Jan CarsonRezensionen

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-fire-starters-by-jan-carson/

East Belfast, marching season, the present day (2019); two fathers concerned about their children. Ex-Loyalist Sammy suspects that his son is the masked social media influencer behind a wave of arson attacks. Trouble GP Jonathan’s daughter was begotten of a Siren who came and stayed in his bath and then disappeared back into the waves.

Most of the novel is gritty reality, so that you can almost smell the tarmac bubbling in the summer sunlight; but the parts with Jonathan and his daughter edge into magical realism with a particular Belfast idiom, where parents of strangely gifted children navigate both intrusive supernatural forces and the banal bureaucracy of health care and social security.

Often this sort of trope can feel bolted onto a conventional narrative, but Carson makes you feel that Belfast (East Belfast, very specifically) is the sort of traumatised place where reality starts to erode at the edges. It’s well-balanced, in the sense that a cyclist going at top speed over uneven terrain remains well balanced. Anyone expecting a standard urban grim novel will be surprised.

Jan Carson’s The Raptures is set in a village near Belfast in the early 1990s. The Good Friday Agreement is still five years away, and hope of a solution to the sectarian conflict which plagues Northern Ireland is dim. Yet, the inhabitants of Ballylack have a more urgent problem on their minds. Several children from the same class start dying of a mysterious illness. The only student who seems to be avoiding the effects of the disease is Hannah, a girl from a born-again Christian background. Already an outsider because of the peculiar hang-ups of her parents, these inexplicable developments only serve to further mark her out, especially when she is visited by the ghosts of her dead classmates, who reveal that they are trapped in an alternative version of Ballylack. We live the extraordinary events of that summer through Hannah’s eyes – the novel opens and ends in the first person, but even those chapters written in the third person are written from her perspective.

Carson’s writing is marked by witty observation, and would be a joy to read, irrespective of the details of the story itself. As a bonus, she comes up with an enjoyably quirky plot; a coming-of-age narrative which mixes elements of comedy and tragedy, human drama and satire, mystery and the supernatural. It is not often that a book has you laughing out loud in one paragraph and shedding a tear in the next, but somehow Carson manages it repeatedly in this novel.

This notwithstanding, there is still something about The Raptures which I cannot get my head around. The speculative aspects of the novel invite an allegorical reading but I’m not sure I got the “message” (if there is, indeed, a specific one). The alternative Ballylack, with the ghosts rapidly ganging up into factions, could be a symbol of the divisions in the adult world. The send-up of Hannah’s happy-clappy Protestant parents (her father in particular) can be read as an indictment of religion, although not necessarily of belief – Grandpa, one of the most positively portrayed characters in the novel, also “prays in his own manner”.

At the end of the book, I was left with the impression that there were hidden layers which I was missing. Even though this might be the case, I still found The Raptures a remarkable reading experience.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-raptures-by-jan-carson.html

I'd just borrowed Jan Carson's The Raptures from the library when Cathy at 746 Books broke the news that it had been shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year (along with another splendid novel that I've read, The Colony by Audrey Magee, see my review). The Raptures was on my radar because I'd read the review by Kim at Reading Matters but now that I've read the book, I know why it was shortlisted...

Human beings are spectacularly good at brutal conflicts which go on for years and hate-filled years, and The Raptures shows the reader what it is like to be a child growing up in a climate where death seems random and inevitable. The novel traces three months in the life of Hannah, a child growing up in a Northen Ireland village in 1993 during the Troubles, when — inexplicably at first — the children in her class start to die. As the villagers grapple with the existential question Where will it end? How can they make it stop? they are confronting the normalisation of the Troubles with its reality.

Carson depicts the Othering than perpetuates the bigotry with black humour and biting satire. Ten-year-old Hannah is isolated from the other children in her class because of her evangelical faith. Her parents impose numerous strictures to prevent her being 'contaminated' by the values of the other people in the village. No dancing, no cinema, no magic or fairy tales and so on. Her exclusion, imposed partly by her parents and partly by the children who reject her oddness, has the effect of making her both naïve and perceptive. She is startled when her mother suggests meditating on the scriptures to ward off the illness, because she thinks that meditation is something that Muslims do.

They've done Muslims in RE class. It's all right to learn about wars and other bad things that happened in history. Forewarned is forearmed, Pastor Bill says. Hannah has no notion of what this means. It is not OK to dabble in other people's religions. Most Protestants would agree on this. It's why Lief's mum wasn't allowed to do her yoga demonstration at the last school fair. It's why Granny stopped watching Songs of Praise* after they had an ecumenical carol service, broadcast from a Roman Catholic chapel with a priest saying the prayers. (p.218)

When asked, Mum tells Hannah that she thinks it's Buddhists who meditate, but meditating on the scriptures is of God, not the Devil. Carson is economical, and not didactic, but she makes the point that this kind of bigotry, ingrained over generations, won't be shifted by some lessons in comparative religion.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/10/25/the-raptures-by-jan-carson/

The story is set in the fictitious Protestant village of Ballylack one summer in the early nineties. Shortly after being told by a visiting speaker that they are "Northern Ireland's future", the eleven-year-olds in the top class of the local primary school all start falling sick with a mysterious and deadly illness. Hannah, who belongs to a particularly hardline charismatic pentecostalist family, seems to be the only child who isn't affected, and she disconcertingly finds herself nominated as contact-person to the world of the living by her dead classmates, who have somehow turned into rootless, destructive teenage ghosts.

Carson takes a hard look at the kind of small community she grew up in, wittily — and with a certain amount of affection — pinning down its absurdities and small-minded local concerns. It's very lively, clever writing, with a lot of close observation, and satisfyingly complicated levels of allegory and symbolism going on in the background of what is essentially a kind of murder-mystery plot.

But an utterly unsentimental magic-realist novel about the deaths of young children is never going to be an easy read. If The fire starters was challenging, this is the next level up. Carson makes it clear that the quaint local peculiarities of Northern Ireland life can't be separated from the very real harm that they do.½

Jan Carson’s The Raptures is set in a village near Belfast in the early 1990s. The Good Friday Agreement is still five years away, and hope of a solution to the sectarian conflict which plagues Northern Ireland is dim. Yet, the inhabitants of Ballylack have a more urgent problem on their minds. Several children from the same class start dying of a mysterious illness. The only student who seems to be avoiding the effects of the disease is Hannah, a girl from a born-again Christian background. Already an outsider because of the peculiar hang-ups of her parents, these inexplicable developments only serve to further mark her out, especially when she is visited by the ghosts of her dead classmates, who reveal that they are trapped in an alternative version of Ballylack. We live the extraordinary events of that summer through Hannah’s eyes – the novel opens and ends in the first person, but even those chapters written in the third person are written from her perspective.

Carson’s writing is marked by witty observation, and would be a joy to read, irrespective of the details of the story itself. As a bonus, she comes up with an enjoyably quirky plot; a coming-of-age narrative which mixes elements of comedy and tragedy, human drama and satire, mystery and the supernatural. It is not often that a book has you laughing out loud in one paragraph and shedding a tear in the next, but somehow Carson manages it repeatedly in this novel.

This notwithstanding, there is still something about The Raptures which I cannot get my head around. The speculative aspects of the novel invite an allegorical reading but I’m not sure I got the “message” (if there is, indeed, a specific one). The alternative Ballylack, with the ghosts rapidly ganging up into factions, could be a symbol of the divisions in the adult world. The send-up of Hannah’s happy-clappy Protestant parents (her father in particular) can be read as an indictment of religion, although not necessarily of belief – Grandpa, one of the most positively portrayed characters in the novel, also “prays in his own manner”.

At the end of the book, I was left with the impression that there were hidden layers which I was missing. Even though this might be the case, I still found The Raptures a remarkable reading experience.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-raptures-by-jan-carson.html

An entrancing, delightful collection of stories that can fit on a postcard. Carson started writing these innovative stories when she hit a writer's block. Now at over 800 she has published two small books of the best. The originals were on postcards mailed to friends. Different, funny, with a humour born in Northern Ireland, what else would you expect from the author of Malcolm Orange Disappears?

Resistible.

Winner of an EU Prize for Literature Jan Carson's The Fire Starters is a blend of social realism and the fantastic which reveals the ongoing trauma that haunts Belfast despite the Good Friday Agreement set in place two decades ago in 1998.

At the 2020 (digital) Melbourne Writers Festival, Jan Carson was paired with Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott whose new novel The Rain Heron (n my TBR) also uses magic realism in a setting grounded in everyday reality. To quote from my report about what Carson said in this session:

The Fire Starters explores the history of sectarianism in Northern Ireland in a novel where the ghosts of the past inhabit the present during the Marching Season in Belfast. These echoes of the past can be seen in real life: Carson said that whenever you see a limping man of a certain age in Belfast, it’s because he was knee-capped during the Troubles. The book traces a father’s dismay when he learns that his son is involved in the violence that often accompanies the bonfires set by the competing sides. Realism blends with the fantastic with rebellious young people setting mega fires that spark a conflagration.

Chair Angela Meyer asked: Can aspects of reality be better addressed by using the fantastic? Carson said that the Northern Ireland tradition is realism, whereas in the republic, this is not so. Citing writers like Salman Rushdie, Carson likes fantastic elements being used to show how absurd reality can be. She says she doesn’t want people to ‘like’ her work, she wants then to wake up and pay attention to what’s in it.

Which is certainly the effect the book had on me. I hadn't thought much about the ongoing effects of the violence in Belfast. From this distance and having no skin in the game, I thought the Troubles were all over and a good thing too. Carson tackles this attitude in Chapter 1 'This is Belfast', leading me to categorise this novel within 'War, Armed Conflict and its Aftermath' because though the conflict in Northern Ireland has long been characterised as 'The Troubles', that innocuous-sounding name is a euphemism for a civil war of extraordinary brutality.

The Troubles is too less a word for all of this. It is a word for minor inconveniences, such as overdrawn bank accounts, slow punctures, a woman's time of the month. It is not a violent word, something as blunt and brutal as 'apartheid'. Instead, we have a word like 'scissors' which can only be said in the plural. the Troubles is/was one monster thing. The Troubles is/are many individual evils caught up together. (Other similar words include 'trousers' and 'pliers'.) The Troubles is always written with a capital T as if it were an event, as the Battle of Hastings is an event with a fixed beginning and end, a point on the calendar year. History will no doubt prove it is actually a verb; an action that can be done to people over and over again, like stealing. (p.8)

It had not occurred to me that there remains in Belfast an undercurrent of fear that a small spark could start it all up again, nor that young people coming to maturity in a 'post-Troubles world' might not realise that reigniting rebellion might soon get out of control.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/08/21/the-fire-starters-by-jan-carson/

En los barrios protestantes del este de Belfast basta una chispa para que todo vuelva a arder como en los años de los Troubles. En este junio sofocante, la decisión del ayuntamiento de limitar la altura de las hogueras del solsticio de verano desencadena un imprevisto estallido de furia. Las calles se envuelven en llamas y el antiguo paramilitar unionista Sammy Agnew ve con profunda preocupación cómo su hijo se inicia en sus mismos pasos de violencia. Por su parte, el pusilánime doctor Jonathan Murray acude un buen día a una emergencia y se encuentra con una sirena. Como las de los cuentos, pero de carne y escamas, con cola de pez en lugar de piernas, retozando zalamera dentro de una bañera llena de agua tibia en un suburbio de Belfast. de su fugaz encuentro nacerá Sophie, una preciosa niña, que queda al cuidado del médico tras la desaparición de la mujer marina.

The summer "marching season", when East Belfast protestants commemorate the Battle of the Boyne with processions and bonfires, is a long-standing flashpoint for riots and civil disorder. In this particular year, it threatens to get even more out of control than usual, with a sinister masked figure posting videos on social media encouraging young people to start fires in defence of their "civil rights". Naturally, there are plenty who do so without stopping to think which rights they might be defending and how starting fires could help. This is Belfast, after all, and it's the middle of summer. The tourist board are hoping visitors will turn up to enjoy the city and its unexpected attractions, but it seems to be a lost cause when there are negative stories on the BBC News every night...

Against this background of the barely suppressed legacy of generations of community violence, we follow the story of two fathers frightened — for quite different reasons — of what they may have brought into the world with their children. One is a "normal enough" story of the heritage of violence; the other takes us off into a magic realist dimension. Jonathan has been picked, for unknown reasons, by a Siren to become the father of her child. Now he's convinced himself that baby Sophie will be genetically programmed to lure people to their doom the moment she starts speaking. In his plight, he discovers that Belfast is actually full of the concerned parents of children with unexpected powers, but he still has a hard time sharing his problem. He's a respectable doctor, he can't go around telling people he believes in supernatural beings.

This is obviously in part a fable about the powerful, unpredictable waves of love and fear for their children that parents experience, and in part a way to lead us into the strangeness of the mindset that goes with growing up in Northern Ireland and the way that engages — in good and bad ways — with the power of storytelling. Carson wants us to see the cult of reason and the protestant distrust of getting involved with symbolism and myth as elements that make it harder for people to share what they really feel about what's wrong with their lives. Carson is bending the edges of realism to achieve something a little bit like what Anna Burns did in Milkman by twisting some of the basic rules of language. I'm not sure if it works completely, but this is still a very interesting book, if a slightly disturbing one.½

Northern Ireland author, Jan Carson, has the most imaginative writing style I've ever come across. That it's a debut novel makes it all the more awe-inspiring. Eleven year-old Malcolm, his parents, and baby brother travel around America living in their beat-up Volvo. Malcolm is worried about the holes that are beginning to form on his body although no one else notices. When the father abandons the family, Malcolm's mother finds a job and home at a Baptist retirement village in Oregon filled, of course, with fantastically colourful characters. Carson maintains the surprise factor throughout this ingenius story without once letting up. This is a wonderful, unforgettable story.