Where They Were Missed - Lucy Caldwell > Reviews (1)

WHERE THEY WERE MISSED

LUCY CALDWELL

While visiting our little mobile library last week, on book cover caught my attention as the picture of a group of children playing on the front looked like my kids playing in the 1980’s – with one exception – behind these children was a soldier with a gun.

The book ‘Where they were missed’ was written by Lucy Caldwell, it was a short book with only 230 pages and the cover stated that it had been short listed for the 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize, so I added it to me pile of books.

THE AUTHOR

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981.
She was the youngest ever author to be short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize when at the age of 25 her first novel, ‘Where they were missed’ was in the final six books short-listed.
As well as a talented novelist she is also an award-winning playwright.
Amongst her growing list of prizes she has won the Most Promising Playwright Award, the Irish Playwrights' and Screenwriters' Guild Award and the BBC Stewart Parker Award.
Ms Caldwell now lives in East London.

THE STORY

This is a poigniant little story set in Belfast in the late 1970’s.
It starts during a very hot summer:

“Belfast is hot. Belfast is never hot. But Belfast is hot this summer. Daddy says it's the hottest summer in Living Memory. Mammy says, It's hot as hell”

It is the ‘Marching Season’ in Belfast, it is at the heart of the’ Troubles’ in Belfast, but the book is NOT about the Troubles.
The political background does though shape the family, although their crisis is not eclipsed by it.

The novel is narrated by six year Saoirse (pronounced Seer-sha), who lives in Belfast with her Mammy, Daddy and younger sister, Daisy.

Things are not as they should be in the family, but she and Daisy don’t understand what is happening and why their Mammy is so changed.

That hot summer the two sisters are stopped from playing with local children. Then a tragedy stops them visiting an Italian family their mother has befriended and brings an end to the delicious ice creams they had become accustomed to
Both girls, especially Saoirse, are enamoured of the Irish folk tales their parents tell them and so they spend the summer in a fantasy world of their own.
Then tragedy strikes and splits the already rocky family apart.

The second part of the story is ten years on when Saoirse is almost 17, and living with her Mother’s eldest sister and her uncle in a little isolated guesthouse in the tiny town of Gweebarra Bay on the coast of Southern Ireland.

It is at this time that Saoirse discovers murky secrets in her families past. She is distressed at things that her family and extended family have kept from her. She now has to unravel the mesh of the half-truths and blind spots of her past and so she decides to go back to Belfast to discover the truth about her life

WHAT DID I THINK

This was a really good read. It was completely different from any other books I have read recently. It was absorbing and carried me along quickly.

Lucy Caldwell cleverly has the narrator Saoirse speaking as a six-year-old, and then later as a 16-year-old.

The tone of each stage of her life is concise and true. The two halves of the novel changing in style as Saoirse matures.

At first I honestly thought that this was an autobiographical book there was so much sincerity in the dialogue; as if the writer had actually experienced the details. But Caldwell insists that is completely fictional and that she had a very happy childhood

One thing I like is that the writing is not littered with many Irish pronunciations as is often the case, instead the writer manages just to instil a subtle Belfast accent, just dropping in the odd word that gives the book a clear hint of Northern Ireland
It would have been easy for the writer to make this more a political book using the ‘Troubles’ of Belfast as a tool,
I felt that Caldwell actually uses the little family of Deirdre, Colin, Saoirse and Daisy as an allegory for the country and its problems.

All in all I would say that this is a wonderful little book, very moving and thought provoking and well worth a read.

I give it 5/5