This Human Season

Louise Dean
Scribner
€16.99


It’s November 1979, in Belfast. British soldiers storm a Catholic house, searching for weapons. Kathleen’s elder son, Sean, is in Long Kesh prison, after a year on the run. Last time, they mistakenly arrested her husband while Sean escaped out the back.

Meanwhile John Dunn, after 22 years in the army, is starting work as a prison warden. Ten wardens have already been targeted by the IRA. John has also recently discovered he has a son, Mark.

This Human Season follows the separate stories of these two characters, their families, relationships and love for Belfast. John likes that it’s a ‘hard’ place, not like England, ‘all white bread and keeping the lawn trimmed.’ He has already served two tours in Belfast, and cannot imagine leaving. It emerges that he has never reconciled himself to a dark incident in his past, and wants to do the right thing now. He admires the Catholics, their austere humour, the discipline and cohesive, hardcore ideology of the IRA prisoners, who refuse to wear prison uniforms until they are reclassified as prisoners of war. ‘On the blanket’, they are also involved in a ‘dirt’ protest, smearing their cells with excrement, and there is talk of a hunger strike. In retaliation, the prison wardens, with instructions to break the prisoners’ resolve, play mind games, and inflict humiliating pain.

At times, Kathleen bitterly regrets not having moved down south, but her younger son Liam, who already makes petrol bombs and joins the rioting, says fiercely, ‘you’ll never take me away from here.’ When John’s girlfriend Angie warns his visiting son about West Belfast, vividly describing atrocities, Mark sees in her eyes, something ‘proud. Excited.’ A burning passion for this life-and-death existence seems addictive on both sides.

In researching this book, Louise Dean interviewed over a hundred prison guards, IRA members, Unionists, mothers, priests. She studied the Northern accent intently, and for the most part, the dialogue is convincing.

A novel set in the North is a balancing act, particularly for an English author, but Dean manages to walk the tightrope without toppling. In intensity, This Human Season is to the North what JM Coetzee’s Disgrace is to South Africa. Only in this case, the stark pain of the place is relieved with plenty of Belfast humour. Compelling and powerful, it’s definitely a contender for major literary awards.

Afric McGlinchey
Reviewed in The Irish Examiner