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Reading In The Dark

By Seamus Deane
Published by Jonathan Cape

Firstly, an interest must be declared. I am a former student of Seamus Deane’s, from when he was Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College, Dublin. He has since moved on to the University of Notre Dame. This novel has been in gestation for almost as long as I have been aware of its author, and an extract appeared in Granta magazine as far back as 1986. Literary gossip has it that familial objections to certain skeletons in the cupboard revealed in this highly autobiographical work were responsible for the prolonged delay. So was it worth the wait? The answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
This is a Bildungsroman, a rites of passage novel which, in common with other recent Irish books in the same genre, Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and Lia Mills’ Another Alice, follows the central character through their formative childhood and adolescent years. But Reading In The Dark goes further, in being the first Irish novel since Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to give us a glimpse into the childhood of a genius.