Evaluative Summarisations: Representing the Real

Bowyer-Bell’s approach tends towards a structuralist and evaluative method of analysis. Other contemporary critics use more traditional close reading methods to interpret the novels, but these too tend towards evaluation. Richard Deutsch (1976) focuses on novels about the Troubles written by Irish writers, which he classifies

hierarchically according to perceived value, using an analytical method that might be termed “evaluative summarisation”. The critic, having presented a summary of the novel’s plot, comments on those elements considered strengths in the novel, and elements considered weaknesses. The tone that Deutsch adopts is judgemental and evaluative, and the criteria for judgement and evaluation are subjective. A measure of value is how realistic the novel is in relation to what Deutsch perceives to be real life in “Ulster” (134). Deutsch’s aim is to explore whether the term “renaissance”, applied by literary critics to Northern Irish poetry and drama, could be applied to Northern Irish short stories and novels. For Deutsch, Northern Ireland society is divided into two fixed and polarised communities, which have always existed, and are essential aspects of Northern Irish society. He refers to “the two persuasions” (133);

“the two communities” (134); and “both sides of the religious and political divide”

(142). In his interpretation of Irish history, polarisation and sectarianism are not historical and mutable, but eternal and ontological.

The criteria for evaluation include evidence of “realism”, which is not defined, and sympathy towards the Catholic community and/or the working class community.

Deutsch’s interpretation of the term “community” is binding and one-dimensional.

There is no sense that individual human beings might live, act and react within a matrix of communities and identities. His analysis of the politics of Northern Ireland extends only to asserting that the conflict is religious in origins, form and function.

Deutsch states that realistic details are well depicted in specific novels. Of Ballinger’s The Green Grassy Slopes (1969), he writes that “W.A. Ballinger studies well the two communities possessed by the same chronic problems: unemployment, poverty,

hunger, lack of comfort, fear and sectarianism” (134) [my italics]. In James Garrick’s With O’Leary in the Brave (1971), “the description of the way of life behind the barricades is very accurate, listing all the real people who took part in this historic and short lived ‘republic’” (140), while Garrick’s “style, dialogues and descriptions stick to reality” (139). Deutsch is also partial to the hyperreality of satire, claiming that in his novel, A Little Bit British (1970), Martin Waddell “transcends” a novel on the North and its Troubles to reach “the level of brilliant satire” (136).

The only one of the ten writers discussed in this article with whom Deutsch takes issue is Joan Lingard, because: “one detects a leaning towards the Protestants and some sniping regarding the Catholics” (148). Moreover, for Deutsch “t]he novel has a pro-British view of the Ulster Question and leaves the adult reader in doubt about the necessity of such works for young readers”(148). Deutsch does not specify which novel he is referring to. In the context of the paragraph, he might well be making a reference to a composite summary of Lingard’s Troubles novels rather than a specific novel. Praise for Troubles novels is qualified towards the end of the article, as Deutsch argues that Northern writers who live within the crisis need to stand at a certain distance to articulate the crisis. He speculates that this might have been the reason that “the more established writers” had not produced any “Ulster Question”

novels at that time (148). For Deutsch, the “best novel” on the North remains Michael McLaverty’s Call my Brother Back (1939) (151). The question of distance is one to which later critics return, arguing that it is the distance facilitated by mass education and Europeanisation in the late 1980s and 1990s that allows younger novelists to write about Northern Ireland with a post-modern detachment.

McKillop (1976) is more critical of Troubles fiction than Deutsch. His main concern about Troubles fiction is that “the problem in the non-Irish public’s lack of understanding of Ulster stems from the lack of myth-making about the conflict, specifically in the great bourgeois genre, the novel” (133). From his perspective, the function of the novel is moral rather than aesthetic. McKillop surveys sixteen novels and the method he adopts is to provide a potted synopsis followed by authorial evaluation of the novel. McKillop transparently articulates the criterion of value he intends to use to judge each novel, and this is “a journalistic one: which provides the most information?” (136). He also identifies characteristics shared by the survey set, which are:

1. The violence is primarily portrayed in a social-political context rather than a religious one;

2. No major figure is terribly religious;

3. There is no dialogue about theology or church discipline;

4. Not one of the novels is genuinely partisan: “there are no romantic portrayals of heroic forces of good fighting for either side”.

5. All the novels are set in “the present or immediate past” but most seem to “float in time”, although some are specific;

6. Protagonists of a dozen of the novels are divorced or in a crumbling marriage;

7. Many protagonists have experience in the Eastern Mediterranean, most often Cyprus but also Lebanon (135).

For McKillop, David Brewster’s The Heart’s Grown Brutal (1972) “squats head and shoulders above the others” (136). McKillop writes that the “most useful

contribution” of this novel is the “explication, in both personality and ideology, of the recent history of the Irish Republican Army” (141). In his view, much of the book reads as though written from afar, and at least two of the chapters appear to be

“extrapolations from chapters of the Sunday Times Insight Team’s well known series of articles” (142). The novel is full of information, much of it wittily summarised from other sources, but the “better informed reader” might “spend their time better collecting data on the subject elsewhere and forming opinions of their own” (143). In his view, Terence de Vere White’s novel The Distance and the Dark (1973) is the

“best written” (139) of all sixteen, but is not the best in De Vere’s “canon” (139). It is likely to be considered a “significant novel” because it is the only one by a writer who

“has – or is likely to have a reputation as an artist” (136).

Joseph Browne (1976) draws attention to a number of novels representing the

“dreadful suffering of those tormented people” (155-6). He believes that articulating other people’s horror and grief is the job of fiction writers and poets, and he takes the view that fiction writers write history, which “must be honestly written and

objectively read. Therefore, writers must write and write and write and tell it as it is because the very next page may be the one that will help all of us to learn to live together instead of dying separately” (156). The imperative is a moral one. Browne discusses three novels, Both Your Houses by the English novelist, James Barlow (1973), The Whore Mother (1973), by Sean Herron (1973), and American Jimmy

Breslin’s World Without End, Amen (1974). His method is to summarise the novel within a highly judgemental, evaluative framework. Both Your Houses (1973) is

“sensationalistic, embarrassingly contrived, melodramatic, and reads more like a cheap imitation of an afternoon soap opera than a worthwhile novel, however, it does have worth” (162). The worth lies in the high modal value of the “consummate barbarity this book portrays”, and to the “fulminations of the Reverend King

Lamont”, a fictional representation close to Ian Paisley. The Whore Mother (1973) is

“more replete with bestiality and wanton violence than any other literary work dealing with Northern Ireland. Again, regrettably, it’s all much, much too believable”

(163), while World Without End (1974), is a novel in which “violence is the ill wind that blows no good” (164).

Rolston’s 1978 article, “Escaping from Belfast: Class, Ideology and Literature in Northern Ireland”, argues that conventional publishing channels only publish Troubles fiction that encodes and disseminates bourgeois ideologies, even though there are other types of creative writing, produced in the north, written by working-class writers who are closer to the reality of life in the Troubles than the bourgeois novelist could ever get. His thesis is that the bourgeoisie, which escapes the worst of the ravages of class society, is an escaping class, producing escapist literature. In its Northern Irish context escape refers to escape from Belfast and Northern Ireland, and/or working class ideology. Rolston examines the works of three writers of teenage fiction, Joan Lingard, Sam McBratney and Peter Carter, by referring to authorial autobiography, followed by plot summaries of the novels. He then comments on the representation of reality in each novel, evaluating the novels, and

ranking them according to their success in representing reality. Fictional realism for Rolston is a matter of how close a novelist’s representation of Belfast is to working class experiences of life in Belfast.

Lingard’s books rank low because emergency legislation, which had consequences for Belfast teenagers, is ignored altogether in her books (54).

McBratney’s Mark Time depicts the working class teenage activists as psychopaths as opposed to the respectable working class hero. Peter Carter’s Under Goliath ranks highest because of Carter’s political explanations for the origins of the conflict, but this greater insight goes hand in hand with a greater misanthropy and cynicism

towards the working class to justify the eventual escape. Rolston’s view of the novels is that the characters within reflect the class and aspirations of the novelists rather than “the real surroundings of their own lives” (55), by which Rolston means the surroundings of working class people in Belfast.

The second part of Rolston’s article comprises a discussion of “the literary response of the non-escapers” (55). This includes a discussion of the work of the poet Michael Brophy, whose poem Where are my people now? Rolston describes as

“magnificent” (55). The remainder of the article consists of lengthy quotes from working class poems, some of which are only published in this article. This survey of working class literature includes reference to popular ballads and folk-songs set to American tunes. The content of the ballads is often sectarian, celebrating killing and death. Rolston pinpoints a counter-culture living and breathing in opposition to the stereotypical representations constructed by bourgeois novelists. His conclusion is that Loyalist and Republican working class authors have no desire to run away from

understanding “their Belfast”(60), where “there is anti-imperialist struggle, loyalism, emergency legislation, assassination, rioting, intimidation, and so on” (62)

Rolston suggests that there is homogeneity of experience and beliefs within specific class formations. His analysis acknowledges the intersections of culture, religion and politics underpinned by economic and class concerns, and rates novels that attempt structural and societal explanations more highly than novels representing the experience of living in Belfast in terms of private and individual interests.

Although he expresses concern about the didactic ideological inclinations of the bourgeois novelists, he acknowledges that authorship brings with it both moral responsibility and ideological power: teenage novels are not merely for entertainment, but also for instruction. The battle seems to be about whose ideology and whose knowledge is to be disseminated.