As Strangers Here and The Maiden Dinosaur reviews: a chronicler of the Protestant North back in print

The years since her death, in 1994, have seen a number of valiant attempts to resurrect the novelist Janet McNeill. Her work has appeared under the Virago Modern Classics label, and Blackstaff and the Women’s Press have reissued a couple of titles. She has been highly praised, compared to Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor, claimed for feminism, for social history, for local (Northern Irish) writing.

Yet somehow, after a flurry of interest, McNeill seems to retreat into obscurity again, perhaps because of a sense of provincial ennui that is tied up with her literary impulse. This is a pity because, at her best, McNeill was very good indeed.

These two ’60s novels, now reissued by Turnpike Books, encompass, in a sense, both the strengths and weaknesses of McNeill’s writing.

The first, As Strangers Here (1960), deals briskly and humanely with the doubts and anxieties of a Belfast clergyman and with the particulars of his less than vibrant circumstances. Edward Ballater's wife is a fretful invalid (the invalid wife is a recurring presence in her fiction), his dour son is unsatisfactorily married, his daughter is prone to adolescent fantasies, members of his congregation sometimes succumb to the lure of Evangelicism. Money is tight. The rectory is rundown and the garden overgrown. It is the late 1950s, and a sporadic IRA campaign is in progress.

The last supplies the central drama in the book. And here, it seems, McNeill strayed into alien territory and lost her touch.

What happens? Summoned to a local police station where a young delinquent is undergoing interrogation, Ballater is just in time to witness an IRA bomb flung through the station window, right into the bad boy’s hands. A fraught drive ensues, and an explosion which leaves the delinquent badly injured.

Bright moments

It is all set out with care and attention, and the book has moments of brightness, as (for example) when the landscape of Co Down is vividly evoked: “The banks of the roadside were purple with willowherb and frothy with meadowsweet. Cattle turned from deep-shadowed trees to stare at them. Honeysuckle and late wild roses straddled the hedges. The sour smell of a flax dam filled the car for a moment and left it reluctantly.”

There is also a splendid set-piece involving two groups of schoolchildren – boys from a Bible class and convent girls – who jointly run riot during a visit to the Ulster Museum and become indistinguishable ("Knitted grey socks covered Catholic and Protestant legs indiscriminately"). However, as an example of Troubles, or pre-Troubles, literature, As Strangers Here falls down in the areas of plausibility, narrative drive and even social comment: the back streets of Belfast, and their inhabitants, do not make a fitting topic for McNeill. Neither the moral nor the physical atmosphere of this novel rings quite true.

She is on much firmer ground with The Maiden Dinosaur (1964) – Protestant Belfast middle-class ground, that is, with its scope for gentle irony and sharp observation.

Sarah Vincent, the “maiden dinosaur” of the title, is a grammar school teacher, local poet and linchpin of a group of old school friends who meet for tea at Campbell’s Cafe opposite City Hall on the third Wednesday of every month: “‘Oh dear, am I late?’ ‘I think an order mark would be in order, Sarah Vincent,’ Addie said in plummy-voiced imitation of Miss Hodgkiss, vintage Lower Fifth, 1922.”

These women, on the verge of middle age, are mostly married and variously employed; and clever, ungainly, self-analytical Sarah has a stake in all their lives, in one way or another. Thronehill, her family home on the north shore of Belfast Lough, has been converted into flats. In two of these live Addie and her husband Gerald, and another school friend, Helen, whose husband has absconded following the death of their only daughter in a road accident.

The only “Troubles” mentioned in this novel are those of an earlier era, the 1920s, when the girls coming home from school had to lie down in the tram because of all the shooting. The narrative emphasis falls on social decline, and on the residue of an old-fashioned decorum.

The stratagems and absurdities don’t go unnoticed by Sarah, even though her role, and that of her friend Addie, is to stick up for the right of the middle class to be, well, middle class. “It’s not me personally,” she says, “it’s my generation, like butter-knives and calling the lavatory the toilet and eating in the kitchen.”

Laughs and tragedy

Humorous comment is an attractive feature of

The Maiden Dinosaur

(“gentility keeps breaking through”), off-setting its darker brushes with tragedy and despair and disablement. It is not by accident that Thronehill, is situated directly beneath Belfast Zoo; unspoken parallels here add a playful note. There might be lions or their everyday equivalent in disruptive potential lurking in the rhododendrons.

The discreet presence of figures from the past – "Mama, thirty-four years dead, stirred on the sofa in the drawing-room" – makes a telling counterpoint to annoyances and humiliations of the present: "It was unreasonable to be hurt like this, as much as this," thinks Sarah, when the girls in her class neglect to present her with an end-of-term token gift. (A similarly humorous, metaphysical device, with long-dead familiars returning to disturb the present, is employed by Brian Moore in his entertaining novel of 1970, Fergus.)

At one point, Sarah , as a local poet, and Addie are interviewed for a television programme, and the old, exasperating question duly crops up: “I wonder, Sarah Vincent, whether you might feel that your upbringing and environment here have, so to speak, been a restrictive element in your work?”

Just for a moment, author and character seem effectively fused, and the doughty defence of the “provincial” position, proffered by outspoken Addie, puts the callow interviewer in his place and answers the question with a resounding “No”.

Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her latest work is Bookworm (Somerville Press), a memoir of childhood reading in Belfast