Book Thoughts: CAL

I finished reading this book over last weekend, and then Tuesday night of this week was at the library helping to lead discussion for our local library's book series on Ireland. The book is short, only about 150 pages, and reads pretty quickly. But its loaded.

Its set in the time known as The Troubles, which engrossed Ireland and Northern Ireland from about the late 1960s until the Good Friday Peace accords in 1998. Cal is the main character in the book, a 19 year old kid who is unemployed and lives with his father, Shamie, and whose mother had passed away when he was 8. Cal and Shamie are Catholic, and live in a neighborhood that is transitioning from being a mixed Catholic/Protestant neighborhood in Belfast to a heavily Protestant neighborhood. This, of course, creates much tension in the lives of both Cal and Shamie.

Without giving away too many nuggets from the story, the book really creates an intense psychological profile of Cal, ranging from low self-esteem/shame, extreme guilt, and even weakness. But what I think makes the book so powerful is how, through Cal, it demonstrates the despair and utter hopelessness that must be felt by some who lived throughout this period. They are controlled by the weight of the history of conflict and tension between Ireland and Northern Ireland, being Irish-Irish versus British-Irish, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) versus the UVF (Ulster Voluntary Force), being Catholic versus Protestant. It seems like the characters, and the real life people living this, are stuck in a world of dichotomy, where they are one or the other, and no matter what they do, they cannot escape what that means for them. They cannot change, because the threat of death to themselves and their family is always present. So they go along to get along.

Almost by definition its a tragic story. Similar to the old Greek tragedies where the characters could not escape fate, these characters cannot escape the history of conflict that has created their world. I do not believe its a coincidence that the novel has 5 chapters, paralleling the 5 acts of those old Greek plays.

For anyone interested in getting a small glimpse into the time of the Troubles, and some of the raw human emotion involved, CAL is a great read.