#the troubles
Some recent postcards
my friend watching Star Trek for the first time with me: oh cool it’s like star trek is predicting the future hahahahahaha!
me whos been watching Star Trek for too damn long: oh god oh fuck star trek is predicting the future again
Working on my dissertation at the moment – “Are the Belfast Murals viewed as pieces of art or threatening symbols of paramilitary control?"
Some of them are amazing!
Post link
“In this city we have a great love of the talking. The talking can be practised on buses, park benches, from pulpits and frequently on gable walls. it swells in the presence of an audience, though a second party is not strictly required.”
Along with ‘Multitudes’ this the second book I’ve read this year that features my home turf: East Belfast. I read this in July while the air burned hot and the humid air clung to my hair. When the bonfires were lit, I had Carson’s book in my hand.
Firestarters is set in 2018 in Belfast. And the city is burning. Tall fires are going up all over the city, large bonfires that destroy buildings, department stores and houses alike. Nobody knows who’s doing it. The only thing the police do know is that a mysterious online entity is orchestrating the whole thing. Masked and dressed in black, the mysterious person is riling up the masses and egging his followers on.
One man, an East Belfast man named Sammy, thinks he knows who the mysterious online figure is: his son.
On the same side of town, Dr Johnathan Murray has been taken in by a siren. (Yes, you read that right. An actual siren.) While doing the rounds on a night shift, Johnathan is lured to an apartment and drawn into bed with the mysterious creature. It binds him for months, falls pregnant and disappears. Johnathan is left with the child.
Sammy and Jonathan’s stories are strong and distinct, so much so that this feels like two books meshed into one. Both plots exist together because both men are grappling with the same thing: they are afraid of their own child. Sammy, an ex loyalist paramilitary thug, is scared of his son Mark. He fears that the behaviour of his past has tainted his son and touched him like curse. Jonathan fears that his daughter will grow up to have a hold over him. He worries that she will manipulate people and control others. He ponders, in his darkest moments, cutting out her little tongue.
This book is full of magical realism. Through his daughter, Jonathan discovers the “unfortunate children of Belfast.” Children born with strange, bizarre abilities. There’s the girl with wings, the girl who can turn into a boat and a boy who can see the future in every liquid.
Sammy and Jonathan have the same fear but they live in different worlds. Sammy is working class. Jonathan, middle class. They live five minutes away from one another in the same part of the city. Firestarters brilliantly illustrates the class divide in East Belfast and the invisible line that runs between the Upper and Lower Newtownards Road. Jonathan is completely ignorant of his working class neighbours and the hidden world of the unfortunate children.
“And why did I never hear about any of this before Sophie?”
“Cos-no harm intended-Doctor, you’re too posh to have known what was going on at the other end of the road.”
I think there’s a reason why Carson sets her story in post Good Friday Agreement Belfast. Firestarters is about the legacy we leave to our children. It’s about a younger generation that looks back at the past and sees glory instead of pain.
“They talk of the loud violence their parents knew, as if it is a kind of birthright denied to them.”
Are the Firestarters the young arsonists or the generation that engaged in the violence of the Troubles? That, more than anything, is at the heart of this book.
