This Human Season by Louise Dean

A good mouthful of gloom

In the final chapter of this book a singular phrase appears: "inexorable, stupid, lovely". It refers to a narrow, bumpy road in Donegal along which Sean and Kathleen Moran and their two youngest children are driving towards what may, or may not, be a new beginning in their Belfast-blighted lives.

We travel no further, yet part company with them feeling vaguely optimistic that their future may yield something more tolerable than the inexorably bleak, stupidly useless and decidedly unlovely existence they have endured throughout all the preceding chapters. The story is set in the Troubles during the Thatcher era. There are two main characters: Kathleen, a housewife from the republican Ballymurphy estate in West Belfast, and John Dunn, an English prison officer at the Maze Prison (formerly Long Kesh) which was built to contain convicted and suspected terrorists, among them now Kathleen's older son, also named Sean.

Kathleen is married to a drunken braggart who, behind lace curtains and whiskey fumes, rages at British authority while his son and other republican prisoners prepare to go on hunger strike. Dunn, a former soldier untainted by sectarianism and, consequently, with no local axe to grind, has taken the job because it pays good danger money, but is troubled by the cruelties inflicted on his charges.

Dean rather brilliantly captures Northern Irish speech patterns, as when Kathleen's sister Eileen says: "Christ that's a lovely wee drop. We're going to finish the bottle that way, Kathleen, go steady. Jesus don't spill any of it, you silly cow, look you've spilt a good mouthful there. Rub it in so it won't show. Here y'are, use my sleeve."

Brilliance of patois is as cheerful as the narrative gets for it is an intensely gloomy portrayal of wrecked lives in rancid poverty. The gloom can be said to be relieved only by melancholy, defined in bleakness and redeemed by despair. Mornings are "dim and grey", and evenings drunkenly garrulous at best. Christmas is an angry washout in which parents fight and priests fart. Morose movement reveals graffiti everywhere, and a dull seething lightened by no birdsong from the green-dark hills around the city. No church bells punctuate the priestly afflatus.

In this novel Dean conveys, more tellingly than a documentary could, the double-edged uselessness of terrorism as it pulses its turgid message to posterity. Men are murdered in their homes and on the street. Sympathy is spurned, decency strangled. John Dunn is united with the English son he didn't know he had, and a new life flickers on the horizon, though not for long.

Mothers anxious for their own sanity and their children's survival travel through a depressingly familiar cycle. Maternal love declares recruitment to the IRA to be anathema. When filial bravado ignores this, with fatal consequences, the anathema is promptly lifted because a son, so silenced - or "martyred" - can have done no wrong. And so it goes on.

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