Finding Her Way Out of The Maze

In a land where history is slow to evaporate, the events that unfolded in Northern Ireland’s Maze prison in 1981 still hang thick in the air. i.r.a. prisoners, who were demanding political instead of criminal status, began a series of hunger strikes to get it. The British government refused to budge. So, one by one, 10 men starved themselves to death. The macabre drama was a low point of mutual, willful intransigence in the battle between the British state and Irish republicanism, and provoked the province to some of its worst bloodshed. The ghost of Bobby Sands, the first of the prisoners to die, has hovered over Ulster’s uneasy peace ever since.

Yet it is an English-born woman — a former globetrotting advertising executive now raising a family in Provence, France; she was only 11 when Sands died — who has dared to revive those dark days. Louise Dean’s This Human Season (Scribner; 374 pages) is a novel constructed around the events leading up to the hunger strikes. “The one gift I bring to my books is my ignorance,” she says, enthusiastically blowing cigarette smoke toward the ceiling of a London hotel lounge. While researching a follow-up to her award-winning first novel, Becoming Strangers (published last year), in which two main characters dealt with terminal disease, Dean was plowing through the British news of 1981 — a touchstone year of royal romance, race riots and Thatcherism in full cry — when she was sidetracked by a brief item on the death of Bobby Sands. Using lack of knowledge as her passport, Dean spent the next nine months flitting between Provence and Belfast to record the memories of republican and loyalist paramilitaries, British soldiers, prison officers and the Catholic and Protestant residents of Belfast’s working-class housing estates.

The hundreds of hours of tapes she amassed would have made a startling documentary, but using real names can cause trouble. Instead, she crafted a drama with two main characters: Kathleen Moran, a Catholic mother of four living on the front line of Belfast’s Ballymurphy estate, and John Dunn, a former British soldier with uncomfortable memories of his tours of duty in Ulster. Moran’s eldest son, Sean, has joined the 40 or so prisoners on his block in the Maze who are on “dirty protest” — living naked rather than wearing a prison uniform, and smearing their excrement on their cell walls. Dunn has returned to Ulster as a prison officer in the Maze, drawn by good money and hopes of finally settling down with his Protestant girlfriend. The two characters never meet, but their parallel lives converge when the antagonism within the Maze, and the political stakes outside, start to rise.

The political and religious jangle of Belfast in 1979 is the backdrop for a vivid tale of lives filled with booze, cigarettes, bad food and murderous gossip. But the real meat of This Human Season lies in the scrunched spaces between day-to-day survival and the weight of history. Moran is preoccupied with worry over her children and her loss of faith in both God and her husband. “She had grown up around here, she knew everyone, her family was close by, there was a war on, terrible things happened all the time and they were in the thick of it, and they managed to feed their kids and get them to school and the days went fast and yet she was lonely, unbearably lonely,” Dean writes with an Ulster lilt. Meanwhile, the earnest Dunn must confront a grown son he didn’t know he had, and is haunted by the sound of his prisoners talking late at night: “There was something ghastly about it; it was like listening to the voices of men who’d died together, trapped in the hull of a boat or in a building on fire, hundreds of years ago.” The book ends poised between hope, heartbreak and history.

Politically, Dean’s heart is clearly with the republican cause, though she found little to like in the leaders she interviewed. “They’re brilliant propagandists, and it’s awesome how cohesive they are at a local level,” she says. “But they just thought it was funny that a housewife from Provence should be interested.” A history graduate of Cambridge, Dean has a nose for detail. The references to pop songs and TV programs sometimes have the whiff of the library about them. But the details that matter — the inner turmoil of the compromised prison officer, the mother who wants a son, not a hero — smell of real and rarer history. From all her interviews, Dean concluded that “Northern Ireland is very much like, ‘You don’t come from here, so you can’t understand.'” At a time when political polarization seems to be once again clouding the peace process, Dean’s “ignorance” sheds welcome insight on what’s at stake.