DISPLACEMENT AND BROKEN DREAMS IN POST-WAR LONDON

LAND and earth have been fought over for centuries in this country. From the Norman invasion to the struggle for the six counties, the island of Ireland has been contested from the moment it was first inhabitated.

And thus, our attitude towards mud and stone is a complex one; there’s an affinity, a grá, which other nations might not understand.

In The Water Star it is Croghan Mountain which holds the affection of a Wexford family who, like many before them, have been forced to leave the land behind and seek out lands anew.

Brendan Kinsella is middle-aged and working on the building-sites in postwar London. He dreams of returning to the mountain, to the little house he once shared with wife Mairé. All he needs to do is save enough money to make this dream a reality.

His son Hugh, young and eager to begin his ascension to manhood, works alongside him; six days a week, back-breaking work, a pint on Saturday night and a day of reflection on Sunday.

Neither is particularly happy with their lot, both miss Mairé; who died seven years previous - alone on the farm, the two men in her life on the other side of the sea.

For Hugh, when he’s not joining his father in moments of reflection, he visits their neighbour Sarah; Irish, but different to them. She is educated, perhaps a Protestant, and teaches Hugh how to read.

Yet Sarah has mysteries of her own. She is a single mother to Deirdre, her presence in London made necessary by an unplanned pregnancy, a child out of wedlock.

Over a six-year period between 195056, the lives of these Irish emigrants interweave with those of a couple brought together by the war: Elizabeth, a native Londoner, a survivor, a young landlady, and Karl, her tenant, a German who spent most of the war in captivity, but saw enough to suffer nightly terrors, to succumb to what would now be known as PTSD.

The second in Philip Casey’s Bann River Trilogy, The Water Star is very much a tale of displacement, it’s about a group of people who, through circumstance, have been cast together and must make the most of what they have.

Each has broken dreams, none are where they want to be - with perhaps the exception of Hugh, whose wide-eyed enthusiasm is gradually knocked out of him - yet they are all grateful for what they have, grateful to be living and breathing in a world still nursing the wounds of the bloodiest conflict in history.

And while The Fabulists touched on the trauma of poverty, of the daily struggle to survive, The Water Star takes a deep dive into the darkest of themes; the grief of loss, the anger and despair of a man driven from his land, and, most evocatively, the unremitting anguish of the Second World War, of seeing your home, your family, your people, obliterated by steel and metal.

And yet, like The Fabulists, there are moments of respite. These people need comforting, they need the touch of another, to take refuge, however brief, in moments of passion.

The sex scenes - I would hasten to equate them to love - in The Water Star are frantic and frenetic, they carry a grief of their own, the participants never really there, thinking of someone or somewhere else.

And when its characters aren’t plundering one another’s souls, they are drinking - alcohol is the first resort to all life’s problems in this part of inner London. A great sadness pervades The Water

Star, a sense of wasted lives and of feeble hope. Each victory, however minor, is celebrated with vigour, and the defeats, of which there are many, almost cripple a cast already living in the trenches.

Overseeing it all, across the Irish Sea, lies Croghan Mountain, yet as Brendan says, ‘You might love a piece of rock, but it won’t love you back’.