Copyright 1989 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

February 24, 1989

LENGTH: 410 words

HEADLINE: Books: The curse of the frontier / Review of 'A Border Station' by Shane Connaughton

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

A Border Station, by Shane Connaughton (Hamish Hamilton Pounds 10.95)

By cripes, they knew what they were doing when they drew that Border!' mutters the policeman father in the autobiographical and episodic A Border Station. He is gazing across the 'lost part of the world' of southern Irish marshes and bogs to the lush farmlands of the Six Counties. Confined to a round of duties and petty crimes, he dreams of a murder case to solve, thinks back to his days as a detective at Dublin Castle.

The border as a meandering frontier, and the border as a symbol, broods over the lives of those in its shadow, not least the policeman's son as he grows up in Cavan. Patrolled by British soldiers and officers, it is crossed to and fro by tinkers, soldiers and officers, even a Methodist family, preaching in vain to hostile Papists, in whose company he himself eventually traverses the frontier between belief and unbelief, childhood and adolescence.

It is an old theme - of a growing child torn between irascible father and warm-hearted but subdued mother; the urges of the flesh and the restraints of the brain; the church teachings of sinfulness and a burgeoning sexuality - but told in tightly organised prose (a tautness which sometimes sacrifices depth).

The second of the seven stories which make up the book won the Hennessy Literary Award. It may be a sign of the times that some of the stories have been used twice over (like a Lloyds' asset!), once as self-contained stories and now as part of a book. The focus is on the boy's relationship with his mother and father, but the border pulsates through the narrative as a constant reminder of a colonial past, a nagging presence driving the father to pathetic and sometimes mean acts of defiance.

When the boy says of the wealthy Anglo-Irish grand dame whom they visit - and of her kind - 'I'd stick them to a tree with six inch nails and set them alight,' he is exaggerating the sentiments of his father. But the frustration is real enough. And there is confusion when his father announces when they are in Eire and when they are not, as they cycle along the border.

The author is anxious not to cast the Troubles as the shaping influence over the lives he depicts. His bildungsroman is set in a rural backwater, cut off from the great world outside. But, ironically, the sectarian troubles emerge as the pervasive and even dominant feature of his haunted frontier landscape.