Powerless in Belfast

Press, 29 July 1989, Page 22

Powerless in Belfast

The Killing Of Yesterday’s Children. By M. S. Power. Abacus, 1989. 264 pp. $14.99 (Reviewed by A. K. Grant) Some subjects need to be written about fictionally, even though you don’t much want to read fiction about them. Northern Ireland is such a subject, and the horror of life in a city ruled by murderers is powerfully realised in this novel, which treats of the corruption of violence, the perennial problem of how a democratic society deals with terrorists without becoming terrorist itself, and the centuries-old question of why the English insist upon ruling the Irish, or some of them. The novel is the first instalment of a trilogy and, if the later instalments are as good as this one, the first leg of a tragedy. It is marred only, for your reviewer, by the unnecessarily odd nature of the central character, Mr Apple, a man haunted by nightmares and apparitions, whose thought

processes, described at some length, get in the way of the reader’s perception of Belfast and the dreadful dilemmas posed daily to those who live in it, try to capture it, or try to pacify it. The story is powerful and, as I say, tragic, and the characterisation and insight into the fascination as well as the fear of violence is acute. It is a book which makes one realise how powerless we are to shape our lives if we are born in a place like Belfast or Beirut, where forces we can do little about condition existence in ways we are powerless to change. So it is a depressing book: all the more reason for reading it, since depression can open the door to comprehension, and comprehension is a preliminary to imaginative anger, which itself is the preliminary to action against governments which prefer to sustain such states of affairs rather than do anything imaginative to end them.