JAN CARSON’s latest novel, The Raptures, is set in the fictional Northern Irish village of Ballylack, in the summer of 1993. Our heroine is 11-year-old Hannah, who attends a particularly Evangelical church, and, as a result, lives a highly restricted life. She is not allowed to celebrate Hallowe’en, or learn about dinosaurs; nor is she allowed to go to birthday parties or the cinema, because the devil is always after a foothold. (Her father says: “Cinema starts with sin.”)
One of the few things that Hannah is allowed to watch on TV is the news, and, since we’re in the middle of the Troubles, violence is so common as to be almost mundane: “There’s never a night when nobody dies.”
For all that, it’s summer, and Hannah is looking forward to the holidays — until, that is, her classmates start to succumb to a mystery illness. Hannah, it appears, is the only child to stay well. Events taker a darker turn when the other children begin dying — only to appear to Hannah, one by one, from beyond the grave. In a story that is, by turns, tragic and comic, we witness the gradual unravelling of the community.
This is Carson’s third novel (Malcolm Orange Disappears came out in 2014, followed by The Fire Starters, in 2019). It is hard to categorise her work, but, she says, “There’s definitely a magical realist undertone to everything I do — and this one in particular,” she says. Part of the inspiration came from the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. “I mean, what would happen if all of the children in a village are taken away to another place, and one is left behind? So, there’s a kind of fable there.”
What is it about this form of fiction that appeals to her? “I’m completely self-taught,” she says. “I have no degree in creative writing, or anything like that. I guess, when I started to write, I just wrote the kinds of stories I wanted to read, and they tended to be this way.”
It was the poet Sinéad Morrissey who gave her a copy of Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum and suggested that this was her genre. “At that point, I began to do some research into magical realism, and to understand the associations with colonialism and post-colonialism, which is particularly relevant in Northern Ireland. I’m always a bit shocked that a lot of the writing that comes out of the North [of Ireland] is very realist. There is not the kind of playfulness or the uncanny or anything speculative at all. . .
“But I would say, for me, the main reason that I write magical realism is because the Bible was my primary storyteller text, and I think the Bible is a magical realist text. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. But it’s a narrative that’s grounded in the real world, where strange things happen, but it constantly brings you back to the real present. So, that’s how I learned to tell stories: being exposed to years and years of Presbyterianism.”
Looking at Northern Irish literature, she says: “I think, if you go back, beyond the period of the Troubles, there is a real grounding in a kind of mythology and folklore and a playfulness.
But something happened when the conflict began. People mistakenly got this notion that serious times deserve a very serious degree of storytelling technique, which is nonsense. . . I don’t think that you need to be realistic to talk very seriously about things.”
YOUNGER Northern Irish writers appear to be enjoying a moment. As well as Carson, Louise Kennedy, Lucy Caldwell, and Anna Burns have all come to prominence in recent years.
“These writers have always been there,” she says, “and they’ve been writing away, but there was a moment around the Brexit legislation and questions around the [Northern Ireland] Protocol when the likes of The New York Times and Le Monde and The Guardian suddenly came calling for us to talk. And, lo and behold, there were loads of [us], and all very eloquent. So, that spotlight is probably one of the only things that has been positive about Brexit.”
She is now a dual passport-holder — but not without misgivings. “I’m the first person in my family to have an Irish passport ever, I think. My grandfather was an Orangeman, my dad was Clerk of Sessions in the Presbyterian Church, and we were brought up very British.”
In the brand of Presbyterianism in which she grew up, politics was viewed as “a dirty thing to get involved in”, a stance reflected in The Raptures. “They didn’t vote, but, if they had, it would have been Unionist. The last five years has taken me on quite a journey.” This is to do partly with Brexit, and partly with the outworkings of the collapse of the Stormont government.
“It’s also parallel with my journey as a writer, because the Irish writing community has been so incredibly welcoming and inclusive, whereas with the UK writing community, it hasn’t always been as easy,” she says. “At this point, I probably identify as Irish. I’m not ashamed of my British roots, and I still have my British passport, but I’ve much more ease and comfort with an Irish identity than a British one.”
Winning the EU Prize for Literature Ireland in 2019 for The Firestarters is part of the story. “That was a very gracious statement, I thought, because the Irish judging panel nominated my novel, which is about Loyalist identity in Ireland, as representative of Irish culture. I feel a real responsibility to be an EU laureate, and that’s much, much easier on an Irish passport.”
OF THE latest book, she says: “There’s not very much of The Raptures that isn’t my own story. . . Much of Hannah’s world is the world that I grew up in.
“Growing up, I read a lot of Irish literature, but I didn’t really ever come across another Evangelical Protestant narrative. There was a lot of the exploration of the Catholic faith in Ireland, but it just always felt odd that I couldn’t pick up a book and go, ‘That’s the world I’m familiar with.’
“I wanted to write something so that the enormous amount of people in Northern Ireland that grew up under [the Revd Ian] Paisley, under Evangelical Protestant churches, have something that represented them. I also wanted to interrogate it.”
As a result, The Raptures took about eight years to write, “because the early incarnations of it were just really angry, and I didn’t want to write a book that became confrontational.”
She took inspiration from Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience (about leaving an Orthodox Jewish community) and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (about the systematic rape of women in a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia), “because I think they’re careful books that go through religion, picking out what is beautiful and worthy of celebration, and what needs to be interrogated”. She wanted, she says, to write the kind of a book that was honest, but also respectful.
“It’s a world I’m not so much part of now, but my entire extended family still is, and a lot of my friends are. I’m a big believer in trying to maintain conversation and relationship with people that you don’t always see eye to eye with.”
Ms Carson’s narrative is whip-smart, and full of humour. “There is nothing in there that’s not true,” she says. Ballymena — home to Ian Paisley as well as the Carson family — is often called the buckle of Northern Ireland’s Bible Belt. When she was growing up, in a town of 3000, there were seven different Protestant denominations.
She refers to a BBC documentary about Paisley which was broadcast to mark the recent 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. “There was actual footage of them coming in to chain up the swings on a Saturday night in the park that I used to play in. In my head, I thought I’d exaggerated that, but here’s the footage.”
SO, DOES Hannah’s world still resonate with contemporary readers? “It’s interesting, because it’s just come out in the French translation. France is such a secular nation: you’re looking at in a different way, as something archaic and outdated. It’s been really well received, but it’s been more read in comparison with things like Islam.
“In Northern Ireland, there are still these pockets of fundamentalist, very Evangelical Protestantism: women can’t get into the pulpit; it’s very homophobic; climate-change deniers. People read The Raptures and go, well, yeah, that’s like my church.”
Directly or indirectly, the legacy of the Troubles is ever present in her writing. What can fiction contribute to the conversation? “One of the big problems that we struggle with in Northern Ireland is binary thinking,” she says. “I imagine not everyone in England knows that 91 per cent of our school system is still segregated, and [it costs] £600,000 a day to keep our school system segregated in Northern Ireland.
“So, we’re bringing up our children to think in these binary ways: us versus them, Nationalist versus Unionist. There’s a giant peace wall still splitting Belfast into Protestant and Catholic areas. So, the idea of nuance, and being able to empathise and see the world from another person’s perspective, is not something that our children are naturally being offered.
“I think that’s the strength of fiction. Every time you read a character, you’re invited to step into a pair of shoes that aren’t yours.”
She is convinced that children who read have a greater ability to empathise with others. “I grew up in the fundamentalist world of Hannah, and I honestly believe the only reason that I’m slightly more liberal is because I just read furiously.”
Writers, therefore, have an enormously important part to play. “I think we are moving towards some form of a referendum on a united Ireland — in my lifetime, possibly in the next ten years. Artists are going to be a huge part of that, because, with the Brexit referendum, people voted without an awareness of what they were voting for.
“And people are going to vote on the future of the whole island without knowing what it’s like to live in Tipperary if you live in Ballymena, or what it’s like to live in Ballymena if you live in Tipperary. That’s where books come in. Writers can take you into these worlds, to understand a bit. Everywhere I’ve been in the South with The Raptures has been shocking, because people have said: ‘I had no idea it was like this.’”
How has the novel been received in the North? “It’s been received really well in the Nationalist community. I’ve had so many Nationalist politicians just getting in touch and saying: ‘I learned so much. It’s helped me to understand the outlook of the likes of the DUP.’”
There has, though, been some antagonism in the Protestant heartlands. “But I think it’s difficult having a mirror held up to any community, to recognise themselves.” Her brother, who is a pastor, has been supportive. (The book is dedicated to him.) “He always says, you know, any religious community that wants to keep skeletons in the closet is not a holy community if that’s what you want to do. So, the likes of him . . . they’re very grateful for it.”
BEFORE she became a writer, the Church was also Carson’s world of work. “I didn’t write a word until I was 25. I worked in churches for a long time, with a special emphasis on working with artists,” she says. There was considerable EU funding for community arts projects after the Good Friday Agreement. “I loved those [projects] and worked in a couple of big arts venues, programming literary festivals. Then, eventually, I thought I’d have a wee go myself.”
Her community work continues alongside her writing life. She has a particular interest in working with people with dementia, partly because three of her four grandparents had the condition. Ventures include a research project with Queen’s University into how dementia is depicted in contemporary fiction, which led to the commissioning of contemporary British and Irish writers to write short stories inspired by dementia, published as the collection A Little Unsteadily into Light.
She also wrote a piece for Radio 3, UnRaveling, about a concert pianist with dementia who is struggling to play a piece by Ravel. It was narrated by the actor Liam Neeson, another child of Ballymena.
Carson has a book of short stories coming out next. Meanwhile, her next novel (working title: Few and Far Between) will address the plan by Terence O’Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in the 1960s, to drain Lough Neagh to create a seventh county.
“He was laughed out of Westminster for saying that. It was kind of like FDR’s New Deal. But, in this book, he actually has a go,” she says.
Carson discovered that, beneath the Lough, there is an archipelago of little islands. “So, when he drops the water, these islands appear, and they become a sanctuary space for people during the Troubles, who don’t feel safe in mainland Northern Ireland. The book is set in 2017, where they’re about to flood the dams and get rid of the islands because they’re not needed any more. And there’s still a few people there who don’t feel safe going back.”
Before then, there will be the chance this autumn to hear her next Radio 4 series, which follows The Last Resort, a series of interrelated stories broadcast in 2021. Moving Mountains imagines that Ballymena Town Council accidentally sells Slemish Mountain, where St Patrick lived, to a Japanese theme park. “They think they’ve sold the concept of it to a Japanese theme park creating a St Patrick’s area in their Irish theme park. But, when the paperwork comes through, they haven’t understood the translation, and they’ve actually sold the physical mountain.
“It’s a bit like The Last Resort, where we get different people’s perspectives: the haulage contractor that’s been hurt by Brexit, and has taken this deal to move this mountain, even though everyone hates the idea; the politician who accidentally misread the translation; and the environmental activist.”
She adds: “It’s not as mad as it sounds.”
The Raptures by Jan Carson is published by Penguin at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99); 978-1-804-99084-1.