Inventory: Powerful, layered story of growing up in Derry

Inventory: A River, A City, A Family

Author: Darran Anderson

ISBN-13: 978-1784741501

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Guideline Price: £16.99

Late in Inventory, Darran Anderson’s disturbing and memorable history of “a river, a city, a family”, the narrator sits down to question his father. The scene is Derry, in what passes for the post-Troubles world; and the questions the narrator has in mind were until recently more or less unaskable, given that “not long ago, asking about what happened in the Troubles might get you killed”. But now, we are told that life is different, and so, “one night, I decided to talk to him, finally, properly”.

And a history pours forth: a childhood in postwar Derry, with its chronic housing shortages, political injustice, clannishness and claustrophobia; and an adulthood amid the violence of the Troubles, and hobbled by the psychological trauma which haunted these years and which continues to the present day. A life which, like every life in Northern Ireland, has borne witness to a profoundly abnormal history, the thread of which continues to unspool.

This paternal story is evoked intensely, brilliantly, and at length – only to be snatched away. “None of this conversation happened,” the narrator eventually notes: for this was a conversation, a soliloquy which never took place. Instead, father and son sat silently in the family home watching music videos, and that was an end to that.

This sense of a resistance to authority is present throughout Inventory. At the outset, we are cautioned against setting much store by memory, or the truth of the stories we are told. “Memory has its complications, contradictions, collages, and it has time when it aspires to fiction.” We are told this as the narrator gazes down from the attic window of his childhood home towards the river Foyle, and describes the view – though Anderson is unsure whether the river was visible from this house.

A conscious element of deliberate and fundamental uncertainty lies at the heart of this book. It is fractured and fragile, declining to invest excessively in any notion of a truth or a series of truths when stories are refracted through any number of minds and memories. It is charged too with awareness that in Northern Ireland in general and Derry in particular, it would be a burlesque, an affront to the senses, to embrace received wisdom, or trust official or authoritative news or histories. Instead, a necessary scepticism is the default – and the strength of Inventory lies in its willingness to draw attention to this fact, almost to glory in it, to undermine any notion of authority even in the tales printed on its pages.

The effect is underscored further by a narrative structure which is itself an unruly mosaic, a jumble of tesserae; and emphasised too by references to Narnia, to Oz, to radio voices caught in the air, to locales otherworldly and fantastical. The youthful Anderson is himself – in his treacherous memory – adrift, unsure of the facts, the rules, the dimensions of his life. This life must fall to pieces before being – carefully, laboriously – rebuilt, in a new form.

Startling intensity

Such a layered narrative effect is disconcerting, but powerful and morally persuasive. It is, moreover, of a piece with Imaginary Cities, Anderson’s compendious previous book, which ranges giddyingly over urban landscapes that never were, or that existed only on the page, on the screen, in our dreams. In this version, Derry’s past is revivified with startling intensity, the human dimension of this history at all times providing the necessary mass and grit. One grandfather has deserted from the army, the other smuggles across the porous border; beaches are combed and riverbanks assessed for signs of death by suicide. These are lives lived on the back foot, on a physical, geographical and psychological edge, in one liminal space after another.

In this book, indeed, an entire city lives on the back foot, its collective life scarred by trauma. Anderson is not the first Derry writer to touch this city's wounds, to capture its spirit and electricity by means of the written word ranging across the genres, to distil the exacting and often punishing relationship between place and person – or to attempt to channel the energy released as the result of volcanic political violence. Best known, perhaps, is Seamus Deane's heartbreaking Reading in the Dark, which caused a sensation upon its publication in 1996. Other names include Colette Bryce, whose poem Derry in The Whole and Rain-domed Universe (2014) catches the specificities of a childhood lived in conditions of persistent and extreme political and social abnormality:

“I was born between the Creggan and the Bogside

to the sounds of crowds and smashing glass,

by the river Foyle, with its suicides and rip tides.

I thought that city was nothing less

than the whole and rain-domed universe.”

Forthcoming memoirs by fellow Derry writers Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Thin Places) and Séamas O’Reilly (Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?) testify to this will to gaze upon and examine Derry’s recent history. Such work stems from the need to speak necessary and painful truths, to survey the ground ceded by a dysfunctional political process, and to represent the effects of trauma to readers hungry for the day-to-day realities.

Inventory describes compellingly the effects of such shock, which are all the more malignant for being subjected to a great silencing. Trauma presses against the other side of the television screen: the news is viewed from a distance, “like I was on the wrong side of the aquarium glass”; the newsreader each evening tots up the tally of Troubles-related deaths that day “like it was the football scores”. Trauma holds the truth at a distance, and all too frequently a place of safety can never be reached, facts remain buried or repressed, and a time of reckoning can never come. The power of Inventory lies in such reflections, which manifest powerfully in its slipstream, long after the book has been put away. It is reminiscent of a long-exposure photograph, tracking the effects of time scored through life, and place, and landscape, and the human heart.

Neil Hegarty’s novels include Inch Levels and The Jewel