The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson Granta Books 295pp, £13.99 in UK
In the dark amniotic gloop, where everything burgeons and tweaks and dreams - the forever-interstices of Belfast, my native place - some X-ray version of Ciaran Carson shakes hands, metaphorically, with the ghost of Mervyn Peake. The resulting gothic-confidential produces an undefinable, indispensible, genredefying book. Riffle its pages and sense the presence of Carson's dire, redoubtable, doted-on, infamous town, and of Carson himself, the two combining by unintended (?) implication in the title, The Star Factory (ostensibly, in reality, a forever abandoned mill). All of the senses are here in cahoots, as was marvellously the case with Last Night's Fun, his last prose outing, about the joys of Irish music.
"Caravaggio interiors of noir", is one of his many flinty descriptions of the city, its filmic redolence apt not least in that the poet's native ground, "my metropolis", is also the monochrome back-lot of what at times seems an awesome pre-natal imagination. His father's Belfast, and his grandfather's, somehow merge into Carson's locale, extending the power and reverberation of his boyhood, the ringing legacy of cobbled, sooty back streets, the slaty parallels of rooftops and batteneddown dreams, mere scores on the map of the Lower Falls Road in the 1950s.
"This terrain is honeycombed with oxymoron and diversion, and the ancillary moments of your life assume an almost-legendary status. There are holes within holes, and the main protagonists are wont to disappear at any time, as in my father's story," Carson writes, retracing his father's recollections of the Star Factory's "sudden demise", a confabulation of serial gossip and mongered myth, as the mew of memory gathers force from chapter to chapter, collecting momentum, discarding nothing.
The "main protagonists", the Irish-speaking father, a one-time postman who was mistakenly interned, and now resembles a potbellied "Toby jug", plus the author's brother Pat, and wife and children, pop up like characters in a sit-com to star in scenes of reminiscence, tracking down facts or cross-checking footnotes, translucent images in this seance, part of the action, but also pretexts, as past and present are ushered in at their behest, appear and dissolve, or spin into lists.
There are lists of everything, an inexorable, pleasurable drizzle of information: items collected for the August 15th bonfire, or objects lodged in the folds of a sofa, "a repository of coins, clips, pencil-sharpeners, crayons, holy medals, pencil-stubs and curtain rings . . ." Commemorative stamps, like miniature histories, flutter by, as does the list of flora and fauna alive in the meadows beneath the beneficent Black Mountain. There the Falls Road merged into fields. There, Carson scouted with his gang, like some skulking provisional Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.
Mostly these lists are piquantly personal, therefore poignant, in their contexts, belonging to festivals, ceremonials, family rituals, with their intimate confirmation of true belonging, a university of meaning found in minutiae: I collect, therefore I am.
Sometimes the lists read like meaningless additives; viz: the one on page thirteen, of sixty-five things that people collect. And of course the conjunction of listings and Belfast invokes the tragedy of the lapsing, ghostly Titanic. Carson devotes (the verb is apt) a haunting "chapter" to its short history, concluding with a lucid evocation of his dreams, as "a disembodied robotic eye, gliding like a wayward star through the adits of its wrecked cathedral, or through a porthole oculus, taking account of tilted apses and saloons, wandering their marbled stairs and passageways".
This typifies the precision characteristic of the writing, the lovely, limber, almost iambic sense of rhythm producing a slipstream of sometimes mesmerising imagery: rumoured sightings of disoriented angels "with their long wing-cases trailing behind them" crawling up the spires of St Peter's Cathedral "like translucent locusts . . . The Bishop of Down and Connor denounced them as demonic visions; nevertheless they continued to prosper in corners of the eye, lurking in alleyways like winos, never fully revealing themselves. As we passed, we could hear the rustle of their carapaces."
Detection - a heightened sensory procedure - combined with Carson's susceptibility to gossip, lore, old albums, the pages of the Belfast Street Directory for 1948 (the year of his birth), to piggeryjokery, the weather, and serendipity (tracing the origins of the word), create a pawn-shop, a huxterish poring-over of riches.
Here are autobiography, history, myth and dream. Couched in the past (the book eschews the more recent Troubles), Carson's vision exults in the humanness of being. His skull is a latter-day sarcophagus of wonders within which he drifts, the gloop enfolding him. If at times he seems fascinated by the depth of his own fascination (and this happens rarely), we can forgive him. Enter this book at any angle, any point, and be enraptured, trapped, seduced, as he himself is, both possessor and possessed, his city's freeman and its captive. He might have called his book of wonders Belfast Looms.
Tom Adair is a critic based in Scotland