Book review: ‘West Belfast’ by Danny Morrison

Danny Morrison, West Belfast . Elsinore Press, 2014 (First published 1989)

Despite living in and around Belfast for some thirty-five years, I find the city difficult to identify with. “Where are you from?” is more likely to get “Omagh” than “Belfast” from me. So I depend for my sense of Belfast on writers. Two spring to mind immediately. One is Brian Moore, who caught 1940s Belfast so well in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. The other is Danny Morrison, whose novel West Belfast (written twenty-five years ago but relaunched recently) catches with precision the Belfast of the  1960s and early 70s.

Morrison has always been aware of the difference between the writer of prose-with-an-ulterior-purpose  (he was the Sinn Féin publicity director) and the writer of fiction. You can see the struggle between the commitment of the political activist and the detachment of the artist in this early novel.

In part it’s the story of the beginnings of the Troubles here, told from the inside. But it’s much more. It’s a meticulous and intimate picture of a society and a family, the O’Neills, living on the Falls Road. There’s a painful honesty in the depiction  of John O’Neill, a teenager and an idealist who falls hopelessly in love with a girl. In one painful scene  he writes a poetic declaration of his love  and gives it to the girl at a dance. Amused, she waits until he’s gone to the toilet, then hands his poetic declaration  to the MC. He reads it aloud to the  audience, who fall about laughing.

But it’s when West Belfast begins to slide into violence that the book goes into overdrive. Two scenes in particular stand out. The arrest of John and his    treatment by the British army is caught in an endless nightmare of pain and shame.  Ironically, it’s an RUC who comforts, cleans, even protects the confused and broken John.

The movement from victim to protagonist is described with even greater skill. In one  brilliant passage, where the narrator stalks his victim, a young British soldier,  we hear doubt and the need for retaliation grapple in his mind:

  “I am not claiming God’s blessing for my actions. I am not that conceited. I believe in a god. I see the beauty of God’s creation all around me, especially in  this man with the clean face and short hair who’ll never shave again, in the red roses over there in the floating warm air, in the demonstration of power and fate unfolding and the tragedy of trapped people…I’m not as callous as this and there’s always, always, always unease, a sense of violations and wrong, about killing this man and the ones before…I walk out to the corner for a last look. I am on stage. The cobalt blue sky, the blazing sun focuses on me, the main character me with the magic forefinger, fate-maker, sorter-outer of British soldiers come to do you harm”.

Morrison takes care to establish the ordinariness of the protagonist and those around him before the Troubles erupt. The opening chapter follows five boys and one little girl in 1963, climbing Black Mountain on a summer’s day. The childish fears, the bravado, the mock battles of British soldiers versus Germans,   the meaning of words ( “What’s the difference between fizcley handicap and mentally handicap?” “I know. When you’re mentally handikept you’re really, really handikept”). The innocence of childhood and adolescence makes the brutality and death that follows all the more shocking.

People often ask of fiction “Is it true? Did that really happen?”  I think that’s a misguided question.  To ask what parts of a work of fiction have a counterpoint in the real world is beside the point. What matters is, has the author created a world that is credible and revealing? West Belfast rings true at every point, from the hopes and doubts and fears of the central character to the background of a close-knit society suddenly sucked into the hell of violence.

Some books you forget, some books you half-remember, some lodge in your head for a lifetime. West Belfast is in the third category. If you’ve already read it, read it again. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favour and open your mind. And heart.