Every One Still Here - Liadan Ní Chuinn
Consisting of six stories, Every One Still Here is a diverse collection that is nonetheless tightly built around a central theme bookended by the stories at the beginning and the end of the collection. Those stories, 'We All Go' and 'Daisy Hill' both feature young people who may not have lived through the period known as the Troubles, but are nonetheless struggling to come to terms with its legacy upon their own families and on many others. The Northern Ireland troubles are in the past for the current generation, and presumably that is the case for the author, but it's not difficult for anyone living here to see that tensions and divisions persist. Some of us old enough to have direct experience of where that lingering mistrust comes from know that the idea of 'peace' is not an ideal that can has been achieved, but is more the beginning of a journey whose destination is still a long way off, or perhaps merely just an uneasy truce where one set of troubles are soon to be replaced by another.
Part of the reason the narrators of these two stories are struggling to come to terms with comprehending a mysterious past not fully understood or talked about is precisely because it is not talked about. Or at least not talked about openly in real terms for the atrocity that it was and for the lasting impact that is still with us. All they have to go on is the experience of living with the after effects of a still dysfunctional society with many dysfunctional families, which indeed seems far removed from any idea of peace. There is like a social PTSD, one that the deeply sensitive narrator Jackie of 'We All Go' considers in terms of a seemingly minor incident that happened to his parents decades ago, one that they still won't speak about. His parents' car was hijacked when his mother was pregnant and just two days away from giving birth to him. He wasn't there but in a way he was and he lives wondering whether the event was significant or has had any lasting impact. He feels a sense of injustice in this, that the sins of past have not been acknowledged and resolved, but covered up - "things unspoken as if that makes them unseen".
The story doesn't attempt to use that as a simple metaphor for a complex issue. There is some reflection by Jackie on his on his father's death and the death of a dog (two similar subjects also bring resonance to 'Daisy Hill'), as well as his current present-tense recounting of his first year university studies in anatomy, where he feels a detachment from those around him and incomprehension at their detachment from handling bits of dead bodies. The relating of such uneasiness and sense of displacement in such experiences is mirrored but in a less easily defined way in the middle stories of the book, but they contribute to a greater sense of our experiences and feelings all being caught up in the vast number of incidents, events, relationships and experiences that we absorb on a daily basis that we can never fully evaluate or weigh their significance.
'Amalur', the second story, is also about family, about relationships, about the secrets individuals keep and how because of it, how they feel like they never really know those closest to them. The narrator has a boyfriend from a Basque family and she loves his family more than her own. She has an empty relationship with her own mother, but still loves the sense of family, of having a shared common background, a language, a culture, beliefs and past hardships that unites them; things that define them, bind them together and set them apart, but there are other small details and family troubles in the story that all feed into the narrator's sense of discomfort.
In what feels like a more experimental piece - it's even written in second-person - 'Mary' uses the idea of a writer on a creative writing course trying to find a method or subject that will allow her to find an expression for her sense of unease she has with the actions of those she sees around her, of those close to her and questions how can you tell the good from the bad. Despite the frustration of the course teacher and others in the class that she is heading down a dead end, she persists with seeking to find the answers to these troubling doubts in the innocence in a child called Mary who regularly appears on a bus. The same issues are worked over - "It is nothing until it is stated. It is nothing if it is not named" while wondering "Isn't the truth that we all do terrible things?"
The past, living with terrible things, trying to make sense of them in the present but afraid of what they will reveal also arises in 'Russia'. On a notion, a man goes to see a psychic on Bloomfield Avenue in Belfast. He doesn't really know why or what to expect, but when prompted realises that he has a deep sense of guilt about something. The story takes another angle on the idea of family and fitting in, but in a surprising and fascinating way, the author connects this story with a side incident around the experience of the narrator at his workplace in the Museum. Someone is leaving notes and mementos at exhibits of skulls and mummified remains, a protest at them being left no peace in death. It's an extraordinary connection and despite the help of the psychic, not one that the narrator can resolve or resolve to his satisfaction. Isn't that the truth about many such things? But by the time we get to the final story in the collection we will see how this - like the other stories - ties in with and gives such impact to 'Daisy Hill'.
Prior to that 'Novena' in a way prepares us for the final story, or adds wider context to the kind of everyday troubles and family issues that people face in the present day which, in some way that is hard to define, are related to events in the past. It deals with two market traders, Tara running a coffee stand with teenage assistant Moll from an immigrant family. Felix with a bit and bobs stall. Both lead almost double lives, a personal life different from the one they show at their place of work. It's a reflection that this is something we all indulge in now, perhaps even having multiple aspects that are split across social media platforms, raising expectations of what life can be while refusing to acknowledge the reality. News of a scam fertility clinic becomes a big talking point, stirring up feelings of parenting that carry familiar failings and feelings of rejection that are in evidence elsewhere in the collection.
In 'Daisy Hill' personal stories and experiences of the history of the Troubles rise to the surface and catch you unawares. As they often do. Rowan travels into Newry to visit his uncle John who is distraught that his dog is sick and dying. Only it's John who ends up in Daisy Hill hospital and the trauma of the event stirs up old emotions in Rowan, who is only in his late 20s but a writer and sensitive to family histories. Like Jackie in 'We All Go', Rowan believes the events from that period profoundly affected his parents and prevented them from having a normal lives. And not just his parents, his wider family and the people of Northern Ireland, those who suffered and were murdered at the hands of a British state that now wants to brush it all under the carpet. There is resistance to acknowledge it also in the young people of his own generation and their parents who having lived through it, don't want to talk about it and relive it.
The story is extraordinarily visceral. I have never read anything quite like it, not in past writing on the Troubles, and certainly not expecting to see it in a young writer today who you must assume never experienced it first-hand. But time throws a different complexion on things. The cold eye of history may permit a more dispassionate reflection on those times, but it can also be far from dispassionate in the judgement it takes on it. It's like the breaking of an unconscious omertà, like Black Lives in the USA, like the Civil War and the Franco years in Spain, distance permits a fresh perspective that there needs to be an acknowledgement of the reality of the past as it really was; not some glossing over of history, not some idealistic or romanticised outlook on the past, but a stark look at the lasting impact that going through something deeply traumatising has left on the society around us today. Reading 'Daisy Hill', you realise that it needs from outside but still connected to it all to look back at this and say "WTF? This is how the British state behaved against the citizens of Northern Ireland in the 20th century; murdering, torturing, beating and brutalising people and then calling demands for justice "vexatious claims against those who served their country". Why is no one really calling this out for what it is?
As shocking as the list of historical atrocities is at the end of the story, it's almost inevitably what the rest of the stories of Every One Still Here have been leading up to. What is incredible is the way that we get to this point of release in 'Daisy Hill'. It starts out with a man distraught at his sick dog, a sick dog that bites somewhat weakly and ineffectively when roused, and turns into a roll call condemnation of atrocities committed - by the army of the British state - against civilians. It makes the experience of death and suffering of the past real and present today. It contrasts this also with a reflection of a school experience where Rowan had been coached in the importance of "getting in touch with your emotions" in the belief of it being a way of "moving on". The juxtaposition of these little details and their impact is extraordinary, and in their own way the other stories between the more direct reflections on the history of 'the north' serve a similar function, bringing them into the present, providing contrast and context but no less devastating for the lasting impact of those times that still haunts them today.
Reading notes: Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published in the UK by Granta on the 17th July. I received an advance eBook copy from the publisher through NetGalley. I suspect that some might find the author's viewpoint on The Troubles "one-sided", but the only side I see them taking is that of innocent victims. There are other innocent lives of course from other communities including many on the side of the "security forces" who will have suffered from the trauma of the experience of those times, but that would be their story to tell, not the author's.
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