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5��
“There was food and drink. The right butter. The wrong butter. The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal. There were ‘our shops�� and ‘their shops��. Placenames. What school you went to. What prayers you said. What hymns you sang. How you pronounced your ‘haitch�� or ‘aitch��. Where you went to work. And of course there were bus-stops. There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.��

I remember a saying from my childhood: You can’t win for losing. Or another, damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Both of these apply for this eighteen-year-old unnamed girl whose mother has been badgering her to get married since she was sixteen �� marry and pop out babies.

Everything is unnamed, but it’s obviously Ireland during The Troubles, when whether she chose a side or not, she was assumed to have one because of her family and kinfolk. What she said or did or to whom she spoke or how she behaved was watched (cameras click in the bushes and from windows) and reported ‘back�� to someone somewhere. An unwary remark or meeting could be noted out of context (the milkman stopped to talk to her), and by the time she got home, ma was waiting, ready to berate her for having an affair with a married man.

She couldn’t win. She does have a secret maybe-boyfriend but won’t let him come to her house because ma will browbeat him into marrying her, which she doesn’t want. What she wants is something that was another popular phrase many years ago, to turn on, tune in, drop out. She hides behind very old books (as do a lot of readers) to the extent that she’s known for always reading-while-walking. Nose in a book. Oblivious.

She is criticised, not for the reason we criticise each other now for looking at our smart phones (danger of walking into pedestrians or traffic), but because she should be watchful.

“On the other hand, being up on, having awareness, clocking everything �� both of rumour and of actuality �� didn’t prevent things from happening or allow for intervention on, or reversal of things that had already happened. Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety or relief and often for some it meant the opposite of power, safety and relief �� leaving no outlet for dispersal either, of all the heightened stimuli that had been built by being up on in the first place. Purposely not wanting to know therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about.��

That is a rather dry paragraph, while the story itself flows freely and doesn’t lend itself to skimming, at least not for me. It’s the kind of writing where I may go back to the beginning of the last break to enjoy how she took me from one thought or place to another.

The humour is black, the situation dire. Families number their losses by how many have been shot and/or killed by someone from ‘across the road�� or the ‘other side�� or by the army from ‘over the water�� or who have died in accidents (bombs that go off at the wrong time) or suicided. Then there’s the drink that so many hide in and depression like her father’s when he was alive.

“She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.��

People are called and addressed as “first sister��, “first brother-in-law��, and the best are the “wee sisters�� whom she is helping to raise. She is middle sister and does not want her eyes opened, she wants to drop out, but then again, she does want to learn, and she’s taking French classes, but she doesn’t want any part of the fighting, burying guns, patching up wounds in back huts, and never trusting anyone but being suspicious of everyone.

��. . . for us, in our community, on ‘our side of the road��, the government here was the enemy, and the police here was the enemy, and the government ‘over there�� was the enemy, and the soldiers from ‘over there�� were the enemy, and the defender-paramilitaries from ‘over the road�� were the enemy and, by extension �� thanks to suspicion and history and paranoia �� the hospital, the electricity board, the gas board, the water board, the school board, telephone people and anybody wearing a uniform or garments easily to be mistaken for a uniform also were the enemy, and where we were viewed in our turn by our enemies as the enemy �� in those dark days, which were the extreme of days, if we hadn’t had the renouncers as our underground buffer between us and this overwhelming and combined enemy, who else, in all the world, would we have had?��

So you can’t win. She can’t win. She does have an epiphany when her French teacher insists on telling their class that the sky ‘out there�� can be any colour, not just the three colours they allow: blue (day), black (night), and white (clouds). She drags them down the corridor to watch a sunset through a big window.

“If what she was saying was true, that the sky �� out there �� not out there �� whatever �� could be any colour, that meant anything could be any colour, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, in any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody �� probably had too, only we just hadn’t noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.
. . .
Here teacher bade us look at the sky from this brand new perspective, where the sun �� enormous and of the most gigantic orange-red colour �� in a sky too, with no blue in it �� was going down behind buildings in a section of windowpane.

As for this sky, it was now a mix of pink and lemon with a glow of mauve behind it. It had changed colours during our short trip along the corridor and before our eyes was changing colours yet. An emerging gold above the mauve was moving towards a slip of silver, with a different mauve in a corner drifting in from the side. Then there was further pinking. Then more lilac. Then a turquoise that pressed clouds �� not white �� out of its way.��

And there you pretty much have the cover of this fantastic book, this imaginative look into a young woman’s mind that is frightened of being opened but terrified of being empty.

I loved it and was delighted to see it win the 2018 Booker Prize. There's an interesting review in The Irish Times (before the prize decision) about some of the background.