Were the Troubles really like that?

Judith Woods on her hunt for a novel about growing up in Northern Ireland that rings true to her memories

Northern Ireland. It’s having a moment. Not a pain-in-the-backstop political moment, although we Northern Irish would be lying if we didn’t admit to a shard of schadenfreude at the unholy fuss being made about the border.

Call us cynics, but the current imbroglio has only served to reinforce the Northern Ireland truism that nobody across the water even remembers we exist unless we’re giving them grief.

So it’s all the more meaningful, this cultural moment that at once recognises the province’s inherent uniqueness and its universality – no easy feat. In recent years, and thanks to generous grants, a lot of quality television has been set or filmed in Northern Ireland: Game of Thrones, The Fall, Line of

Duty, and the recent period drama Death and Nightingales, set in the lush Fermanagh countryside. Add to those the scabrously unfiltered comedy Derry Girls, Anna Burns’s Milkman, the first Northern Irish book to win the Booker Prize, and a brace of distinctive new novels, and it’s music to the ears of the diaspora, like me, who have fought shy of reading about our own history.

This month sees the publication of

Music Love Drugs War (Fig Tree, £12.99)

by the Derry-born debut novelist Geraldine Quigley, and

For the Good Times (Faber, £12.99)

by Scotsman David Keenan, whose first novel, This Is Memorial Device, a hilariously hyperbolic tribute to a fictional Airdrie band (à la This Is Spinal Tap), was a razor-sharp dissection of small-town disappointment and big-time dreams.

In Keenan’s new book, it is a couple of surprisingly dapper Seventies IRA men that come under his fierce, funny and at times hallucinatory gaze. For Sammy and his sidekick Tommy, the surest way to get past the average RUC plod is to walk in like they own the place. “The peelers treated us like rats, waiting for us to sneak in the back door or shin up a drainpipe, nip down an alley in a black balaclava and a pair of camouflage slacks. Instead we turned up wearing cravats and with gold watches and with

Italian handmade suits.”

The unlikely music favoured by this self-conscious pair is Perry Como and (Rat Packer) Sinatra, adding a grotesque burnish of showmanship to the grisly proceedings. Yet it is Quigley who has the best tunes, or at least the best line about them. Two of her protagonists, Noel and Kevin, get caught up in a riot, and amid the burning cars, the shimmer of shattered glass, the flecks of brimstone, they hear the siren call of anarchy: “It’s like being in a film,” says an entranced Noel. “All it wants is a really good soundtrack.”

Although very different in style, both are longoverdue novels that might just persuade people of my generation to look back, not in anger, but in something approaching nostalgic affection. I fled my native Co Tyrone for university in Edinburgh in the early Eighties, glad to be gone from Dungannon, a town where armed soldiers patrolled the streets, buildings were blown up with monotonous regularity, Catholics used one newsagent and Protestants another.

Classic Troubles narratives tell the story of a tiny scrap of land where historic grudges ran deep into the peaty soil and “each neighbourly murder”, as Seamus Heaney termed them, poisoned our groundwater a little bit more. Reality is always more complex; sometimes vexingly so. Dungannon was where my friend’s father was shot dead a few houses along from us, as he answered the front door at teatime. Did it matter that he was Protestant? It did back then.

Yet I was one of the lucky ones, for whom the Troubles were primarily a bloody inconvenience more than anything else – an uncomfortable truth audaciously captured in Derry Girls. Tiresome bomb scares and tedious road diversions changed our day-to-day lives in the most dreary of ways. But Northern Ireland was also the place where my generation grew up, fell in and out of love, laughed, argued about the Cure versus the Smiths, drank gin stolen from our parents’ drinks cabinets like every other teenager and were filled with that inchoate provincial longing for more, to be more.

And so I rarely picked up any book with the dread cover line, “set against a backdrop of the Troubles”. There were of course exceptions: Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Deirdre Madden’s slenderly elegiac One by One in the Darkness. In 2006 came Lucy Caldwell’s unsettling Where They Were Missed, a heroic, heartbreaking story of the Troubles’ effects on ordinary people, told from a female perspective. Then last year Anna Burns’s elliptic Milkman burst