And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend-the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly-reveals its transfixing reality. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. If Issac Babel had been born in Derry, he might have written this sudden, brilliant book."Īlready hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane's first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. Here, these supernatural beings have power over humans, so humans must always be on guard and make sure that they do not deviate from their religious beliefs and practices."A swift and masterful transformation of family griefs and political violence into something at once rhapsodic and heartbreaking. He says, “any who heard their cries on those days would cross themselves and pray out loud to drown out the sounds” (54). When the narrator is on holiday in Donegal, he encounters the Field of the Disappeared, which hosts ghosts. Similarly, the Irish also believe in ghosts. The narrator notes, “If we ever met anyone with one green and one brown eye we were to cross ourselves, for that was a human child that had been taken over by the fairies” (5). For example, the Irish believe that fairies can enter the human world to steal children. The Irish believe that there is a certain permeability between the spirit world and the human world and that this barrier can be crossed.
Though Ireland is mostly Christian in the novel, it has pagan roots, which still filter into the culture. Aspects of the supernatural suffuse daily life in Derry, and this is emblematic of the fear and suppression that is present in Irish culture.
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