Another Sky, Colm O'Gaora, Picador, UK £10.99. PB

review by Pat Boran

The family, according to the British social anthropologist Edmund Leach, is "the source of all our discontents." It is the kind of thing one might imagine Michael, the central character of this second novel by Dublin-born Colm O'Gaora, saying to his pupils as he stands in front of a classroom in contemporary London, his mind constantly drawn back to the northern Ireland of his own childhood.

In essence, Another Sky is a tale of love, loss and memory, moving between that childhood in the quiet seaside town of Portnew in the 1960s and present day London.

But it's not that the two time zones sit comfortably side by side or that the idyllic aspects of times past are what draw him back. Rather the two locations of the novel seem to be jostling against each other, the past casting shadows on the present and suggesting that all was not as rosy as Michael might like to remember.

Back there in the house where his father's workshop sat at the end of the garden, things happened that are hard to conscience. The Troubles, formerly an attribute of the urban centres of Belfast and Derry, began to spread to the rest of the province, and tensions surfaced even in little Portnew. In a beautifully observed phrase, we are told that Michael's mother found herself watching "soliders walking backwards through the terraces". And, not surprisingly, the external troubles produced troubles within the family itself.

One of the real strengths of this book is the way in which, despite having a male central character, it is able to convey the fact that so often the real casualties of the Troubles are female: the mothers, wives, sisters and lovers who so often go unsung.

Sensitively handled and written in crystal clear prose any poet would be proud of, O'Gaora's portrait of a broken family, a family with a missing limb, is a strikingly assured, suggestive novel from a writer who has somehow escaped me up till now. My loss. On the strength of this, his earlier and highly praised A Crooked Field is next on my list.

© copyright Pat Boran