It’s only proper to start with a declaration of interest: Patrick Kelly is my much-loved brother-in-law and what follows is, no doubt, informed by that fact. But, by any standards, his first novel, published last year, is a remarkable achievement.
For many reasons—maybe I didn’t want to be disappointed, maybe my bedside table was groaning already—it took me a while to get round to reading A Hard Place. And noticing its stern title and austere cover—a man staring out at a forest of cranes in a Northern Irish dockyard—made me think that it would be a challenging read: worthy, no doubt, and informed by lived experience, but not very entertaining, even a bit of a slog.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. At the heart of The Hard Place is an extraordinarily touching love story which, like lots of love stories (Romeo and Juliet, indeed!) concerns love across an unbridgeable divide. The novel tells of an Oxford educated middle-class young man who goes to Northern Ireland in the early 1960s to assist in the decision-making process of where to build a new university. There David meets and falls in love with the flame-haired Catherine, a ferociously independent and very striking junior academic from the nationalist community.
Both figures are drawn with brilliant skill: we see how his privileged background has failed to prepare him for the social and political complexities of Northern Ireland, but also how, for all her spirit and energy, she is trapped by the quicksand of her home, with eventually, tragic consequences. We sense how his love for her is driven by a search for redemption, for acceptance, for a second chance, but also how that love all too easily feels like the latest manifestation of English cultural appropriation.
It’s an infinitely nuanced tale, thick with the intricacies of Irish politics (eventually, to popular outcry, Derry is rejected as too politically scarred to be the site of the new university and Coleraine is chosen instead), but it’s also a brilliant satire about the shenanigans of the English education elite and the shady compromises of Stormont. But so also is it driven by passion and desperation, sexual desire and repression, and a strange combination of stodgy food and endless drinks, laughter and youthful partying, and the grim faces and repressed violence of the marching season. There’s even a wonderfully atmospheric account of the young Van Morrison playing in a club.
But looming over it all, is the landscape of Northern Ireland: the grey, poverty-stricken cities (especially Derry, or Londonderry as the Unionists call it), but also the dazzling beauty of the green countryside, the grey-washed skies and the yellow, sometimes even tropical, sandy beaches, all drawn with delicacy, affection and subtle realism.
The novel isn’t perfect (what novel is?): occasionally the satire slips into stereotype, and I felt that too many chapters end with one of the characters storming off into the night, but this is an amazing achievement: brilliantly researched and plotted, entirely readable and very enjoyable: infinitely touching, vivid and alive. What else can we ask from a novel?