The Raptures
by Jan Carson
Jan Carson’s The Raptures is set in a village near Belfast in the early 1990s. The Good Friday Agreement is still five years away, and hope of a solution to the sectarian conflict which plagues Northern Ireland is dim. Yet, the inhabitants of Ballylack have a more urgent (T)troubles of their own. Several children from the same class start dying of a mysterious illness. The only student who seems to be avoiding the effects of the disease is Hannah, a girl from a born-again Christian background. Already an outsider because of the peculiar hang-ups of her parents, these inexplicable developments only serve to further mark her out, especially when she is visited by the ghosts of her dead classmates, who reveal that they are trapped in an alternative version of Ballylack. We live the extraordinary events of that summer through Hannah’s eyes – the novel opens and ends in the first person, but even those chapters written in the third person are written from her perspective.
Carson’s writing is marked by witty observation, and would be a joy to read, irrespective of the details of the story itself. As a bonus, she comes up with an enjoyably quirky plot; a coming-of-age narrative which mixes elements of comedy and tragedy, human drama and satire, mystery and the supernatural. It is not often that a book has you laughing out loud in one paragraph and shedding a tear in the next, but somehow Carson manages it repeatedly in this novel.
This notwithstanding, there is still something about The Raptures which I cannot get my head around. The speculative aspects of the novel invite an allegorical reading but I’m not sure I got the “message” (if there is, indeed, a specific one). The alternative Ballylack, with the ghosts rapidly ganging up into factions, could be a symbol of the divisions in the adult world. The send-up of Hannah’s happy-clappy Protestant parents (her father in particular) can be read as an indictment of religion, although not necessarily of belief – Grandpa, one of the most positively portrayed characters in the novel, also “prays in his own manner”.
At the
end of the book, I was left with the impression that there were hidden layers which
I was missing. Even though this might well be the case, I still found The Raptures a remarkable reading
experience.
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