The Fire Starters is set in Belfast “16 years after the Troubles”, among a loyalist community trapped in an anticlimax: “We continue to believe that across the sea, Europe (and also the world) is holding its breath for the next chapter in our sad story. The world is not waiting for us. There are louder voices around the table now. African. Russian. Refugee. They say terrible things in words that require translation. We are wet paper in comparison.” How do you counteract the suspicion that you are merely wet paper? By setting the city on fire.
Sammy Agnew is from the “hundred terraced streets” of east Belfast. During the Troubles, he devoted himself to thuggery. Political idealism did not inform his rampage. “This was never about the politics – the flags and freedom, God and country of it all. They were only words I stood behind. I did it again and again with fists, and guns, and sometimes bombs, for the pure blood rush of being alive.” Middle-aged Sammy is ashamed of his past and struggles to master his rage. He worries about his son. “He needs to tell his son that violence is a passed-down thing, like heart disease or cancer.”
Sammy has figured out that his son is the Fire Starter, a figure who has been posting anonymous videos online in which he holds up placards exhorting people to light fires. The last placard reads: “LEAVE OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES ALONE.” Which civil liberties? The Fire Starter does not specify, but it appears he means the right to wreak havoc, a battlecry that the local youths willingly take up.
Dr Jonathan Murray is a weary and wary new father. Though he grew up five minutes up the road from Sammy, “the distance between them is continental. It isn’t just money that keeps one man from mixing with the other. It’s education and reputation.” But both Jonathan and Sammy are emotionally stunted. Sammy “lug[s] his guilt around like a dead leg”. Similarly, Jonathan’s parents’ lack of love for him “was something [he] lugged around constantly, like a dead leg”. Jonathan cannot form friendships or relationships. Then a Siren emerges from the River Lagan and calls him, quite literally.
“Siren, she is. Wicked, matchless Siren, and I’ll be lucky to survive her or the thing she’s making in my bath.” This Siren seduces him, and gestates their baby while submerged in Jonathan’s bath. When the baby is born, the Siren disappears. Jonathan is terrified of his new daughter, of the danger of her siren song. He decides to cut off her tongue.
This inventive novel is about, among many other things, the burden of parenthood. Sammy and Jonathan’s narratives are intercut with tales of mythical children – a girl with wings, a boy with wheels for feet – whose fraught parents meet in monthly support groups.
Anna Burns’s Booker-winning Milkman depicted factions of the nationalist movement during the Troubles as an oppressive and dangerous regime imposing the opposite of liberty. Jan Carson depicts factions of the post-ceasefire loyalist community as similarly wedded to violence: “They talk of the loud violence their parents knew, as if it is a kind of birthright denied to them.” Both female writers skewer mindless masculine righteousness. Carson’s loyalists go about with their beer, value-pack crisps, sashes, drums, flags and stuffed effigies of the other side. The novel is set over the marching season, except that this year, thanks to the Fire Starter, the bonfires are off the scale. A female police officer is doused in tractor diesel and a lighter held up. The person holding it is shot dead before igniting her.
The novel is inventive if disjointed: the magic realism of the Siren plotline might have come from a different book. She is a magnetic presence who looks like an ordinary woman, “freckled and average, a little thicker in the thigh than I’d imagined”: her hair has a damp slick to it. Jonathan, a man who has never loved, finds himself abruptly and hopelessly in her thrall. She leads him on to the rocks and his life falls apart. She leaves him with a residual horror that when their daughter learns to speak, she will unleash chaos on the world. As Sammy sets about turning in his Fire Starter son, Jonathan assembles the medical instruments necessary to silence his daughter.
What does the Siren symbolise? Although water is her element, she won’t put out the fires: her presence on the page is something of an inkblot test, and every reader will see something different. The Fire Starters succeeds in dramatising the simmering volatility of a region that, with the looming post-Brexit threat of a hard border, could explode again. But volatility, Carson illustrates, can go either way. The needle can equally and unexpectedly swoop towards love.
• The Fire Starters is published by Transworld (£14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
