A Place of Safety is the story of Brendan Kinsella, a simple lad in Northern Ireland who just wants to live his life...but history keeps interfering.
Derry
Northern Ireland, 1966
Partitioned from the main part of Ireland since 1921 and dominated by the Protestant majority, the Catholic minority has grown weary of the discrimination against it so has begun to push for equal rights. One-man-one-vote. Decent housing. Good jobs. The most basic of requests. Yet these are still too much for those in power to accept. So there are confrontations and demonstrations that, step-by-step, grow more and more dangerous and violent.
Caught in the middle of this is a Catholic boy named Brendan Kinsella. Just days after his tenth birthday, his father is brutally murdered. But because the man was a vicious drunk who kept the family in extreme poverty, Brendan is not sorry he is dead. However, he was killed by two Protestants, which makes him into a martyr for Ireland and sets his mother, Bernadette, on a path to Irish Nationalism. She drags his older brother, Eamonn, along with her, but Brendan is resistant.
The third of her six children, Bernadette constantly belittles him as simple-minded, despite his knack for repairing things. In truth, he is quietly observant with an innate skepticism, and prefers to go his own way and form his own opinions, even though that sometimes leads him into trouble.
Through the next six years, Brendan is caught up in the growing turmoil, including several Civil Rights demonstrations in Derry; the attack on peaceful marchers at Burntollet Bridge; the Battle of Bogside, the following August, where Catholics forced the Protestant police force out of their neighborhood; the arrival of British troops to separate the two warring sides; internment without trial and...Bloody Sunday, the massacre of Catholics by British forces.
Mingled into this is Brendan's budding relationship with Joanna, a Protestant girl from a well-off family. A relationship that must be kept secret for fear of reprisals...from either side. But he doesn't care; she is pretty and fun to be around, has a life of relative ease and is certain she is bound for university. She helps him see there can be more to his world than hate and distrust, that his hopes and wishes and dreams can become reality...that they can find a place of safety, even as their world careens towards chaos.
The likelihood of violence haunts both Brendan’s youth and Sullivan’s clipped, brisk, hard-edge prose. A civil rights march facing a line of constables “kept flowing, like a flooded river smashing against a jam of logs and refuse”; Brendan, the famous “fix-it lad” of his circle, laments “the vicious politeness I was being handed by people I’d been doing work for since I could first hold a set of grips.” Dialogue, too, is sharp, slicing, and convincing. The novel is long, but Sullivan, a prolific author in a host of genres, wastes few words conjuring the milieu, the prevailing sense of desperation, and the ugly but undeniable thrill of striking back.
Tense marches and confrontations at checkpoints abound, including one beauty in which women harangue soldiers abusing Brendan and co. with the finest Irish profanity. Sullivan is just as committed to capturing Brendan’s development in moments of relief, working at an auto shop and enjoying the occasional escape, with friends or eventually a lover, into what he calls a “new and amazing world of peace and tolerance.” Those reprieves make the finale all the more wrenching.
Takeaway: Wrenching epic of coming-of-age in Derry during the Troubles.
Comparable Titles: David Keenan’s For the Good Times, Anna Burns’s Milkman.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A
