SOURCE: "Identity and Diffidence," in The New Republic, Vol. 216, No. 20, May 19, 1997, pp. 33-6.

In the following review, Boyers traces the development of betrayal as the central theme of Reading in the Dark, explicating narrative implications about the political character of Northern Ireland.

Irish history is bad history. So says one character in Seamus Deane's first novel [Reading in the Dark], and no other character in the novel seems much inclined to deny it. In a land of "small places," as it is described here, people have too often made "big mistakes." They lie to themselves and to one another. They rely on old certainties when they might better have abandoned them. They carry around "stale" secrets and bitter resentments. Their courage is too often merely a willingness to absorb meaningless defeats and inflict pointless damage. For all their eloquence and their gift for storytelling, they are not, typically...