I don't know what's been happening lately - I've had a load of barely started books on the go for the last few months while I've been working on the first draft of Find Me, and no energy to finish any. It's only now the draft is completed that I've been able to properly sink into them. And how much I've enjoyed them - it reminds me again that all books are a two-way street, not something you passively consume. You also have to bring your A-game to them, and not just the other way around.

This Human Season has had me gripped for days. It's a richly textured, beautifully told story based around the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Closed off army veteran John Dunn has taken a job in the Maze prison, formerly called Long Kesh, and Kathleen Moran's son Sean is part of the blanket protest with the other IRA prisoners in the months running up the first hunger strike.

There is a wealth of bleak sharp humour and warm but scratchy domestic detail as both live their lives and separate but interlinked family dramas while, outside, the threat of sectarian violence and growing dread draws ever nearer to home. There's a wonderful thread all the way through of how brutality begets brutality, breaking down all involved, and yet despite this humans can continue to love, hope, and attempt to build again.

It is not a particularly easy read in places - it doesn't shy away from the horrors of life in prison during the protests, or the lurking fear and intimidation of the prison officers taking place in the community, but it gave me a great deal to think about. In the gaps between being able to carry on reading, this book haunted my mind.

I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the Troubles (especially if, like me, they were a kid at the time and a lot of the context for the headlines went over your head), or if you are interested in great books in general.

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I’ve only ever read one book set in Northern Ireland – but that was nothing like as confronting as this one. David Park’s The Light of Amsterdam (2012) is a comparatively recent book which makes no mention of the conflict known as the Troubles at all. This Human Season, by contrast is grounded in the Troubles. It tells the parallel stories of a mother whose 19-year-old son has just been sent to the notorious Maze Prison, and a man who has just started work there as a prison guard.
I am mindful that readers who have come to adulthood since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 may not know much about this horrific conflict which claimed the lives of more than 3500 people. Events still in living memory are ‘history’ now, yet for people of my generation, deaths from the IRA bombing campaigns in Belfast and London were a regular item on the nightly news, in the way that Islamic terrorism is now.
Wikipedia provides this brief summary (lightly edited to remove links and footnotes):

"The Troubles (Irish: Na Trioblóidí) was an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, and the Conflict in Ireland it is sometimes described as a “guerrilla war” or a “low-level war”. The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.] Although the Troubles primarily took place in Northern Ireland, at times the violence spilled over into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.
The conflict was primarily political and nationalistic, fuelled by historical events. It also had an ethnic or sectarian dimension, although it was not a religious conflict. A key issue was the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. Unionists/loyalists, who were mostly Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists/republicans, who were mostly Catholics, wanted Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and join a united Ireland."

This Human Season takes place when the British army had been sent into Belfast to try to prevent violence between the two sides, but inevitably the soldiers became targets themselves. There had been a crackdown on nationalist sympathisers and hundreds of them had been arrested and were in the Maze prison. As part of a protest to have these prisoners deemed political prisoners rather than criminals (some of them guilty of murder and targeted assassinations), the prisoners began a gruesome campaign known as the Dirty Protest. (The BBC has videos here, but they are graphic, you have been warned). Inevitably prison guards became targets themselves as well.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/08/15/this-human-season-by-louise-dean-bookreview/ ( )

Really interesting novel about Belfast in the late 1970s told from several pov - the mother of a prisoner, a British prison guard, the community priest. Very sympathetic to the human condition rather than one side or the other. One plotline went where I thought it would go, the other was a total and rather wonderful surprise. ( )

This Human Season is set in Belfast in 1979, and is the intertwining story of two very different people, each struggling in his or her way to hold on to the things they believe in and to the families they cherish and are compelled to protect.

Kathleen is a beautiful housewife, fighting a daily battle to hold her family together – a drunken, irresponsible and unstable husband, a son Sean who is imprisoned in the notorious Long Kesh prison for IRA activities, and two younger children who are already world-weary and yet attracted to the violence they shouldn't be inured to. Kathleen's desire to protect her family is fierce and unwavering.

John Dunn has just finished serving twenty years in the British Army, and now lives in Belfast , where he works in the Long Kesh prison. The work is difficult and revolting, but the pay is quite good, and it enables him to buy a small house and a reliable car, and to start a respectable life with his new girlfriend and newly discovered teenage son. To John, this is worth the nights of excruciating work, and the hardship of coming home in the morning with his boots and clothes reeking of urine and shit, with which the prisoners coat the floors and walls of their cells because there is no other way to handle it. Prison warden's orders.

In prison, John meets Kathleen's son Sean, a quiet, meditative young man who can sing like and angel. In speaking with prisoners such as Sean and witnessing the inhumane way in which the prisoners are treated, John begins to question the very foundation upon which he has built his career, and indeed, his very life.

Louise Dean's writing is difficult to read at times, but the horrifying poignancy makes it worthwhile. Her ear for dialogue is impeccable. She wrote this novel while living in France , and it is astonishing, knowing this, to hear the perfect Irish lilts and the rhythm of the language. She is a prodigiously talented writer, and the TurboBookSnob thinks it was a tragedy that This Human Season did not make the 2005 Booker Longlist.

You really get all sides of the Troubles in this novel set in Northern Ireland just before the hunger strike in the early 1980's. Dean switches points of view frequently and at times this was distracting. I would have rather stayed with each character a little longer. Overall I enjoyed the book. Hated the end. ( )