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The Dark Hole Days by Una WoodsReview by: Jennifer FitzgeraldThe Linen Hall Review, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter, 1984/1985), p. 19Published by: Linen Hall LibraryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533614 .

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notion

Jennifer Fitzgerald

The Dark Hole Days Una Woods (Blackstaff Press, 1984, ?3.50)

Una Wood's vision is of a series of

dark, black holes, traps inexorably closing over vainly beating wings. In

the title story,.a novella, two diaries are laid side by side: the writer of each attempts to create an alternative to the dreariness which surrounds them. Colette, on the dole, resists the seductions of safe and conventional

marriage, intelligently arguing herself into a claim on experience and

change. Joe, a Protestant, also on the

dole, finds identity and purpose in the heroism of paramilitary involve ment. In the event, he sees too much but fails at direct action; self imprisonment, in the dark hole under the floorboards to which he retreats

nom retribution for both crimes is as literal a burial as that of the man he

helped to kill. As Colette descends into 'the pit of mourning', Joe remains trapped by fear/ guilt and vengeance.

The troubles are only one of the shackles by which these characters are bound; unemployment, relative

poverty, class consciousness, marital

violence, the competitiveness of the sex market, young love grinds on,

making victims out of the perpet rators. The periphery disappears; conflict is central to every life. Each story focuses on the individual's struggle to assert identity and desire, fiercely clashing with the monotony of inherited misery.

It would be wrong to convey the impression of unrelieved gloom.

Tragedy requires catharsis; the dynamism of this collection lies in the strength of the revolt, the pretension to change and escape which moti vates the characters. Getting inside an individual's head, intimating personal value and aspiration, Woods

internalizes the social reality, highlighting the battleground of feeling. There is nothing of the novice but about such writing; skilfully and sensitively handled, it bears witness to maturity and restraint. The authenticity of the narrative never falters. Una Woods faces the same bleakness of struggle and outcome as

Dorothy Nelson and Pat Barker do, without their distinctly feminist Perspective. Yet in the inexorable ?arch of 'dark holp days' she dramatizes the same sense of

entrapment by the relentless grind ing on of the laws of social depri

vation.

Technical expertise apart, what makes these stories work is the remarkable -balance of external and

internal, of social pressure and

personal protest. One would wish to Bee it transferred to a larger canvas,

with the final insights of the stories integrated into the wider perspective of plot and action, but as a beginning this bodes well. The narrow confines of the dark hole suffocate; the characters can only scream in silence.

fiction

Peter Brooke

Fighting with Shadows, Dermot Healy, Alison and Busby/Brandon Books, 1984.

Dermot Healy's woefully pessimistic and badly written novel exemplifies a serious problem that is at present afflicting Irish Catholic culture. We

might have called it 'alienation', were

it not that Mr. Healy comes from Cavan, in that part of Ireland that is free from foreign domination. A much better word would be the sense of 'futility'

- the collapse of all values. Southern Ireland split off from Bri

tain in a mood of great optimism and buoyancy. This spiritual self confi dence was provided mainly by a youthful and self confident Catholi cism, best represented in the novels o^ Canon Sheehan - a wide ranging intelligence able, without dishonesty or special pleading, to resolve its con

tradictions in a Catholic world view. Dermot Healy is the anti-type to Canon Sheehan. In his novel, the South is allegorically represented by a drought of Ethiopian dimensions. For him, that part of Ireland that was free to develop its Catholicism, is a great, diseased void.

Sheehan could write about intelli gent people with a lively interest in the world, from all social back grounds. Healy's characters are uni

formly stupid, passive and are only driven out of complete, self enclosed introspection by the need to fondle each other and be loved (there is how ever a mild flicker of interest in the range of social levels that can be included in one family). The book is allegedly about the 'troubles' and expresses mainly the

negative side of a Sinn Fein/IRA

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view. He hatea the Brits and the Prods. But, like the rest of us, he finds it difficult to rise to the positive side of the Sinn Fein view and in his case it is largely because he can find nothing

admirable in the culture that is coun

terposed to the Brits and the Prods. He is unable to believe in the superior ity of Catholic Irish culture over Brit ish culture and so is left, like Milton's

vision of the fate of Evil after the Last Judgement, self consuming and self consumed. The collapse of Irish Catholic

Nationalist self confidence, which is the most important single fact in

modern Irish culture, creates a very exciting and interesting situation. It is a pity that so many Irish intellec tuals at present merely exemplify the problem instead of coming to grips with it.

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