Jan Carson - “Maybe the whole of Northern Ireland should have gone to therapy”
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
for something completely different. Jan Carson, good morning. Good morning. How are you?
I'm here and I'm awake. It was an early start from Belfast this morning, but the sun is really helping Derby.
It is really, doesn't it? It just makes a huge difference.
People are smiling out there today for the first time in ages.
For a while, it just seemed as if it It was like never ending, Rhian. But no, it's great. It is really, really good. And look, we're here to chat about your latest novel, Few and Forbidding. It is another brilliant take, Jan Carson, on Northern Ireland, where we both come from. And what strikes me, having read it, like a lot of your work, the book asks tough questions about the place where we're from. how we are dealing or not dealing with the trauma of the past. But it's set around a very, very modern dilemma, which is Lockney.
Yeah. I mean, Lockney, listening to you going through the papers, it was in the papers at home last week, the blue-green algae outbreak is back again for another summer. And it's an ecological crisis that we're facing up there.
Sometimes I think, when I'm here, I think people might see it spotted in a pub quiz.
What is Jan Carson's latest novel about?
What is it? But it's the largest inland lake in the UK and it is facing this huge ecological crisis. And, you know, when you speak to writers, sometimes they say their book started with a what if. And this was very much the case for this book.
Yeah, it's got a really interesting Genesis story, this one. I was on residency in France and had hit up against a wall where the writing just wasn't happening. On another book? Yeah, on another book. When a friend sent me an email and the subject line was, this sounds like something you might want to write about, which you often get what I would call helpful friends that give you stories and they're rarely very good. But this was a clipping from an article about Terence O'Neill's plan in 1958 to drain Loch Nye and turn it into the 7th County.
This is bizarre because the book blurs fact and fiction. I had to go back and check myself. Did this actually happen? But Terence O'Neill had a plan to turn the six counties into seven counties.
Seven counties. County Neagh. And County Neagh would have a commuter town in the middle of it. And as we know, O'Neill eventually did go on to build Craigavon, which became his commuter town. But originally he wanted it to be equidistant between Derry and Belfast. It's just this mad. And the plan was to either flood it or drain it.
Was that it?
Drain it. Yeah. So a lot of this from my research seems to be have been based on FDR's New Deal. So O'Neill was aware of the unemployment problems at that stage. And this would be a good way to get people back to work and also, you know, carve this extra county out of nothing really.
And that really is kind of what inspired it. But as you say, it is a blur between fact and fiction because there was a suggestion that there were islands, small islands.
Yeah, so I began to do some research and obviously you couldn't fully drain Loch Nye because it rains so much in the north, which you'll know having grown up there. And the rain all runs into Loch Nye, so you could drain it, but it would fill up again. But I very quickly found these topographical maps which showed these elevated pieces of land just under the surface of the water. And actually, the Victorians did partially drain Loch Nye three times, most notably in 1880 in the shepherd's scheme. And I talked to someone whose grandfather actually remembered this like archipelago of little islands appearing when the Victorians drained the Loch, which is, you know, it's real and it's not real and it's liminal.
And it's so interesting to me.
And obviously just gave such a rich tapestry for your imagination to go into. Before I go into the book and its setting. Can I bring you back? I do want to talk about you and your setting because your background, your upbringing informs so much of your work. I sometimes call you the North Whisperer because you channel so much about where we come from.
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