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A review by arirang
Turning for Home by Barney Norris
3.0
There ought to be truth and reconciliation in every stratum of the lives people lead.
Barney Norris is a very talented young writer - playwright, poet and novelist - and his debut novel Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain was certainly striking if, to my taste, rather flawed (see
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1793845387)
His second novel Turning for Home was inspired by the true-life story of what came to be known as The Boston Tapes, a series of recorded interviews conducted in 2001-6 with (former) Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries. These were intended to be confidential and to be largely about their experiences and motivations, but in many of those interviewed, rather unexpectedly, confessed crimes and named names. In 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began a legal bid to gain access to the tapes and on 30 April 2014, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein was arrested based on allegations part founded on the material (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-27286543).
This novel is set, although the characters thoughts journey back in time, almost entirely on the following day. Robert Shawcross, a grammar school boy from humble stock who rose to be a senior government official in Northern Ireland, but now retired, is celebrating his 80th birthday, but also reflecting on the tapes:
They called them the Boston Tapes in the papers, not discs, not sound files. I thought that was strange at first; it made me wonder how the interviews had been recorded. I suppose it’s just the phrase still echoing onwards, even though we’ve surely all left cassettes behind by now. There is something about a tape that means the image holds interest long after it has been rendered technologically obsolete. The idea of a ribbon of speech, a voice speaking one truth on one side and then saying something else completely different on the other, two stories that might have contained anything at all, separated only by the breadth of the tongue they were told by. That is magical.
And I think perhaps it’s very human as well. Isn’t the life of any person made up of the telling of two tales, after all? People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them. People spin myths from the quotidian roots of their experience, in order to create a small cocoon of space in which they can live between the dream they could never hope to grasp and the indifferent ordinariness of everything around them, in which they can tell themselves things might be about to get exciting, no matter how cramped the quarters seem, how dark the dawn, how low the ceiling.
Robert, living in a large country house, is the paterfamilias of a large extended family:
A few years ago , it became clear to me that I was now occupying a role as de facto head of my family in its diaspora, as the generation that had come before me fell slowly and finally silent.
and family tradition has an annual large gathering of the family (typically 100 or more people) at his house ostensibly to celebrate his birthday. But this year is the first he is hosting without his beloved wife, who died in the last year, so heavily coloured by sadness.
And he is also contacted and then visited on the same day by Frank Dunn, an retired Oxford professor, but who served as an unofficial communication conduit for talks with the IRA (with Robert representing the British government), notably in the immediate aftermath of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing. Frank, also retired, has been reactivated by senior Republicans to sound out Robert as to the British government's intentions with respect to the information revealed in the Tapes.
Robert's first person narrative alternates with that of his granddaughter Kate (see below) as well as fictionalised extracts from the Tapes. He reminded me of an Ishiguro narrator (from Remains of the Day, or Artist of the Floating World) looking back on his own part in historic events and perhaps overstating his role a touch. For example, he regards the dialogue between two 80 year old men as a sensible way even now to handle the concerns of the Republicans:
It seems perfectly reasonable to me to mistrust the capacity of the younger generation to handle these old issues with the tact they require.
and he sees himself as now having a role to play in healing his family (see below):
That is all I have ever wanted really - to have done my share. And perhaps in some way I have, in some walks of life. And perhaps there is still time to do more, to be of some use to my family.
Although unlike Ishiguro's narrators, Robert believes himself to be firmly on the right-side of history. However. as the novel progresses he does gain some new and unwelcome perspectives on his past dealings.
The alternating narration is by Kate, his 25 year-old granddaughter. We learn early on that this is the first birthday celebration she has attended for 3 years, that meanwhile there has been an accident and she has spent a lot of time in hospital, and that she is estranged from her mother, and indeed this party will be their first encounter for some time.
Kate is a deeply wounded character:
It’s weird, but it always throws me when someone shows me kindness. I never think I deserve it. Even when I need someone’s sympathy, it still makes me feel sick to ask them for some understanding, because I’m sure one day, when I want reassurance, I’ll call someone and they’ll tell me I’m not worth their time, they’ve seen through the act, they don’t want to know me any more.
This reference being made in the context of her new boyfriend Sam, a character from Norris's first novel [indeed the very character that most sums up my issues with that novel] making a reappearance.
And her own account makes her childhood and her mother's treatment of her sound dreadful. For example a family dinner when her mother, unusually decides to cook typically ends with her first asking Kate to do the potatoes, then:
‘You have to get those bits out with the end of the peeler! Can’t you see them? Why would you want to eat them? They’re disgusting. You have to get them out like this.’ She would snatch the potato and the peeler from my hands, and finish the job for me, sighing and harried. By the time dinner reached the table, and I sat down with Mum and Dad to eat, the air in the kitchen was usually thick with the threat of her censure.
Kate is also given to rather lengthy meditations on life which at times rather slow the narrative:
On the day we’re born, the future lies infinite before us, and all our lives can be spoken of as lying the future. Then a change, a migration begins. Little by little you journey away from the place where you started, and start to grow a past for yourself, and trail that out behind you. In the end, a day comes when you have no future left at all, only the past tense to speak in. What nothing in the world ever changes, though, is the present. The present is always only one day long. It’s always now, and everywhere, and endless. And that’s the most important screen we have to protect us – the world we’re mired in, distractions and details and miracles of the everyday.
But her genuinely very moving story gradually filters out over the course of the novel. Indeed, perhaps Norris over-relies on withholding information. It's almost a quarter of the way through the book when we learn her mother's name, a third before we find out about the accident, past halfway when we find out about her time in hospital (although rather heavy hints are there from the early pages so it comes as no great surprise) and one crucial revelation is saved, twist-like, until the end.
That said this withholding does reflect her personality. She has a new boyfriend but they seldom discuss their pasts:
We hardly talk at all about our different darknesses, our histories. We’ve picked up little secrets here and there.
…
No subject too big that it can’t be avoided with a cup of tea, a chat about the football. All real speech can happen through the secrecy of those intermediaries, and the steam rising from a cup of tea is the mast all hopes are hoisted on.
And the reference to the "intermediaries" is a deliberate nod to the roles played by intermediaries (such as Frank and Robert) in the Troubles. Ultimately Norris's theme as the opening quote suggests seems to be the need for truth and reconciliation all round, at the level of personal as well as societal conflicts. As Robert decided in his new found mission as peace intermediary for his family, but also reflecting on why so much was poured out in the Tapes:
What people want above all isn’t just forgiveness. What people love is the dream of laying it all out into the open and letting the light play over the acts of their days, all crimes confessed, all sins revealed. The idea of amnesty is only the end of a process the whole world longs for: the comforting dark of the confessional, the ease of the psychiatrist’s couch, the non-judgemental blank sheet of paper listening to them, and the giving up of sins into words. Only then, at the end of all that, do they long for some absolution to come from baring the soul. Above all what everyone wants to do is sing of their sorrows and sins.
Thanks to Doubleday via Netgalley for the ARC.
Barney Norris is a very talented young writer - playwright, poet and novelist - and his debut novel Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain was certainly striking if, to my taste, rather flawed (see
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1793845387)
His second novel Turning for Home was inspired by the true-life story of what came to be known as The Boston Tapes, a series of recorded interviews conducted in 2001-6 with (former) Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries. These were intended to be confidential and to be largely about their experiences and motivations, but in many of those interviewed, rather unexpectedly, confessed crimes and named names. In 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began a legal bid to gain access to the tapes and on 30 April 2014, Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein was arrested based on allegations part founded on the material (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-27286543).
This novel is set, although the characters thoughts journey back in time, almost entirely on the following day. Robert Shawcross, a grammar school boy from humble stock who rose to be a senior government official in Northern Ireland, but now retired, is celebrating his 80th birthday, but also reflecting on the tapes:
They called them the Boston Tapes in the papers, not discs, not sound files. I thought that was strange at first; it made me wonder how the interviews had been recorded. I suppose it’s just the phrase still echoing onwards, even though we’ve surely all left cassettes behind by now. There is something about a tape that means the image holds interest long after it has been rendered technologically obsolete. The idea of a ribbon of speech, a voice speaking one truth on one side and then saying something else completely different on the other, two stories that might have contained anything at all, separated only by the breadth of the tongue they were told by. That is magical.
And I think perhaps it’s very human as well. Isn’t the life of any person made up of the telling of two tales, after all? People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them. People spin myths from the quotidian roots of their experience, in order to create a small cocoon of space in which they can live between the dream they could never hope to grasp and the indifferent ordinariness of everything around them, in which they can tell themselves things might be about to get exciting, no matter how cramped the quarters seem, how dark the dawn, how low the ceiling.
Robert, living in a large country house, is the paterfamilias of a large extended family:
A few years ago , it became clear to me that I was now occupying a role as de facto head of my family in its diaspora, as the generation that had come before me fell slowly and finally silent.
and family tradition has an annual large gathering of the family (typically 100 or more people) at his house ostensibly to celebrate his birthday. But this year is the first he is hosting without his beloved wife, who died in the last year, so heavily coloured by sadness.
And he is also contacted and then visited on the same day by Frank Dunn, an retired Oxford professor, but who served as an unofficial communication conduit for talks with the IRA (with Robert representing the British government), notably in the immediate aftermath of the 1987 Enniskillen bombing. Frank, also retired, has been reactivated by senior Republicans to sound out Robert as to the British government's intentions with respect to the information revealed in the Tapes.
Robert's first person narrative alternates with that of his granddaughter Kate (see below) as well as fictionalised extracts from the Tapes. He reminded me of an Ishiguro narrator (from Remains of the Day, or Artist of the Floating World) looking back on his own part in historic events and perhaps overstating his role a touch. For example, he regards the dialogue between two 80 year old men as a sensible way even now to handle the concerns of the Republicans:
It seems perfectly reasonable to me to mistrust the capacity of the younger generation to handle these old issues with the tact they require.
and he sees himself as now having a role to play in healing his family (see below):
That is all I have ever wanted really - to have done my share. And perhaps in some way I have, in some walks of life. And perhaps there is still time to do more, to be of some use to my family.
Although unlike Ishiguro's narrators, Robert believes himself to be firmly on the right-side of history. However. as the novel progresses he does gain some new and unwelcome perspectives on his past dealings.
The alternating narration is by Kate, his 25 year-old granddaughter. We learn early on that this is the first birthday celebration she has attended for 3 years, that meanwhile there has been an accident and she has spent a lot of time in hospital, and that she is estranged from her mother, and indeed this party will be their first encounter for some time.
Kate is a deeply wounded character:
It’s weird, but it always throws me when someone shows me kindness. I never think I deserve it. Even when I need someone’s sympathy, it still makes me feel sick to ask them for some understanding, because I’m sure one day, when I want reassurance, I’ll call someone and they’ll tell me I’m not worth their time, they’ve seen through the act, they don’t want to know me any more.
This reference being made in the context of her new boyfriend Sam, a character from Norris's first novel [indeed the very character that most sums up my issues with that novel] making a reappearance.
And her own account makes her childhood and her mother's treatment of her sound dreadful. For example a family dinner when her mother, unusually decides to cook typically ends with her first asking Kate to do the potatoes, then:
‘You have to get those bits out with the end of the peeler! Can’t you see them? Why would you want to eat them? They’re disgusting. You have to get them out like this.’ She would snatch the potato and the peeler from my hands, and finish the job for me, sighing and harried. By the time dinner reached the table, and I sat down with Mum and Dad to eat, the air in the kitchen was usually thick with the threat of her censure.
Kate is also given to rather lengthy meditations on life which at times rather slow the narrative:
On the day we’re born, the future lies infinite before us, and all our lives can be spoken of as lying the future. Then a change, a migration begins. Little by little you journey away from the place where you started, and start to grow a past for yourself, and trail that out behind you. In the end, a day comes when you have no future left at all, only the past tense to speak in. What nothing in the world ever changes, though, is the present. The present is always only one day long. It’s always now, and everywhere, and endless. And that’s the most important screen we have to protect us – the world we’re mired in, distractions and details and miracles of the everyday.
But her genuinely very moving story gradually filters out over the course of the novel. Indeed, perhaps Norris over-relies on withholding information. It's almost a quarter of the way through the book when we learn her mother's name, a third before we find out about the accident, past halfway when we find out about her time in hospital (although rather heavy hints are there from the early pages so it comes as no great surprise) and one crucial revelation is saved, twist-like, until the end.
That said this withholding does reflect her personality. She has a new boyfriend but they seldom discuss their pasts:
We hardly talk at all about our different darknesses, our histories. We’ve picked up little secrets here and there.
…
No subject too big that it can’t be avoided with a cup of tea, a chat about the football. All real speech can happen through the secrecy of those intermediaries, and the steam rising from a cup of tea is the mast all hopes are hoisted on.
And the reference to the "intermediaries" is a deliberate nod to the roles played by intermediaries (such as Frank and Robert) in the Troubles. Ultimately Norris's theme as the opening quote suggests seems to be the need for truth and reconciliation all round, at the level of personal as well as societal conflicts. As Robert decided in his new found mission as peace intermediary for his family, but also reflecting on why so much was poured out in the Tapes:
What people want above all isn’t just forgiveness. What people love is the dream of laying it all out into the open and letting the light play over the acts of their days, all crimes confessed, all sins revealed. The idea of amnesty is only the end of a process the whole world longs for: the comforting dark of the confessional, the ease of the psychiatrist’s couch, the non-judgemental blank sheet of paper listening to them, and the giving up of sins into words. Only then, at the end of all that, do they long for some absolution to come from baring the soul. Above all what everyone wants to do is sing of their sorrows and sins.
Thanks to Doubleday via Netgalley for the ARC.