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1974: Ian Cochrane, Gone in the Head
- Cork University Press
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all the more arresting in representing a protagonist whose Irishness proves irrelevant to the circumstances in which he finds himself. Supplementary Reading ‘Pointed Questions’, Unsigned Review, The Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1973 Colm Tóibín, ‘Back to a Dark Biafran Drama’, The Irish Times, 21 December 2002 Also Published in 1973 John Banville, Birchwood; Sam Hanna Bell, A Man Flourishing; John Broderick, An Apology for Roses; Eilís Dillon, Across the Bitter Sea; Jennifer Johnston, The Gates; Edna O’Brien, Night 1974 Ian Cochrane, Gone in the Head Northern Ireland’s so-called ‘Bible Belt’ stretches across mid-Antrim, and Ian Cochrane (1941–2004) is the author who has uniquely brought it to fictional life. Born in Ballymena – the ‘buckle’ of the Belt – and reared in the surrounding countryside, Cochrane produced six novels, four of which, including Gone in the Head, are set in his native territory, the others being A Streak of Madness (1972), Jesus on a Stick (1975) and F for Ferg (1980). Two other novels – Ladybird in a Loony Bin (1978) and The Slipstream (1983) – take place among London’s marginal young Irish immigrants, whose seemingly structureless, peripheral lives do not greatly differ from those of their fictional brethren in Cochrane’s Northern world. The Boodie family has just moved from rural Heathermoy to a new house in a housing estate on the fringe of an unnamed Northern Ireland village. The estate’s location is so marginal that the road leading to it is unpaved, and like a lot of these public housing developments, North and South, the place is neither in the town nor in the country. This hybrid space at first seems an appropriate dwelling-place for Cochrane’s social misfits and marginal personalities, and a suitable stage for the various dislocations and lapses in consciousness indicated by the novel’s title to play themselves out. But such characters and conditions are also typical of the village, and in the event, the most shocking events are those concerning some of the most obviously established members of the community. The Boodies are Ma, Da, and two teenage boys, Frank (the 1974: IAN COCHRANE, GONE IN THE HEAD 49 narrator), aged fourteen, and his older brother Bobby, who is sixteen. Their father has a record as a petty thief, works in the local linen mill, is given to violent outbursts and has a clutch of stolen hens illicitly housed in the back yard coal shed. Ma has a weak heart, is besotted by religion, and spontaneously administers chastisement to her two boys. Soon after moving in, she appears to suffer a heart attack, brought on in part by one of her husband’s physical onslaughts. As to Frank and Bobby, their changed surroundings is so strange and intimidating that they are initially afraid to go out. And when they do venture forth, estrangement becomes the hallmark of their experiences, as life in their new world presents not only the challenges and temptations to which teenagers in general are subject but treats them as strangers and scapegoats . In general, the moral atmosphere is bewildering. The village, too, seems gone in the head. Adjustment to such a habitat requires being able to negotiate its fragmentary – or, to use the colloquialism, ‘cracked’ – attitudes, and to think of dislocation as relocation. ‘My name is Frank and I live in Ireland. Ireland is in the world and the world is in the universe, and the universe is in the . . .’ (51). This incomplete and generalised revision of Stephen Dedalus’s well-known attestation of his place and station in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one expression of both the narrator’s being out of place and his inconclusive recognition of the fact. The youngsters’ confusion and estrangement also underline the quality of Boodie family life, its casual violence and emotional impoverishment . Frank acknowledges that ‘where we lived before, our name was the lowest of the low’ (40). It has sometimes occurred to Frank that his mother does not want him, although if he tries to express that worry, ‘she just seems to cast her mind away somewhere else’ (5). He is on unhappily familiar terms with Da’s violence, and receives an unmerciful beating when, in a fit of rage and panic, he dispatches the ill-gotten hens. This beating is so severe that even his parents fear for his recovery, although when Frank does come round, ‘I felt sorry for [Da] because he knew all...