* review contains spoilers
To anyone outside Northern Ireland, even – perhaps particularly – in Great Britain, the Troubles invariably seem like ancient history. The Good Friday Agreement that brought the decades-long fight between nationalists and loyalists to an end is now a quarter of a century old, but the chaos and bloodshed it helped put a stop to left scars on the people of Northern Ireland that are still visible today. It has proven fertile ground for a whole generation of novelists, including Gerald Seymour, Bernard MacLaverty, and latterly Adrian McKinty, whose Sean Duffy cycle has won critical plaudits. Jane Buckley’s LIGHT, the third volume in the STONES CORNER series, sits squarely in this tradition, offering a take on the turbulent, tragic period that is by turns affecting, thought-provoking, and absorbing.
The main characters are derived from TURMOIL and DARKNESS, the first two installments in the series, and takes the action into the 1980s. A penniless Caitlin has run away to London, where she is fortunate to land on her feet, and lives a secure, comfortable life with her new lover and fiancé, Christopher, who she almost, but doesn’t quite, love. Back in Northern Ireland, her old flame, James, continues to run the quietly failing family factory with money supplied from the trust fund of his wife Marleen, to whom he is unhappily bound in a marriage of convenience. Marleen herself abandons her new family in favor of living the high life in London with her long-time mistress and the odd loaded sugar daddy. Robert Sallis, who was formerly a soldier who did a tour of Northern Ireland in a counter-espionage role, is now living in north-east England with undiagnosed PTSD; he is alcoholic and on the dole.
There are others; indeed, the ensemble of characters is quite large, and one feels the book sagging somewhat in the opening third under the weight of all the characters it reintroduces. What the novel does achieve via this voluminous list of protagonists, however, is an impressive omniscience. As one character mournfully puts it with reference to his son languishing in the notorious Maze prison, this is a circumstance in which people are “stolen from [their families] by war and politics”, irrespective of which side they are on. Everyone in the novel is in pain. Caitlin, in spite of her new, well-heeled life in London, is haunted by the horrors and traumas of her childhood; Robert relies on weed and painkillers to deal with the lasting effects of injuries sustained on duty; James rues his missed opportunity with Caitlin; and the various paramilitaries whose shadowy activities also inhabit the book’s pages go to their work with grim acceptance of the zero-sum game that is absolute loyalty to a cause.
LIGHT speaks also to the wider conflicts raging in Northern Ireland at the time. Caitlin is the most obvious manifestation of the exodus from the north that occurred as a result of both the Troubles and the substantial economic problems that its inhabitants faced during the 1980s, but the question of emigration stalks the book ceaselessly. The first woman Caitlin speaks to in London is from Omagh; Emmett, realizing that the paramilitary life is not for him, manages to extricate himself from it and eyes far-off Australia as his goal; others aim for America. James’s shirt-making factory is described as a “white elephant” – it is not hard to draw comparisons with the ill-fated DeLorean factory that briefly provided employment in the early 1980s before its owner’s ignominious downfall condemned it to closure. On occasion, Buckley’s need to provide context leads to a few leaden sentences that read more like a history textbook than a novel. But the narrative arc is impressive, the prose powerful, and the realization of what England’s dirty little war looked like from the perspective of those embroiled in it complete, harrowing, and tragic.
LIGHT, the third installment in Jane Buckley’s STONES CORNER series, provides an absorbing and compelling glimpse of life in a 1980s Northern Ireland wracked by the Troubles.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader