The role of fire in three NI literary works: Brian Friel’s play The Freedom of the City (1973), Bernard Mac Laverty’s novel Cal (1983), and The Fire Starters, a magic-realist novel by Jan Carson (2019).

As a teenager growing up in France in the late 70s-early 80s, I vaguely heard about violent fights in Northern Ireland (NI) on television, but the idea of a “war” between Catholics and Protestants in Europe seemed to me more linked to history books (like the Saint-Barthelemy massacre in 1572) than relating to actual, bloody facts happening in the late 20^th century. From U2’s song Bloody Sunday in the early 1980s to the eponym film of 2002, bits of information about NI tragic events on the news, such as terrorist attacks and bombs exploding in London and elsewhere, punctuated years of ignorance until I started studying English at University and digging into history and culture of the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland.
In one of our literature classes, we studied three books which gave us various perspectives on the period of The Troubles in Northern Ireland (NI), from its beginning in the early 1970s up to its echoes in today’s society.

The Freedom of the City (1973) is a militant play written by Brian Friel, a Catholic writer. Set in Derry in 1970, in the aftermath of a Civil Rights meeting, the play presents three protesters, who, trying to escape from the gas bombs launched to disperse the crowd, find themselves in the Guildhall by mistake, while outside, their presence in the building is interpreted as a terrorist action. The play describes their final hours in the mayor’s parlour, their surrender, and the tribunal supposed to investigate their deaths. The play was modified following the events of Bloody Sunday to entail some references to the events.

Cal is a realist novel by the Catholic author Bernard Mac Laverty, published in 1983, which describes the struggles of the eponymous character during The Troubles. Cal, a young, Catholic man, is on the dole. He lives with his father within a Protestant community, in an Ulster village. Press-ganged by two IRA members, aggressed by young Protestant neighbours, his house burnt out, he falls in love with the widow of an NI police officer, victim of an IRA assassination in which Cal took part a year before.

The Fire Starters (2019) is a recent novel written by the Protestant writer Jan Carson. Set in Loyalist Belfast 16 years after The Troubles, the story intertwines two sub-plots dealing (among other themes) with the difficulty of parenthood and the endemic violence—inherited from their parents—of an aimless youth, which implements the Fire Starter’s calls to wreak havoc in the city by lighting fires.

In my essay on NI’s literature, I analysed the role of fire in these three books: Friel’s play The Freedom of the City, Mac Laverty’s novel Cal, and The Fire Starters, by J. Carson.

I invite you to read the complete essay, available in the pdf document here above, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. You may download it and use parts of it for your own research work but beware of plagiarism: do not forget to indicate your references as soon as you quote, reformulate, or cite any part or idea written in this essay.