Benedict Kiely's Troubles Fiction: From Postcolonialism to Postmodernism (Critical Essay‪)‬

From the beginning, Benedict Kiely has been a deeply 'rooted' writer, drawing inspiration from his native place in and around Omagh, Co Tyrone. Like the seanachai, he speaks from deep down in his environment, his stories a species of dinnseanchas, bedding the locale in their utterance, moving with the fluid ease of oral narrative. Yet the narrative voice in his stories and novels is a sophisticated medium, displaying a wide range of cultural reference, closely tuned to the lives and accents of those about whom he writes--farmers, tradesmen, publicans, solicitors, priests, and doctors--but quite capable of critical detachment and the satirical thrust. He is very much the son of the father who features in 'A Journey to the Seven Streams': 'Townlands like Corrasheskin, Drumlish, Cornavara, Dooish, the Minnieburns and Claramore, and small towns like Drumquin and Dromore were all within a ten-mile radius of our town and something of moment or something amusing had happened in every one of them. The reiterated music of the names worked upon him like a charm'. (1) These are the names of what is known and loved, redolent of the past and history: 'Then the seven made into one, went away from us with a shout and a song towards Shaneragh, Blacksessiagh, Drumragh and Crevenagh, under the humpy crooked King's Bridge where James Stuart had passed on his way from Derry to the fatal brackish Boyne, and on through the town we came from' (p.212). His descriptions reflect an emphatically sectarian landscape, but one in which the two communities, having accepted compromise, lived relatively harmoniously side by side. It is only by first recognizing the depth and passion of Kiely's attachment to his native place, its topography, history, and people, that we can understand the sense of pain and outrage he felt at the violation of his personalized Irish pastoral in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, culminating in the Real IRA's Omagh bombing on 15 August 1998, the single worst terrorist attack of the Troubles, which left twenty-nine dead and two hundred and twenty seriously injured. His memoir, Drink to the Bird (1991), contains many references to Irish history, particularly in the context of the post-1969 Northern Irish Troubles. Describing his childhood in the garrison town of Omagh, he recalls the British military at Christmas time, 1939, in a way which consciously resists the routine rhetoric of nationalist indignation at the provocations of the imperial presence in Ireland. Instead, he forces recognition of Ireland's complicity in the imperial British war machine. Himself the son of a decorated British Boer War veteran, Kiely refuses simply to demonize the British army in Ireland and counts many serving Irish soldiers amongst 'old friends':