{"id":45338,"date":"2025-07-07T06:52:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T06:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/45338\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T06:52:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T06:52:09","slug":"every-one-still-here-by-liadan-ni-chuinn-review-an-extraordinary-debut-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/45338\/","title":{"rendered":"Every One Still Here by Liadan Ni\u0301 Chuinn review \u2013 an extraordinary debut | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney\u2019s North<\/a> (1975), Jennifer Johnston\u2019s Shadows on Our Skin (1977) and Bernard MacLaverty\u2019s Cal (1983), to Eoin McNamee\u2019s Resurrection Man (1994), Anna Burns\u2019s Booker-winning Milkman<\/a> (2018), and Louise Kennedy\u2019s Trespasses<\/a> (2022). The latest addition to the corpus, a slim debut story collection by nonbinary Northern Irish writer Liadan N\u00ed Chuinn, shares the brilliance and burning energy of those other books, but there is a fundamental distinction. N\u00ed Chuinn was born in the year of the Good Friday agreement, the 1998 power-sharing deal that delivered peace and brought an end to the Troubles; why, then, should their writing be so obsessed with them?<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe, these things, they\u2019re the making of us,\u201d a character says at one point. He\u2019s talking about a dead friend, but his words might apply to Northern Ireland\u2019s past 50 or so years. Throughout the book the violence of that period is shown to persist, the past proving powerfully, inconveniently alive. Tensions flare between those who attempt to ignore that fact and others who insist on it.<\/p>\n

The narrator of the title story, Jackie, sometimes uses slashes to prevent him having to choose between alternative nouns: \u201cIt looks like a morgue\/a nightmare and it smells like a butcher\u2019s but with chemicals mixed in.\u201d N\u00ed Chuinn\u2019s writing is often terse, blunt, its subject matter better served by urgency than elegance. Jackie is a young man haunted by the internment, before his birth, of his uncle and grandfather \u2013 also Jackie \u2013 and by loyalists having hijacked his parents\u2019 car when his mother was pregnant with him.<\/p>\n

In Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Jackie was a boy his father fell ill and appeared to enter a vegetative state. N\u00ed Chuinn, a writer of subtlety despite the polemic that veins these stories, doesn\u2019t push hard on the metaphor, but this \u201clax and unmoving\u201d figure can be read as a symbol for a Northern Ireland that forgets its history. In fact, as another character \u2013 born, like Jackie, after the Good Friday agreement \u2013 insists later on, in Northern Ireland the past bears down on the present with such weight that it is an error to even call it history. N\u00ed Chuinn forgoes an epigraph, but a lesser writer, one more in need of underlining their aims, would have reached for Faulkner\u2019s lines from Requiem for a Nun: \u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is space, though, for other concerns and registers. Novena features Moll, second-generation Irish with a father from East Timor. Her grandmother, who is literally keeping the faith, texts Moll: \u201cSaid special prayer. You should feel it in couple mins.\u201d But the church she attends announces the impossibility of single funerals owing to a lack of priests, and its congregants listen to hymns on CD because \u201cthere is no choir\u201d. In the story Russia, which centres on a brother and sister adopted from that country, a psychic asks her client why he\u2019s come. Aren\u2019t you supposed to know? he answers. \u201cThe psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You\u2019ve, none of youse, you\u2019ve no concept of how this works.\u201d N\u00ed Chuinn\u2019s humour flashes brighter for its infrequent use.<\/p>\n

The same story describes a series of anonymous protests at a museum. Flowers of remembrance are being left at exhibits containing human remains: the preserved corpse of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking skull, a stone age woman\u2019s bones. This broadens the book\u2019s preoccupation with the past while simultaneously, in the manner of Heaney\u2019s bog poems, linking ancient instances of violence with the sectarian murders committed within living memory.<\/p>\n

Not everyone is willing to have such connections pointed out. In the closing story, Daisy Hill, a young man\u2019s obsession with the Troubles exasperates his family. \u201cI\u2019m sick of this, right, Rowan?\u201d his cousin Shane says. \u201cIt happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.\u201d Rowan rejects not only the urge to leave the past behind, but Shane\u2019s characterisation: \u201cI hate that, says Rowan. It\u2019s not both sides, it\u2019s not either side, it\u2019s this huge fucking army, it\u2019s this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.\u201d Reading this book as the Israeli state kills unprecedented numbers of Palestinian civilians in Gaza feels particularly difficult, but also valuable \u2013 or as valuable as reading can be in the circumstances.<\/p>\n

N\u00ed Chuinn\u2019s stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots \u2013 family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking \u2013 these aren\u2019t their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history.<\/p>\n

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Daisy Hill ends with a threnody subtitled The Truth, nine pages detailing more than 50 murders of\u00a0Northern Irish civilians by British soldiers. N\u00ed\u00a0Chuinn quotes a Conservative government minister\u2019s contemporary praise for the impartiality and professionalism with which British soldiers performed their duties. \u201cThe British state,\u201d N\u00ed Chuinn writes, correcting the record, \u201ckills and it kills and it kills and it kills.\u201d This extraordinary book\u2019s final words \u2013 \u201cnobody is ever charged\u201d \u2013 jam\u00a0open the door to a past many would prefer to\u00a0remain shut away.<\/p>\n

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ni\u0301 Chuinn is published by Granta (\u00a314.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The literature of the Troubles is a rich one, from Seamus Heaney\u2019s North (1975), Jennifer Johnston\u2019s Shadows on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":45339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-45338","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114810633904490025","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}