61Jane Hardy
is a feature writer who has interviewed a few of
the big names from Arlene Foster to Mrs Thatcher.Roddy Doyle signed off his review of Jan
Carson’s new novel, Fire Starters, by saying
she’d created a whole new version of Belfast
in her “gripping, surprising, exhilarating”
fiction. He’s not wrong. Although the
summer epidemic of gigantic bonfires bears
some relation to our summer headlines, the
“unfortunate children” who pop up, including
a little girl with wings and a boy born with
wheels under his feet (“greased lightning on
the hills”), are off any realistic graph. The plot
concerns fathers coping with problem children,
one a possible siren-baby equipped with lethal
charm, the other a boy addicted to violence. It’s
a funny, scary, persuasive, dystopian world.
As Jan (39) says over coffee in one of the
cafes she regards as the office, her first words
indicated the imaginative dilemma. “The first
sentences I wrote were ‘This is Belfast. This is
not Belfast.’” The hesitation is partly because,
as Ms Carson explains, she can only see her
version of the city. “There’s no fixed reality.
There are 100,000, or 500,000, different
versions of Belfast.” Magic realism is her bag
and as she says later, she can’t understand why
we’re so hooked on realism.
“I am probably a magic realist first and
foremost and love the absurd, the ultra-real, the
exaggerated take on reality.”
She values imagination - “it’s what writers
do” - but reveals she got the inspiration for
Fire Starters on a writing tour. “The idea came
when I was giving a talk in Washington DC
about bonfires and some of the symbols of
Loyalist culture. I began to talk about these
sixty to seventy foot bonfires, and people in
the audience said they were magic realism too,
which I’d mentioned. That was when the spark
went off, no pun intended.” She adds: “There
is something magical about them in the true
sense, that is fantastical. They’re large like the
Lambeg drum.”
Born in Ballymena, Jan Carson now lives
near the Holywood Arches in east Belfast. She
says: “I live in a terraced house and the very
physicality of our spaces blurs the line between
public and private. I’ve been thinking recently
about writing about things from within. You
feel physically placed in a community unlike
in suburbia where there’s a lot of distance
between people. I can hear my neighbours and
my front door opens onto the street.”
The novel is relayed by two men, Dr Jonathan
Murphy, father of water baby Sophie, and
Sammy Agnew, ex-killer and father of his
spitting image son, Mark. Was taking on the
male voices tough? Apparently not, as Ms
Carson explains: “I actually find it easier to
write as a male. I don’t know why but think
because I am a woman, there’s a responsibility
when writing as a woman to get all the aspects
right. Writing as a man, there’s not the same
pressure.”
The relationships between the fathers and
their offspring are superbly done. Carson
describes the doctor cradling his child - “she
curls into the corner of my neck to doze” - and
his fears about her future, then makes you
feel the tension in the Agnew household as
the older parents hear their murderous son
walking about his room. “Neither of them loved
Mark. It was entirely possibly no one in the
world loved Mark.” Jan Carson, who doesn’t
have children herself, reveals she drew on her
experience at home for the positive stuff. “My
mum was a childminder so when I was growing
up, I was always carting a baby around.” She
adds that her niece and nephew, now eight and
11, live down the road. “They’re beyond the
carting around stage but I’ve been there from
day one as a very hands-on aunt. It’s much
better than actually having a child.” Jan Carson
is writing a young adult book with her nephew,
Caleb, who is 11. “It’s about the near future in
Belfast and is dystopian.”
The Fire Starters isn’t a post-Troubles book
but addresses the continuing divisions through
its characters’ lives. The recent death of writer
Lyra McKee recalling a tough past exacts a
thoughtful response from Jan Carson.
“One of the things I wanted to say here was
peel back the layers. I didn’t know her but when
something like Lyra’s death happens, it’s very
easy to point the finger and blame the people
who were directly responsible for firing the
gun. Yes, there is a level of blame there, but
you have to question the society behind that.
I wanted to think about the young men, and
have written passages about the community in
east Belfast. I wanted to challenge the idea that
people join the paramilitaries for one reason,
because of a creed. It’s because they want
community, and they like violence. Getting back
to Derry, those young men are a product of lack
of community and unemployment.”
Ms Carson, who came to writing late at the
age of twenty-five, has always had plenty to
do. After Cambridge House Grammar School,
she attended Queen’s University, studying
English, then theology for a Master’s degree. “I
come from a Presbyterian background and I’ve
always been interested in religion. I worked for
churches for several years, always in the arts.
My dissertation was about Bob Dylan and the
rhetoric in the gospels. It was great fun to write
but totally useless. I did one article on the back
of it so it’s hardly made my fortune,” she says
with a laugh.
Creatives nowadays don’t exist in garrets;
they travel the world discussing literature and
work hard in community arts or education. Jan
Carson’s cv contains an impressive range of
jobs. She went to the States in 2005, returning
only when her work visa ran out in 2009.
While there, Jan started an art house cinema
and can still work the projector. She has also
been an arts co-ordinator for elderly people,
some dementia sufferers, for several years.
But Ms Carson rejects the idea she got into
this because of family members experiencing
the illness. “Honestly, no. I slid into this as I
was working at the Ulster Hall and ended uporganising all their tea dances. If you’ve worked
with teenagers then old people arrive who are
not sullen and they thank you for things and
bring buns, it’s nice.”
Jan Carson’s interest in language also
made her keen to understand how those with
aphasia and increasingly gappy vocabularies
cope. She became interested in the linguistics
and is conducting research into the subject.
Unsurprisingly, she is also writing some related
fiction: “In August I will be writing a number of
short pieces in what I’d call a dementia voice.
Then they’ll be passed on to a musician and a
choreographer and a photographer for their
response.” Sylvia Plath said everything in life
is potentially good copy and Jan says, “We want
to get it across that we don’t just do this work
because we’re lovely people but because there’s
something in it.” She talks about approaching
the problem of dementia not via memory but
via sufferers’ imagination. “In workshops with
them, I’ve come across amazing work.”
Ms Carson wants her own amazing second
novel to fly. It nearly vanished when she lost
the manuscript on her computer in Edinburgh
station. She says: “It would be great PR if I
won the Costa prize as the baristas who found
my PC worked in a Costa.” But she has the
prestigious EU Prize for Literature 2019 to be
going on with.
Ms Carson feels life is too short for Netflix.
“I don’t have a television so go to the Queen’s
Film Theatre a lot, maybe three times a week.
If anything threatened the QFT, I’d chain
myself to the railings. Most recently I saw
Capernaum there, a film about refugees
and acted by refugees which wasn’t an easy
watch.” The Sunflower is Jan’s pub of choice
in Belfast but she hangs out much of the time
at cafes. “I don’t write at home, it’s too quiet.
I write in cafes, and have a holy triangle near
me, including Clements at Ballyhack and
Connswater Starbucks where there’s a great
table I go to for people watching.”
A self-confessed overachiever, Jan Carson
believes in lifelong learning. “I’ve noticed there
are two sorts of people, those who stop doing
things at 60 and those who go on trying new
things because they like learning.”
She is also, unsurprisingly, a voracious
reader with a 200 a year book habit, Ms Carson
has one surprising enthusiasm, though. “I’ve
been reading Agatha Christie since I was eight
and finished everything in the kids’ section.
Now I am reading the novels in order, one a
month. She wrote over a great span of history
and you see attitudes change. The early ones
are amazingly xenophobic and misogynist, the
later ones less so. I love the bloody ones but
my favourite Agatha Christie is probably The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It’s intriguing and I
always like an unreliable narrator.”Jan Carson will appear in the Jaipur
Literature Festival when it comes to Belfast
from June 21-23.