The Raptures by Jan Carson review: visions in a Northern Irish village | Fiction

TTwo strange things happen in a Northern Irish town during the 1993 summer break. First, Hannah’s classmates begin to die. Then, one by one, they return to chase her. There is a pattern to the deaths. Strange lumps accumulate on the victim’s skin, they become feverish, and then their organs fail. Within hours of her passing, and even before the village’s well-oiled gossip machine has begun to spread the news, they reach Hannah. Each appears only once, flipping through magazines in the doctor’s office, or crumpled in the dark in the bathroom as Hannah gropes her way to tears. They’re subtly changed: older, with a coat of nail polish here, a drop of extra confidence there. After a few words, they fade away.

Two questions prompt Carson’s compassionate and meticulously observed third novel. Why has this plague affected Ballylack? And why, of all her class, is Hannah the one blessed with apparent health and cursed with strange visions?

Carson was born in Ballymena, the town of Antrim whose pious council banned the Electric Light Orchestra and Brokeback Mountain. Now that she lives in Belfast, she has spoken of her desire to give voice to the Protestant experience in the province. His previous novel, The Fire Starters, which won the European Union Prize for Literature, set a magical siren amid sectarian violence in carefully drawn Belfast. The Raptures brings a similar mix of granular detail and bizarre happenings to Ballylack, a town whose name and religious conservatism carry more than an echo of its birthplace.

Here, houses display “wacky paintings of the Queen, Princess Di, and King Billy,” local shepherds rumble from the pulpit, and school drummers soundtrack the Orange marches. A mother is prohibited from doing yoga demonstrations at the school fair; Hannah’s evangelical family doesn’t let her study dinosaurs or sing Beatles songs. The orthodoxy may be overwhelming, but Ballylack is not a monolith. Some residents come from the Philippines or China, and not all attend church. There’s a “fairy tree” on the outskirts of town and a healer in the neighboring town, while the age of alcopops, 2 Unlimited, and bomber jackets is dawning for Hannah’s tweens class.

Ballylack’s miniature pandemic burns holes in this community. The grieving parents turn against each other or approach the justice of the vigilantes. Those who have faith wonder if it is strong enough. News reporters swarm around the homes of sick children. Seán, a crisis management officer hired to investigate, seeks to find the cause of the outbreak, until one of Hannah’s ghostly visitors gives a clue.

Shy but determined Hannah is Carson’s main focus, but The Raptures glide through Ballylack as an understanding spirit, keeping watch over parents and children, and spending time with the repairman Seán, the taciturn farmer Alan, and his wife, Maganda. The narrative voice takes on the characters’ tics, rhythms, and thoughts, occasionally stumbling but never falling. Instead, it unfolds in a great chatty cascade, drawing the reader into the increasingly worn-out trust of the community and propelling the story forward.

The result is an intriguingly mixed book. The Raptures is a study of village life that brings the easy familiarity of a sitcom to its cast, but it is also an Agatha Christie-style detective novel, a dark supernatural mystery, and a tale of massive trauma. Carson turns these parts into a tragicomedy in which the fantastic elements fit almost perfectly with the realism of the kitchen sink. Given that Hannah is the centerpiece of the novel, this makes a lot of sense: why wouldn’t a child who has spent many Sundays “drinking into the apocalypse like a little sponge” not see ghostly companions as another of life’s mysteries? ?

Hannah takes a singular path through Ballylack’s sinister plague and religious groupthink, and Carson ends The Raptures on a note of measured optimism. The people may be mistreated and afflicted, but here too there is patience and kindness, and green shoots stubbornly peeking through the scorched earth.