Unanswered Questions: Ciaran Carson

This chapter examines themes of surveillance, uncertainty, identity, and political violence in the work of Ciaran Carson. If Carson's Belfast poems, written during the Northern Ireland Troubles, have something of a journalistic aspect, they also contain the motifs of surveillance and interrogation paired with uncertainty and doubt. Carson revisits some of these themes in three post-Troubles works. The mirroring sonnet sequences of For All We Know play with the archetypes of spy narrative. The poems are full of dressing up, disguising, cross-dressing, but when you take on a false identity, these poems ask, who are you then? What does uncertainty mean in the aftermath of conflict, when so many unanswered questions remain? And in the context of so many false witnesses, where might truth, or justice, be found? In The Pen Friend, both the realities and possibilities of collusion between security forces and paramilitaries during the Northern Ireland Troubles find an echo in the explosion at the heart of Carson’s novel. Finally, Exchange Place gives us a fantastical take on surveillance, uncertainty, and questions of identity, with a whiff of espionage, in a novel that leaves us, again, with unanswered questions.