Review: Few and Far Between
- 36 minutes ago
- 4 min read
By Charles E.P. Murphy
In another world’s 1960s, Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, achieves his dream of draining the lake of Lough Neagh to boost employment and gain land. While it doesn’t quite work out, it does cause an archipelago of small islands to rise out of the water: the “Ark”, so named after it becomes a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles. The world sees it as a beacon of hope in dark times, a place where the mixed marriages and the artists and the mixed-race locals and the queer community can find sanctuary. Fiery celebrity anthropologist RJ Connolly lives there with his family, lionising the Ark as a utopian community to be envied.
Jan Carson’s Few and Far Between isn’t set then. It’s set in 2017, almost twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement, almost as many years since RJ died, and a year after Brexit. Only a handful of long-timers live in the Ark now, the elderly trans artist Sandra and RJ’s children Marion and Robert-John. Everyone else left as soon as it was safe to do so, and Lough Neagh is reeking with blue-green algae. There’s no money to fix things without EU funding and so Stormont plans to flood the place to shift the algae, wiping out the empty Ark in the process. Can Marion and Robert-John save the historic place by helping the visiting Dr Alex Anderson, someone who also grew up on the Ark and is following in RJ’s academic footsteps?
More importantly, can Marion and Robert-John save themselves from the utter wreckage of their lives caused by being the children of the monstrously abusive RJ?
Carson is a literary fiction writer and Few and Far Between is a literary fiction book. The Ark didn’t lead to a wildly different Northern Ireland, Alex isn’t a detective investigating a murder that exposes an AH conspiracy, Marion and Robert-John’s German mother is from our timeline’s lost-the-war Germany. This is ‘AH as setting’ stuff, a story about damaged people and the rotting past that seized on an oft-forgotten bit of history to create an intriguingly different place for a story to happen.
And this is a good story, one that’s uncomfortable and adult. Marion, Robert-John, and Sandra have been hurt and so have stagnated, afraid to leave the Ark – a place that’s very clearly gone bad – for “the Mainland” (in Ark slang, meaning the rest of Northern Ireland!), unable to change. Unable in Robert-John’s case to even know how he’d like to change because his entire idea of how to be a man has been warped and ruined by his brutish father – looking into his life and his thoughts is severely uncomfortable. What happened to everyone over their lives is gradually revealed and leaves you in the position of repeatedly being infuriated with one character who doesn’t understand the other is in pain and trying their best. Because, of course, they can’t see into each other’s heads as we can, and nobody quite knows how to explain themselves.
Carson jumps between those heads multiple times in the same chapter, giving us a look at every side of a conversation (or silence), allowing us to see when they all think they’re having a different conversation to each other. One standout bit there is when Alex thinks she’s successfully manipulating a conversation with a lover to win him over on the Ark, so sure she’s a masterful sneaky manipulator and knows how to work men – but we’ve already seen a few paragraphs before that he knows exactly what she’s doing, it’s not working, and he hasn’t let on that he doesn’t even know what her allusion to Turner paintings actually means.
Does this book need to be AH rather than just a literary novel set in 2017’s County Antrim? Yes, for the setting is crucial to the events and the themes and the mood of the book. The Ark is isolated and disturbing, a place of abandoned homes with abandoned furniture and a decaying old visitor’s centre where once-fancy interactive displays stopped working, and a place people from Northern Ireland go to dump all their crap (including old arms caches from the Troubles) or to kill themselves. Parts of how Carson describes the place are akin to a horror story, such as the island of suicides and the island of the “Almost-Deads”.
And there is another reason for being alternate history, it gives Few and Far Between a bit more freedom to indulge in magical realism. “Almost-Deads” are the ghosts of people who aren’t quite dead yet, people still hanging on in hospitals and comas, waiting around until it’s time to move on. It’s an eerie place, another way the Ark is an allegory for being stuck. You could do something like this outside of AH but it’s far less disruptive in a mostly ‘realistic’ book if I can go, ah, right, in this world ghosts were confirmed to be real and are accepted things we all know we can go look at (but really should just leave them alone). Everyone knows about them in the same way they know about the shops or about how there’s videos of cats on the internet.
‘AH as setting’ gives us a literary drama in a setting that’s Northern Ireland’s great sin-eater, the dumping ground for all the stuff it doesn’t want to think about anymore or wants disappeared. And as you read on, you realise that of course, it was the country’s dumping ground in the Troubles too. A refuge for the mixed marriages and LGBT people that everyone cheered is another way of saying, those people can all go over there where we don’t have to see them. As soon as people thought it was safe to leave or they could be accepted now, they left because they were only there because they had to be. The book tells us why someone would want to stay anyway.
And actually, now I think of it, Alex is going around digging into the past of the Ark and what the Connollys have been doing. So see, there is detective work, this is proper AH now.
Charles EP Murphy is an author who, among other works, wrote the books Chamberlain Resigns, and other things that did not happen and Comics of Infinite Earths for Sea Lion.