Borderation: Fictions of the Northern Irish Border

This chapter examines the impact on recent Irish fiction of the border dividing British Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, ‘the most militarised border in the archipelago’. This border is deplored as a spatial heresy by Irish nationalists who envision a united Ireland, but defended as an orthodoxy by Unionists who insist on their political allegiance to the British state. This chapter compares two thrillers set in borderland territory, Eugene McCabe’s Victims and Benedict Kiely’s Proxopera, with Anna Burns’s deconstructed bildungsroman No Bones, set in Belfast. While McCabe’s and Kiely’s novellas rework the conventions of the Big House novel, with its traditional focus on domestic space, at once imprisoning and open to invasion, Burns shows how the border spreads division through the home, the city, and the mind, undermining the distinction between outside and inside, public strife and private madness.