Reading in the Dark
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| Author | Seamus Deane |
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| Country | Northern Ireland |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
| Released | 3 October 1996 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 220 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0224044052 (first edition, hardback) |
Reading in the Dark is a 1996 novel by Seamus Deane set in Derry in the twentieth century.
[edit] Plot introduction
The text is told from the point of view of an anonymous young Irish Catholic boy. This novel-in-stories is about both the boy's coming of age and the "Troubles" of Northern Ireland from the partition of the island in the early 1920s through the post "Bloody Sunday" violence of the early-mid 1970s. Reading in the Dark was shortlisted for the 1996 Booker Prize.
The Derry/Londonderry that is the setting of this tale is poor, fractured along sectarian lines, violent, and mired in conservative Catholicism, but it is also a place of wonder for the growing narrator, and the novel never slips into complete despair, but maintains a sense of hope and humor throughout.
The main focus of the novel is the narrator’s discovery of his family’s "secret" past and the effect that this discovery has on himself and his family.
The book is constructed of dated short stories that are then assembled into larger chapters chapters, but these chapters are further divided into smaller sections with titles such as “Father”, “Mother”, “Crazy Joe” and so on. This unorthodox technique provides the reader with brief snapshots of different aspects of the narrator’s life; all weaved together by the overall storyline involving the boy’s family’s miserable past.
In Salon (on-line magazine) Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "But there's a sense in which Deane is ideally positioned to tackle Joyce on the great modernist's home ground. For one thing, Deane couldn't conceal his debt to the Irish literary colossus if he tried; Deane is one of the academic world's leading Joyceans, and even edited the Penguin edition of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Seamus Deane is also a widely honored poet and a professor at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana (US).
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