- Audio Cassette
- Publisher: Chivers Audio Books; Unabridged edition (December 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 075400080X
- ISBN-13: 978-0754000808
- Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 16 x 3.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers, and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him. And hovering over all the violence, poverty, and despair of 1940s Northern Ireland is the specter of the "Troubles." The hero of the novel is an unnamed young man whose life turns upside down when a policeman frames him. Deception becomes his only means of self-defense. But the initial lie on the part of the policeman and the narrator's corresponding trickery are only part of the tangled web Deane weaves here. Early in the novel we learn that Uncle Eddie, an Irish Republican Army gunman, was blown up in the town distillery in 1922. In addition to sorting out his own problems, the narrator seeks the truth about his uncle's death.
Reading in the Dark sounds grim, and in some respects it is, yet leavening is provided by infusions of the Irish folktales and legends that inform the characters' daily life. And then there is the language. Deane is a poet, and his prose shows it: sex is like fire, "glinting with greed and danger"; ice snores and candles are swathed in a "thick drapery of wax." Readers looking for a thoughtful, serious, and beautifully written novel will find one in Reading in the Dark. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Deane is a poet and a celebrated literary historian, and this, his first novel, was deservedly shortlisted for England's Booker prize last year (it did win the Guardian Fiction Prize). At first glance, it covers familiar turf: an Irish family riven by the political strife of the 1920s trying to live with the legacy of bloodshed and betrayal?all seen through the eyes of a sensitive young boy as he looks back 20 years later. But Deane has a poet's eye, which transforms the most everyday material into something eternally rich and strange: "The rain lifted away, the sunlight lay piebald on the path for a brief time, then the rain shuttered us in again." And he watches the long struggles of the family with the same kind of patient endurance they themselves display. Gradually, their story emerges from the mists in which it has been wrapped for a generation: an uncle who in family legend had fled to Chicago had in fact been executed, mistakenly, as an informer on the IRA by members of his own family; the real informer, who had been loved by the boy's mother and had briefly married her sister, had escaped, tipped off by the police. Mother and father each know some of the story, and realize that knowing all of it will drive them apart; their life together is a long, loving grief. All this is glimpsed by the narrator in hints and flashes, combined with hilarious surges of comic relief?a lecture on the facts of life by a well-meaning priest, an incomprehensible math lesson at school, the brisk tirades of a local madman, a sly way of getting back at a hated policeman by way of the bishop. In Deane's hands, the language leaps and quivers, and the life he illuminates is at once achingly sad and transfixingly real. 35,000 first printing.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, consummately Irish, should have won the Booker!,
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Reading in the Dark: A Novel (Paperback)
Totally satisfying on every level, this book is a true masterpiece. The level of description, the point of view of the naive child, the events which amuse and/or frighten, the manipulation of time, the suspense created--all are absolutely flawless in their execution. The reader becomes wholly immersed in the act of reading and totally oblivious to the act of creation, so much so that it's difficult to describe the book critically without gushing uncontrollably!
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Way of Every Flesh,
This review is from: Reading in the Dark (Hardcover)
The book of Irish poet Seamus Deane describes a childhood of an unnamed protagonist in Northern Ireland in the 1950s. This gives opportunity to attain impartial attitude to the situation in Derry in order not to blame participants of the conflict but to discern its cause and motives. Old family mysteries' disclosing makes the novel a real pageturner, but it is only a part of author's plot.Seamus Deane masterly reconstructs a wonderful universe of child's fantasies: enigmatic and thrilling adult world appears as an exciting fairy tale with additional heroic or terrifying tinges of local political discord. The child grows up, and fantastic histories lose their charms acquiring outlines of reality in terrors, cowardice and treachery of their personae. Former semigods, parents become ordinary mortals with their fears, pains and guilts; but extra knowledge and futher understanding give both additional strength and pride in never-ending children-parents rivalry and additional yearning after innocence of childhood lost once and for all. We become adults only when in comprehension of our parent's vulnerability we find compassion for them. And hope for future mercy from our own children. An excellent novel!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Slow start, but it just got better and better,
This review is from: Reading in the Dark: A Novel (Paperback)
Having just read Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes", which also describes Catholic childhood in Ireland, I expected to find the two books very similar. I was wrong; whilst "Angela's Ashes" mainly revolved around the problems of poverty and alcoholism in the family, "Reading in the Dark" is decidedly more intricate. Deane has created a beautiful book, full of pleasant (and unpleasant) childhood cameos that are so delightful, as a reader, to share. What I enjoyed most about the book was Deane's ability to create amazingly vivid scenes. The secret passage in "Grianan" was an exceptionally memorable passage (pardon the pun).All in all, "Reading in the Dark" was a thoroughly enjoyable experience which gathered momentum and just became too good to put down.
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