{"id":420477,"date":"2026-04-04T21:10:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T21:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/420477\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T21:10:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T21:10:15","slug":"i-googled-what-would-happen-if-you-drained-lough-neagh-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/420477\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I Googled what would happen if you drained Lough Neagh\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a writer who likes to put the magic back into realism and find new ways to tell stories about the North of Ireland<\/a>, discovering a politician\u2019s visionary or madcap scheme to drain Lough Neagh and create another county was manna from heaven for Jan Carson<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The inspiration for Few and Far Between, her fourth novel, was an early Christmas present. \u201cIt has a really good genesis story,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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 \u2018I think you need to just drop up me. I\u2019m never going to write another book.\u2019 And she said, \u2018Give yourself a break. It\u2019s Christmas.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, on Christmas Eve, a friend sent her an email with the subject line \u201cThis sounds like a story you would write.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYou get a lot of those,\u201d she says drily. But this one was an article about Terence O\u2019Neill\u2019s 1958 drainage plan, and Carson thought, \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cI could see this archipelago\u201d \u2013 a group of islands, which she shortened to the Ark, symbolic and easier to pronounce \u2013 \u201cand began to think about who would be living there. In the late 1960s, as you\u2019re starting to move into conflict, perhaps it would be a space where people sought sanctuary. That just felt like the plot of a novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Populating her ark took several months, \u201cpeople who felt unsafe or persecuted in what they call mainland Northern Ireland: people in mixed marriages, gay couples, Sandra, who\u2019s a trans woman, anyone who was challenging notions of diversity\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a lot of extended metaphors in this novel. Growing up in the North in the 1980s, \u201cthere were almost no people moving here, challenging how we did things, that maybe our way of life wasn\u2019t the only way\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Writing about the world of your childhood is the hardest thing to do\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

So was born the anthropologist RJ Connolly, who would lead the ark \u2013 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 \u201csafe from bombs and guns. But there are so many other ways to destroy a child\u201d. His family wilts in his shadow, stagnating like the lough. \u201cAbsenting herself\u201d is how Ursula, his wife, copes. Marion \u201cscrolls and scrolls until her thumb feels bruised. She does not post or comment. Marion prefers to lurk.\u201d On the sports pitch, it\u2019s unclear whether Robert John is \u201ca player or a spectator. As in football, so in life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few and Far Between follows The Fire Starters<\/a> and The Raptures<\/a> to create a significant sequence of works exploring not just Northern society but family and community dynamics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t see them as a natural trilogy,\u201d Carson says, \u201cbut different perspectives on the same story. They\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cFew and Far Between is more about how we\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a temptation to separate things out and say these are normal traumas and there\u2019s 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\u2019re all tied up into what happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething that I\u2019ve 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\u2019s a blurring in this novel. A lot of early readers are asking which bits are true and which are made up.\u201d I ask if the publicity shot of the bucket men lining up to empty the lough is factual. \u201cNo, I made that up, so I like that you\u2019re asking, because I wanted to blur that line.\u201d<\/p>\n

The various islands host different communities. Church Flat is inhabited by the Almost-Dead, a Bardo-like liminal space for the dying. \u201cThis being the North, with its award-winning rates of heart disease, it\u2019s mostly heart-attack victims who loiter on Church.\u201d <\/p>\n

The suicidal go to Tom\u2019s Hard: \u201cMore people\u201d \u2013 5,000 \u2013 \u201chave 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\u2019ve had a couple of people who are not from the North ask if those statistics are real. Again, an example of something that\u2019s factual that feels made up or exaggerated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Middle Flat is home to women in a coma, victims of sleeping or resignation syndrome. \u201cThis novel deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction. The sleepers have been so impacted by trauma they\u2019ve gone into this comatose state, but that\u2019s a real condition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBuried things are starting to reappear\u201d on Eglish, where things are dumped. \u201cAs 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\u2019s someone in Ballymena that\u2019s got tigers in their garage.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Jan Carson\u2019s year of focused reading: A voyage around Toni Morrison and Kurt VonnegutOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Why is the North so misogynistic? \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert John is unlovable but Carson softened his portrayal. \u201cIf 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s 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\u2019t know somebody you start to fear them, and there\u2019s 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\u2019s as much a victim as he is a misogynist. He\u2019s inherited opinions without the opportunity to challenge them.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a reader, Carson graduated from Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew, \u201cnice safe narratives where you do good things and right will out\u201d, to subtler texts, such as Catcher in the Rye. <\/p>\n

\u201cI 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, \u2018I have to get down to the bus station because we\u2019ve got a fight with the ones from the Catholic school.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cSo I don\u2019t think a book can change anyone, but a lifetime\u2019s exposure to books can \u2013 critical thinking in nuanced thought and empathy, a window into other people\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Books that felt like light bulb moments for her include Sam Hanna Bell\u2019s December Bride, \u201ca beautiful book about my community <\/b>but also really radical; Ian Cochrane\u2019s 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\u2019s okay to be playful, to not always be realist and write in a linear way. And the vernacular is so important for me\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0An orange-green split is looming over Lough NeaghOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Writing the books is one thing; engaging readers is another.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the withering disinterest that is really hard. Some of that is peculiarly Protestant. If Derry Girls had been Presbyterian Wives, I don\u2019t 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\u2019re always on the defensive. It comes from past hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do you attract the people who need to read your work most? <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m making myself culpable. I\u2019m not writing from a distance. I\u2019m writing things that are very close to me, that I was part of. I\u2019m highlighting the stuff that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carson delights in dialect, language that lilts and soars. \u201cHoul yer wheest, plootering, foundered\u201d; \u201cThe Big Flat weans were wee dotes\u201d; an ice cream is given \u201ca slabbery lick\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI spend a lot of time writing in coffee shops in Ballymena, so I\u2019ve 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, \u2018We don\u2019t all have to sound the same.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019s a better way to say that?\u2019 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, \u2018People speak like you in here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

In her novel, consigning a gun to the lough bed marks \u201cthe end of one way of being. The beginning of whatever will come next.\u201d But progress is slow. \u201cThe peace they\u2019re currently living with isn\u2019t the all-encompassing peace they were promised in \u201998 … there is still a deep divide running through the heart of the place.\u201d <\/p>\n

The snag list is long: peace walls, unintegrated schools, violent murals, mass emigration and suicide. \u201cStill, turning a country\u2019s no small feat. It\u2019s not the kind of casual flip that\u2019s going to happen overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carson says, \u201cI would position myself as a critical friend. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s 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\u2019t integrated. Nearly all my characters have become accustomed to disappointment: \u2018My life\u2019s mediocre, but it could be a lot worse.\u2019 The lough is a stagnant place, not just the algae but everything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

She grew up about 20km from the lough. Her family had picnics where the novel\u2019s barbecue scene is set. \u201cOne of the last walks I took with my dad before he died was along the lough shore.\u201d Yet the lough is unloved, almost unknown. \u201cThe algae outbreak has not been the point of consternation that it should have been. If the north coast all went green, or the Giant\u2019s Causeway started to fall apart, there would be popular outrage, but Lough Neagh is a weirdly inaccessible area of actual beauty. People aren\u2019t invested in it in the same way they are in the Mournes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Little has been written about it. She cites Polly Devlin\u2019s work, My Lady of the Chimney Corner; Ciaran Carson\u2019s Fishing for Amber; and Seamus Heaney\u2019s Lough Neagh cycle. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carson worked with a sensitivity reader, Josephine Chick, to ensure her portrayal of Sandra, a trans woman, was accurate. \u201cThere was originally a desire to tone down some of the awful things that RJ and Robert John said about Sandra, and Josephine said, \u2018No, those are things people say to me and say about me all the time, so they need to stay in.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cI had the privilege of meeting a few older trans people, and their narratives are quite absent. Sandra probably wouldn\u2019t call herself trans. She left Coleraine in the late 1960s, before there was a terminology, so her understanding of herself is quite pure: \u2018I don\u2019t have a label on me. I am me. This is who I am.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Barbara Pym is Jane Austen with a side of jumble sales, public transport and laugh-out-loud one-linersOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Sandra is a painter who seeks to capture in her work \u201cnot how it was. More, how I wish it\u2019d been.\u201d Is that Carson\u2019s writing project too? \u201cAbsolutely. It\u2019s very insightful to pick that up. I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carson acknowledges that \u201cthis book, like every other book I\u2019ve ever written, is mostly formed in conversations\u201d, and she lists 29 writer friends. \u201cYou 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\u2019s section. <\/p>\n

\u201cMore frequently for me, it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is unique about Ireland is we have all those people at our fingertips. If you\u2019re a writer in some other place, you might be isolated or people might be snobby and not want to help, but there\u2019s a million people I can pick up the phone and ask. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a book festival pretty much every week, so we\u2019re all circulating and having these chats together. When you\u2019re outside Ireland, somebody says something like, \u2018Do you know Anne Enright?\u2019 You know everybody! We\u2019ve all been stuck in some B&B with each other. You\u2019ve had a few too many and had a great conversation, and we all know each other\u2019s work inside out as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am getting more comfortable saying I often write parables. I think that\u2019s a deeply untrendy, unsexy thing to say, because the current trend is for writing books without an agenda. I hope there\u2019s still a story that you want to read and characters you want to follow, but I think it\u2019s okay to want your fiction to say something.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpoor man\u2019s hot dogs\u201d. Laconically, the narrator observes of another O\u2019Neill, a festival celebrating 50 years of Partition as the Troubles took off: \u201cUnsurprisingly enough, Ulster \u201971 was not the catalyst for a Troubles-era tourism boom.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019re telling themselves about who they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Neill was not always amusing. \u201cIt is frightfully hard to explain to Protestants,\u201d Carson quotes him saying in 1969, \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such patrician prejudice from a putatively progressive Protestant politician is a suitable epitaph for the old Stormont regime if not the statelet itself.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThat\u2019s 1,000 words for me, and then within three months you\u2019ve got a first draft. I can\u2019t write imaginative stuff when I\u2019m on the road, but I can edit. I\u2019ve been lucky. I\u2019ve 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t come up through a writing programme. I\u2019ve never done a single class in writing, not a single workshop. I couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s noisy; it\u2019s busy; I\u2019ve got 45 minutes; what can I get done? <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you do a PhD in creative writing and you\u2019ve got three years of uninterrupted time to write a novel, it can ruin you. That\u2019s why a lot are struggling with the second book, because their practice is shaped around this thing that doesn\u2019t exist in the real world.\u201d<\/p>\n

How has her writing evolved? \u201cIt\u2019s not as shit as it used to be. I was lazy in my early books. I didn\u2019t want to do 25 drafts, so I let things slip. By editing students\u2019 work I\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few and Far Between is published by Doubleday on Thursday, April 9th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a writer who likes to put the magic back into realism and find new ways to tell…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":420478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,113274,11,12,15,16,5,954,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-420477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-jan-carson","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-northern-ireland","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116348493999310363","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/420478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}