Jan Carson's brilliantly inventive fifth novel deposits readers on a small group of islands in the middle of Northern Ireland’s remarkable Lough Neagh. Here, grown-up siblings Marion, Robert-John and Rosemary shared an unusual 1970s childhood. Offspring of the late RJ (qualified anthropologist, possible narcissist) and his wife Ursula (practical hermit, natural recluse), the Connollys arrived on the back of their father’s plan to study the unique community formed when a drainage scheme exposed patches of land big enough to live on, mid-lake around 1967.
Nicknamed the Ark, the Lough Neagh Archipelago offered a potential utopia of acceptance and diversity away from the bigotry of the mainland. As RJ observes from the get-go, the Ark is "both victim of the ongoing conflict and an act of embodied protest" against it. Now, it’s the summer of 2017 and the remaining residents are facing an end to their way of life. An engineered flood, designed to eliminate toxic algae on the surface of the lake, will submerge the islands forever, talking their homes and their histories with it.
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Listen, via Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, to Sunflowers by Jan Carson
Set against the real-life backdrop of the Troubles and Northern Ireland's more recent past, Carson takes the true tale of Ulster Unionist MP (later Stormont Prime Minster) Terence O'Neill’s unrealised 1958 plan to drain Lough Neagh entirely and establish a new County Neagh, together with the 2026 reality that the largest freshwater lake in Ireland and Britain is facing ecological disaster due to persistent poisonous algae, and opens her book with an illustration of a map that looks familiar, but not quite.
Speculative fiction and alternative histories are having something of a mainstream boom right now. Carson is one of the best. She has invented a geographical world, but the magic of this tale lies in the fact that it feels almost possible. Among the islands is one filled with Sleepers: women who won’t wake up and are nursed 24/7. Another is occupied by the Almost-Deads, ghostly figures in silent limbo whose bodies are elsewhere, medically caught between life and death. There is a suicide island, and an island that swallows anything placed on its surface. The people of the North dump guns, documents and worse in secret here, but as the Ark faces potential obliteration "buried things are starting to reappear".
The writer Donal Ryan has described Belfast-based Carson as "one of the greatest of the modern fabulists", a fitting crown for this author of an outstanding counter-factual novel for our times.
Carson’s insightful observation of human behaviour, richly painted setting, and vibrant characters carry the twists and turns of this tale without any of the clear (and frequently delightful) metaphors ever weighing it down. Rather than hovering between invention and reality, Few and Far Between firmly occupies a space that simply feels like both. Politics aside, there are stories within stories here: of power and sex, life and death, love and fear. It is a work of fiction about individual and collective trauma, emotional intelligence, psychological stunting and how the past shapes the present as much as the present will shape the future. It’s also a humdinger of a tale filled with family dynamics and personal dramas. An outsider arrives, who is writing a book about the Ark. But Alex isn’t quite the outsider she seems. Marion has a secret, but then doesn’t everyone?
A multi-layered mystery as quietly surreal as it is homely, this is a ghost story and a community tale about legacy, history, lies. Carson entertains her readers with unexpected turns of phrase, deadpan wit and judicious use of comic timing, especially when it comes to Marion. Changing in a shopping centre on the mainland before an uncomfortable barbeque at her sister’s, 53-year-old Marion dumps her underwear: "They’re an awful dispiriting colour and smell quite strongly of her crotch." "On Small Flat, Marion dreams of people. She thinks she craves company. But the idea of people rarely lines up with reality." "Marion, seeing her siblings once again at odds, sniffled into a tissue and held her silence like a phantom limb."
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Listen, via Spotify: Jan Carson talks to James Crawford about her new book and the three key influences that shaped it.
Is the Ark a haven? Or do these intimately connected islands function as a partially self-chosen, partially societally imposed, partially deadly trap? Geographically, Few and Far Between turns the rest of Northern Ireland into "the mainland", shifting ideas about perspective, significance, dominance and power in this part of the world. All of which gives Carson space to play with tropes and ideas about communes and utopias, to dance with the legacies and impacts of multigenerational trauma, and to consider the far-reaching tendrils of colonialism, post-colonialism, war, violence and political division on the human psyche. It's a tale of strange and curious kindness as much as one of forewarning about the fallibility, messiness and downright cruelty of some humans.
The writer Donal Ryan has described Belfast-based Carson as "one of the greatest of the modern fabulists", a fitting crown for this author of an outstanding counter-factual novel for our times. As made up as it is true, it wears its wisdom like a newsflash and a veil, telling us things we already know but seem thirsty to be told again and again: that the dream of the good life, an escape from it all, will always rise and fall on the ambitions and actions of the endlessly complicated humans in charge. Few and Far Between is a book about habits and patterns, what gets stuck and what we might be able to change next time, if only we can tell ourselves the right story.
Few and Far Between is published by Doubleday
