quotes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Longer quotes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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