Michael Magee’s novel may not be the first to spell out the harsh realities of life for young people in west Belfast, but it has vivid authenticity on its side
THERE IS a little controversy around a new Irish novelist.
Michael Magee’s Close to Home is the story of a lad from one of the bleak housing estates of west Belfast returning to an old circle of friends after getting a degree at Liverpool University.
The setting is Poleglass and Twinbrook, two big estates I used to know around the time Magee was born.
I did a dissertation for a masters degree on the joyriding culture there and the war between the young hoodlums, the ‘hoods’ and the IRA which then was monitoring them and shooting them in the legs to restrain them.
I knew many of the joyriders and I knew the names of the men who were shooting them. My big thesis at the time was that many of the hoods were actually children of IRA families. I had a strong suspicion that one of the boys was kneecapped by his own father.
The controversy around Michael Magee’s novel follows on the marketing approach which regards it as a breakthrough, the first time that an authentic voice has emerged from west Belfast.
This of course isn’t true.
There have been many writers from there and from the harsh working class Catholic culture. I would like to be thought of as one of them myself. I’m thinking also of Ann Devlin, Mary Costello, Henry McDonald, Richard O’Rawe, Martin Lynch, even back to James White and the coterie of science fiction writers of the 1960s. Writers emerge everywhere.
But to give credit to Magee, he has captured the ‘hood’ scene, the young drug-addled skivers and wasters, and he has shown how the damage they do to themselves is a product of the damage that was done to them.
Sean, his main character, is at first too easily roped back into the party life which leads to jobs being lost, money being squandered and relationships strained.
He can see the excitement when one of the group resolves not to get drunk or snort coke and is won over by his mates and stays up all night squabbling and roaring and losing his job, He lets it happen to himself.
We know that he will ultimately pull himself together.
And that journey presents a contrast between the housing estates and the university area of Belfast where he, at first, feels alien.
Sean is first struck by people not being nationalistic. He feels he knows something important about a woman because she uses the term ‘Northern Ireland’ rather than ‘the North’.
He is surprised to see young people dispassionately discussing the prospects of a united Ireland as if it is of no great concern to them.
He comes out of a family and neighbourhood where people, including his mother, have indulged the IRA and retain ambiguous feelings.
The legacy of the Troubles is apparently confused, a sense that the IRA and the cause should be respected while the murderous individuals they know who were involved are to be held in contempt or pitied.
In one scene the coke-snorting drunk young people, throwing their own lives away, talk about the IRA men they know who are even lower down than themselves, lost in depression and addiction, struggling to live with the horror of what they have done.
There are other books that have explored this culture. I’m thinking of Henry McDonald’s Two Souls which has strong similarities.
But it is not fair to dismiss Magee’s book for just not being the first out of west Belfast.
Yes, there were many.
But it may well be the first out of Poleglass and the first that has such an intimate feel for the life there, the trauma and the nihilism, the tension between justifying the IRA and recognising the broken souls.
I remember one night speaking to a couple of joyriders who were under threat from the IRA, expecting to be kneecapped. They were discussing whether or not to get drunk before being shot. A woman in the company was urging them not to because, she said, the painkillers they would need afterwards wouldn’t work. I don’t know if that is true or not.
One of the boys laughed and said that he would drink his own blood and get a second hit from the alcohol in it.
They came across as ridiculously immature.
Two weeks later, the one who joked about drinking his own blood smashed a stolen car into a tree, killing himself and the lad beside him.
Of course the trauma infusing life there was not just a hangover from the troubles but also - and this is in the book - from sexual abuse. And when Sean is in trouble with the law, the punishment he has to take actually hinders his prospects for getting out of the estate and away from the company that is dragging him back.
The story of how a young man might get trapped within a culture that has no faith in opportunity or change and prefers drunken abandon could have been from housing estates all over these islands. But it isn’t. It is from Belfast, and it has a real feel for the place.
MALACHI O’DOHERTY, one of Ireland’s leading political commentators and author of eleven books on the North of Ireland, in his regular column looks at how we can catalogue our recent history
