Top 10 books about the Troubles | Fiction | The Guardian

When I was writing my second novel, for good times, it never occurred to me that we might be approaching some sort of “moment” of trouble in literature, but I did wonder. were we finally far enough from the events of 1968-1998 to start fictionalizing them? Does there need to be some kind of cultural/historical gap before we can interrogate trauma? And then Anna Burns’ Magnificent Milkman won Booker, Michael Hughes released Country, his inspired Homeric reimagining of the Iliad set during the Troubles, and with exciting new voices emerging like Wendy Erskine’s, Belfast suddenly seemed like ground zero. of radical literary fiction, with edges once again in the news.

my own interest in problems comes from my family on my father’s side. my father grew up in ardoyne, the largely catholic area of ​​north belfast that was the epicenter of the war. his father had been a member of the ira, and although my father left belfast just as the trouble began, most of his family stayed, and during my youth the war in ireland, as my father called it, dominated family discussions , especially when one of his brothers came from belfast to stay with us. it was the stories they told, and the way they told them, that first interested me in writing about those times. my father and his brothers were semi-literate, but they had such faith in the language. the narratives of their time in ireland were totally questionable and inevitably self-mythologizing, but there was some truth in the way they appropriated their stories, conveyed them in their own language: a polyglot of jokes, songs, random amusements, sleight of hand verbal, direct disinformation and pure popular poetry, that made me think of the art of storytelling as performative. and i began to think of belfast, and how often it had been rebuilt, as a wild place, an autonomous zone, like cold war era berlin, or 1980s airdrie, where i placed my first book, this is a commemorative device, and I wrote about it as if the events unfolded in their own time, which, to me, is the time in which all the best Irish literature is set: eternity. 1. resurrection man by eoin mcnamee the classic and innovative fictional account of the troubles (and much more) based on the reign of terror of the protestant militia the shankhill butchers and written in an elevated and hallucinatory style that works to transform the being of belfast itself. Published in 1994 when events were still unfolding, it is an evisceration of the nature of self-perpetuating violence and how it can become, almost, a performance, both in the communities that foster it and in the way that the media report it. a deeply important book. 2. nor meekly serve my time: the h-block struggle 1976-1981 an incredible oral history of everyday life in the h-block and the definitive account of the hunger strikes, edited by brian campbell, laurence mckeown, and felim o ‘make horror, redemption, bravery, nonsense, violence, faith, despair; this is a great human drama that raises all the great questions of the young men and women who become witnesses of extreme horrors. 3. milkman by anna burns the irish have a faith in language beyond all proof or reason; Anna Burns writes like a working-class Kabbalist. This fantasy novel is one of the most original navigations into the dark and light heart of Belfast. generates its own kind of autonomous zone, somewhere between the demands of community paramilitaries and state forces, and asserts its independence in its grammar of how people speak and think, in the delight – and terror – of its narrative , as we follow an 18-year-old independent who is chased by a married paramilitary known as the milkman. 4. Rebel Hearts: Journeys into the Soul of Rage by Kevin Toolis Still one of the most moving personal interrogations of the armed insurrection, this book is the result of years of insightful investigative journalism. toolis is particularly good at exposing the kind of contradictory logic that living in a war zone and leading an armed rebellion requires, and his ideas on the difference between revolution and rebellion, as manifested in northern ireland, were key in to write for the good times.

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5. bandit country: the ira and south armagh by toby harnden one of my fascinations with northern ireland in the 1970s and 1980s is how it became a place where different rules applied, where reality itself seemed to be in play. nowhere was this more true than in the “provisional republic” of south armagh, aka bandit country, with its handmade “sniper at work” signs and community militias, all guarded by watchtowers and British Army helicopters. Toby Harnden’s book is a compulsively fascinating tour of this alternate universe.

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6. stone cold by martin dillon the sequence of events that goes from the murder of members of the ira by the sas in gibraltar to the attack on the milltown cemetery by the “independent paramilitary” michael stone, to the murder of two plainclothes british corporals david howes and derek wood, by a republican crowd at a funeral a few days later, remains one of the most horrific unravelings of state and community violence ever broadcast on live television, and one of the most nightmarish sights of my youth. this book too; an incredible insight into the stone mind, by one of the most challenging problem commentators. stone speaks of violence as a simple fact, as a power that he possesses and that is inscrutable in his possession. “I did not choose to kill as a career,” he wrote in his autobiography, No One Shall Divide Us. “killing chose me.”7. country by michael hughes storytelling in northern ireland is about who is telling the story and what historical precedent they can muster in their defense: the irish are born mythmakers. Country, then, is an inspired retelling of Homer’s Iliad set during the Troubles, and engages fully with the performative tradition of Irish storytelling. this is ireland as the eternal country. 8. where lucy caldwell missed them, trouble, here, is a form of distant illumination that heartbreakingly saddens the lives that unfold in its shadow. In her story of a tragic childhood and the end of a Catholic/Protestant marriage, Caldwell is brilliant at imagining the inner voice of a young girl. the novel is an unraveling of the fictions we live with, the stories we inherit from our parents and the possibilities of reinventing our own. a powerful and original work.