For a writer who likes to put the magic back into realism and find new ways to tell stories about the North of Ireland, discovering a politician’s visionary or madcap scheme to drain Lough Neagh and create another county was manna from heaven for Jan Carson.
The inspiration for Few and Far Between, her fourth novel, was an early Christmas present. “It has a really good genesis story,” she says. “I was on a residency in France and it was a bit dire. I was writing a novel that just refused to write itself. Three months into it and getting nowhere, I had emailed my agent, saying ‘I think you need to just drop up me. I’m never going to write another book.’ And she said, ‘Give yourself a break. It’s Christmas.’”
Then, on Christmas Eve, a friend sent her an email with the subject line “This sounds like a story you would write.”
“You get a lot of those,” she says drily. But this one was an article about Terence O’Neill’s 1958 drainage plan, and Carson thought, “You know what? This is actually something that I would want to write. So I opened a bottle of nice French red and Googled what would happen if you drained Lough Neagh.”
She found that the Victorians had partially drained the lough to create farmland and then discovered topographical maps showing elevated areas just under the surface, which would become visible if the waterline dropped.
“I could see this archipelago” – a group of islands, which she shortened to the Ark, symbolic and easier to pronounce – “and began to think about who would be living there. In the late 1960s, as you’re starting to move into conflict, perhaps it would be a space where people sought sanctuary. That just felt like the plot of a novel.”
Populating her ark took several months, “people who felt unsafe or persecuted in what they call mainland Northern Ireland: people in mixed marriages, gay couples, Sandra, who’s a trans woman, anyone who was challenging notions of diversity”.
Carson needed a narrator. A voracious reader, she had just discovered Barbara Pym, who had worked at the International African Institute, in London, and whose novels are peppered with anthropologists, who she often uses as an outward gaze in small-minded communities, people who have seen other places. There’s a lot of extended metaphors in this novel. Growing up in the North in the 1980s, “there were almost no people moving here, challenging how we did things, that maybe our way of life wasn’t the only way”.
[ ‘Writing about the world of your childhood is the hardest thing to do’Opens in new window ]
So was born the anthropologist RJ Connolly, who would lead the ark – only he proved to be a bit of a monster, deeply flawed husband and father, complicating the narrative. His children, Marion and Robert John, might be “safe from bombs and guns. But there are so many other ways to destroy a child”. His family wilts in his shadow, stagnating like the lough. “Absenting herself” is how Ursula, his wife, copes. Marion “scrolls and scrolls until her thumb feels bruised. She does not post or comment. Marion prefers to lurk.” On the sports pitch, it’s unclear whether Robert John is “a player or a spectator. As in football, so in life.”
Few and Far Between follows The Fire Starters and The Raptures to create a significant sequence of works exploring not just Northern society but family and community dynamics.
“I wouldn’t see them as a natural trilogy,” Carson says, “but different perspectives on the same story. They’re set in different periods, but there are overlaps. With The Fire Starters, the focus is on politics and its impact on community. In The Raptures, the religious aspect is front and centre, interrogating that evangelical Protestant thing.
“Few and Far Between is more about how we’ve dealt with trauma in the North. There are lots of images of things being submerged and hidden and not dealt with, not all overtly related to the Troubles. Robert John is feeling a lot of trauma from his relationship with his father.
“There’s a temptation to separate things out and say these are normal traumas and there’s this trauma related to the conflict, but I see it as much messier. A lot of our notions of masculinity, around how women are treated and violence against women, and mental health: they’re all tied up into what happened.”
Carson was brought up on Bible stories; magical realism came naturally to her. Life in the North, where swings were locked up on the Sabbath and people were made to disappear, was often stranger than fiction.
“Something that I’ve been interested in for a long time is what I call writing at the end of the possible, where facts are so bizarre and outlandish that they almost feel like fiction. And so there’s a blurring in this novel. A lot of early readers are asking which bits are true and which are made up.” I ask if the publicity shot of the bucket men lining up to empty the lough is factual. “No, I made that up, so I like that you’re asking, because I wanted to blur that line.”
The various islands host different communities. Church Flat is inhabited by the Almost-Dead, a Bardo-like liminal space for the dying. “This being the North, with its award-winning rates of heart disease, it’s mostly heart-attack victims who loiter on Church.”
The suicidal go to Tom’s Hard: “More people” – 5,000 – “have now died by suicide in Northern Ireland post-Good Friday agreement than during the entire duration of the Troubles, which claimed 3,600 lives. I’ve had a couple of people who are not from the North ask if those statistics are real. Again, an example of something that’s factual that feels made up or exaggerated.”
Middle Flat is home to women in a coma, victims of sleeping or resignation syndrome. “This novel deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction. The sleepers have been so impacted by trauma they’ve gone into this comatose state, but that’s a real condition.”
“Buried things are starting to reappear” on Eglish, where things are dumped. “As the peace descends, the trauma will surface. So many people have been done in by the last 30 years. You can look at the island that swallows things and put that in a box of fantasy and process it in a way that you use for metaphors, whereas how do you process the draining of the lough? A lot of what happens in the North feels like it occurs at the end of the possible. We have slightly laxer laws about owning big cats, so there’s someone in Ballymena that’s got tigers in their garage.”
Why is the North so misogynistic? “I think misogyny often happens behind closed doors. Particularly during the conflict, there was an isolation where people could get away with awful things because there was a distraction. Northern Ireland was such an isolated goldfish bowl geographically.”
Robert John is unlovable but Carson softened his portrayal. “If Robert John had been given an opportunity to experience other cultures, he could have been an intellectual but we were brought up with a fear of anyone different.
“That’s a subsidiary issue of the conflict. This inherent fear that you take through life because we were brought up in segregated schools and housing estates. When you don’t know somebody you start to fear them, and there’s not a big jump from that to hating someone. Initially, Robert John had a much nastier end, because I saw him as not very nice, but I rewrote him a lot, because he’s as much a victim as he is a misogynist. He’s inherited opinions without the opportunity to challenge them.”
As a reader, Carson graduated from Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew, “nice safe narratives where you do good things and right will out”, to subtler texts, such as Catcher in the Rye.
“I always remember discussing To Kill a Mockingbird in school within the context of Northern Ireland, how awful it was to be prejudiced against people just because they were different, and then one of the girls saying, ‘I have to get down to the bus station because we’ve got a fight with the ones from the Catholic school.’
“So I don’t think a book can change anyone, but a lifetime’s exposure to books can – critical thinking in nuanced thought and empathy, a window into other people’s perspective. If young people are brought up with that, it forms citizens capable of thinking beyond their own experience and making informed decisions, having kindness and empathy and all that good stuff.”
Books that felt like light bulb moments for her include Sam Hanna Bell’s December Bride, “a beautiful book about my community but also really radical; Ian Cochrane’s F Is for Ferg, about rural, working-class Protestants. Milkman is huge. What Anna [Burns] got away with in structure and voice felt really freeing. It’s okay to be playful, to not always be realist and write in a linear way. And the vernacular is so important for me”.
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Writing the books is one thing; engaging readers is another.
“It’s the withering disinterest that is really hard. Some of that is peculiarly Protestant. If Derry Girls had been Presbyterian Wives, I don’t know that we would have been as quick to laugh at ourselves, maybe because there has been so much satire and lambasting of that brand of Protestant culture that they’re always on the defensive. It comes from past hurt.”
How do you attract the people who need to read your work most?
“I’m making myself culpable. I’m not writing from a distance. I’m writing things that are very close to me, that I was part of. I’m highlighting the stuff that’s beautiful and worth celebrating as well as the stuff that needs to be critiqued. People love seeing places and experiences that they know referenced, like the caravan park in The Last Resort. That stuff is important.”
Carson delights in dialect, language that lilts and soars. “Houl yer wheest, plootering, foundered”; “The Big Flat weans were wee dotes”; an ice cream is given “a slabbery lick”.
“I spend a lot of time writing in coffee shops in Ballymena, so I’ve got the ear open. There are strange ways of arranging a sentence and peppered with odd little bits of Ulster Scots. Those words are so rich. I want to reflect that, to honour where I come from and to put the foot down, saying, ‘We don’t all have to sound the same.’
“I took The Raptures back to my primary school and did some writing workshops, and the kiddos wrote short stories full of wee Ulster Scot-isms. A child put her hand up and said, `Please, miss, what’s a better way to say that?’ Which is heartbreaking, because I had the Ballymena knocked out of me with elocution lessons. It was cool to hold up the book and say, ‘People speak like you in here.’”
Having got Northern accents on to the BBC, the next step, she says, is to ensure narratives are not reduced to Belfast and Derry but include Banbridge and Ballymena, our respective home towns.
In her novel, consigning a gun to the lough bed marks “the end of one way of being. The beginning of whatever will come next.” But progress is slow. “The peace they’re currently living with isn’t the all-encompassing peace they were promised in ’98 … there is still a deep divide running through the heart of the place.”
The snag list is long: peace walls, unintegrated schools, violent murals, mass emigration and suicide. “Still, turning a country’s no small feat. It’s not the kind of casual flip that’s going to happen overnight.”
Carson says, “I would position myself as a critical friend. I don’t think it’s doing anybody justice as a writer to ignore some of the glaring holes, particularly structural things. A lot of great work has been done with integration and tolerance but I find it endlessly frustrating that 91 per cent of schools aren’t integrated. Nearly all my characters have become accustomed to disappointment: ‘My life’s mediocre, but it could be a lot worse.’ The lough is a stagnant place, not just the algae but everything else.”
She grew up about 20km from the lough. Her family had picnics where the novel’s barbecue scene is set. “One of the last walks I took with my dad before he died was along the lough shore.” Yet the lough is unloved, almost unknown. “The algae outbreak has not been the point of consternation that it should have been. If the north coast all went green, or the Giant’s Causeway started to fall apart, there would be popular outrage, but Lough Neagh is a weirdly inaccessible area of actual beauty. People aren’t invested in it in the same way they are in the Mournes.”
Little has been written about it. She cites Polly Devlin’s work, My Lady of the Chimney Corner; Ciaran Carson’s Fishing for Amber; and Seamus Heaney’s Lough Neagh cycle. “It is the biggest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland. Imagine if nobody had written about Windermere or Loch Ness. Maybe we need a monster.”
Carson worked with a sensitivity reader, Josephine Chick, to ensure her portrayal of Sandra, a trans woman, was accurate. “There was originally a desire to tone down some of the awful things that RJ and Robert John said about Sandra, and Josephine said, ‘No, those are things people say to me and say about me all the time, so they need to stay in.’
“I had the privilege of meeting a few older trans people, and their narratives are quite absent. Sandra probably wouldn’t call herself trans. She left Coleraine in the late 1960s, before there was a terminology, so her understanding of herself is quite pure: ‘I don’t have a label on me. I am me. This is who I am.’”
Sandra is a painter who seeks to capture in her work “not how it was. More, how I wish it’d been.” Is that Carson’s writing project too? “Absolutely. It’s very insightful to pick that up. I’m working on a novel about Ballymena, and really trying to hold on to the realism of what having grown up there was like, but also to weave in what I wish it had been like, holding those two things in tension.”
Carson acknowledges that “this book, like every other book I’ve ever written, is mostly formed in conversations”, and she lists 29 writer friends. “You sit down with a fellow writer and try to work out a kink or an issue. I sat outside a cafe in Paris with Karl Geary for three hours, and we worked out how to end Robert John’s section.
“More frequently for me, it’s the validation of being part of a group of ideas people, all thinking and coming at stuff from different perspectives. It gives you permission to do your own thing.
“Sometimes it’s having your peers throw up stuff that just sparks things in your head. I facilitate Stinging Fly workshops with emerging writers. Sheila Armstrong came and spoke about her practice of building up emotional intensity in the story and how the emotional arc is just as important as the plot arc, which really opened up something for me.
“What is unique about Ireland is we have all those people at our fingertips. If you’re a writer in some other place, you might be isolated or people might be snobby and not want to help, but there’s a million people I can pick up the phone and ask.
“There is a book festival pretty much every week, so we’re all circulating and having these chats together. When you’re outside Ireland, somebody says something like, ‘Do you know Anne Enright?’ You know everybody! We’ve all been stuck in some B&B with each other. You’ve had a few too many and had a great conversation, and we all know each other’s work inside out as well.”
It’s funny that Carson mentions the genesis of the book, because the epigraph is from Genesis. The Bible influences her language but, more importantly, her narrative structure.
“I am getting more comfortable saying I often write parables. I think that’s a deeply untrendy, unsexy thing to say, because the current trend is for writing books without an agenda. I hope there’s still a story that you want to read and characters you want to follow, but I think it’s okay to want your fiction to say something.”
Carson is a serious writer but a funny one too. The barbecue sausages slathered in red sauce and wrapped in a slice of pan loaf are a “poor man’s hot dogs”. Laconically, the narrator observes of another O’Neill, a festival celebrating 50 years of Partition as the Troubles took off: “Unsurprisingly enough, Ulster ’71 was not the catalyst for a Troubles-era tourism boom.”
“I have a chronic inability to be entirely serious, for too long. A lot of the humour comes from the awkwardness of Robert John and Marion. My two favourite sections are when Marian goes to Dunnes to buy a bra and then when Robert John goes to the cinema and is trying to pretend that he wants to see an art-house film but really wants to see Gone in 60 Seconds, the lies that they’re telling themselves about who they are.”
O’Neill was not always amusing. “It is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants,” Carson quotes him saying in 1969, “that if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets; they will refuse to have 18 children. But if a Roman Catholic is jobless, and lives in the most ghastly hovel, he will rear 18 children on National Assistance.”
Such patrician prejudice from a putatively progressive Protestant politician is a suitable epitaph for the old Stormont regime if not the statelet itself.
Carson has four more books on the go. She is incredibly productive given that she always seems to be touring. She writes two hours a day in a cafe. “That’s 1,000 words for me, and then within three months you’ve got a first draft. I can’t write imaginative stuff when I’m on the road, but I can edit. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had at least one residency a year for the last three, so that gives you a longer chunk of time to get maybe 60,000 words down.
“I didn’t come up through a writing programme. I’ve never done a single class in writing, not a single workshop. I couldn’t think of anything more heinous, even though I teach them. I wrote my first novel in the Coffee Island in the middle of the Tower Centre in Ballymena between shifts. So my practice has always been: it’s noisy; it’s busy; I’ve got 45 minutes; what can I get done?
“If you do a PhD in creative writing and you’ve got three years of uninterrupted time to write a novel, it can ruin you. That’s why a lot are struggling with the second book, because their practice is shaped around this thing that doesn’t exist in the real world.”
How has her writing evolved? “It’s not as shit as it used to be. I was lazy in my early books. I didn’t want to do 25 drafts, so I let things slip. By editing students’ work I’ve learned to be a better editor of my own. Few and Far Between went to nearly 30 drafts, some with an editor and some with me just going, no, it’s not quite right, I need to haul this apart and do it again. Editing is not a punishment. It can be a creative part of the process.”
Few and Far Between is published by Doubleday on Thursday, April 9th