Jan Carson knows how to make a reader feel uncomfortable. Some of the characters that populate the Northern Ireland-set stories contained in her new collection are deeply unpleasant types. There is the sunbathing woman who contemplates doing nothing because she is busy reading a paperback while a toddler is edging ever closer to the water’s edge; there is the reporter who hears a set of tall tales when he goes to Belfast and decides to publish them anyway; there is the jaded Northern pensioner caught between helping an ill person at a shopping centre or going in search of the rhododendron he wants to buy: a “big blowsy number with cerise flowers”.
Nick Cave put it simply: “People they ain’t no good” — and across these 16 stories, Carson makes that point more than once, even as the implicit suggestion is allowed to hover that perhaps these people are just like you and me. At times, the collection is easier to admire than to love, such is the unease generated — but throughout there is no doubt that the reader is in the presence of a formidable talent.
Carson excels in offering an accumulation of detail, deftly painting portraits that convince even as they alarm. And there are stories which allow in welcome chinks of light, along with a dose of the supernatural. One highlight is the 1980s-set story Grand So, in which Ruth has to share the back seat of her granny’s car with a ghost, the former owner of the 1982 Sierra. “They say weans are more susceptible to things unseen and Ruth’s a particularly dreamy kind of wean,” we’re told. He’s a bad-tempered ghost; he’s always glaring and not given to chatter. But, as the story reveals, he’s a good ghost to have around when danger is near, and particularly when “there’s a bomb on the news nearly every night”.
It’s a beautifully achieved story, as is the equally impressive Pillars, which tells of Elaine, who can’t “get the line of herself since Martin left”. One day, she’s lucky enough to be gifted a pillar, which hovers beside her and helps her make decisions that work to improve her. Long after the reader has closed the book, these tales linger in the mind: vivid, original and moving.
