{"id":1960,"date":"2012-07-13T06:20:47","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T06:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1960"},"modified":"2012-10-23T13:28:31","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T13:28:31","slug":"so-it-is-by-liam-murray-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=1960","title":{"rendered":"So It Is by Liam Murray Bell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Myriad Editions 14 June 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

352 pp, paperback, \u00a38.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Hilary Laurie<\/strong><\/p>\n

In recent years Northern Irish writers have tended to avoid subjects close to home, fearing a lack of perspective and that they might be lured into taking sides.\u00a0 Liam Murray Bell, a Scotsman by birth but who was at university in Belfast, has no such reservations.\u00a0 He has plunged in headlong, setting his first novel So It Is<\/em> in Belfast in the 1980s and 90s, when the Troubles are at their height and the Unionist and Nationalist communities at each other\u2019s throats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He knows the place and its people well and he has a good ear for the particularities of Ulster speech.\u00a0 Men come home from the pub \u2018stocious\u2019 or \u2018with the stink and slur of drink\u2019 on them, and a young boy is told by his sister, \u2018Go you to the shop and get a tin of corned beef for our dinner.\u2019 As events unfold, Brown never lets us forget where we are in this city of invisible boundaries where it is dangerous, sometimes fatal, to stray far from one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

He knows how to tell a tale.\u00a0 He has said elsewhere that he is interested in the idea of women becoming involved in violence. For most of So It Is<\/em> two stories run in parallel \u2013 that of Cassie, a vengeful, Republican paramilitary who sets honey traps for Protestant men guilty of murder and violence against Catholic Republicans, and of Aoife, a young Catholic girl whose life is gradually warped by the Troubles and what they do to her family.\u00a0 Cassie\u2019s appearances in the narrative are brief and deeply shocking; the risks she runs and the torture she inflicts make for very painful reading.\u00a0 One can\u2019t help reflecting that Stieg Larsson and his heroine Lisbeth Salander have much to answer for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Aoife\u2019s story moves at a slower pace through well-worked (if sometimes overlong) set pieces. Her mother suffers a mental collapse after a stray remark that she made led to the death of a neighbour; her feckless father will not step in to take charge of his family.\u00a0 Her young brother becomes involved with the Provisionals and finds himself in a confrontation with the police.\u00a0 A rubber bullet leaves him blind in one eye and this leads him to take his own life. Aoife, determined and resourceful soldiers on, but she refuses to accept her brother\u2019s death and the agreed ceasefire.\u00a0 She knows that she will not get justice from either side. And so both women, Cassie and Aoife, come together and merge. Their stories finish in shocking violence as well as with the recognition that violence is not an answer. It\u2019s an ending with no winners. Women, Bell would have us believe, are here no different from men.<\/p>\n

He has written a challenging political thriller cum coming-of-age story.\u00a0 He does not hold back and at times he asks a lot of his readers. Often I wished for a lighter touch, for a more shaded point of view. He gives a vivid account of one of Northern Ireland\u2019s two communities, but we are shown very little of the other side. But he leaves us in no doubt that both communities have suffered terribly and that choosing how to respond is no easier for one than the other.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Hilary Laurie<\/p>\n

Liam Murray Bell knows Belfast and its people well and he has a good ear for the particularities of Ulster speech. Men come home from the pub \u2018stocious\u2019 or \u2018with the stink and slur of drink\u2019 on them, and a young boy is told by his sister, \u2018Go you to the shop and get a tin of corned beef for our dinner.\u2019 As events unfold, Bell never lets us forget where we are in this city of invisible boundaries, where it is dangerous, sometimes fatal, to stray far from one\u2019s own.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2006,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions\/2006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}