The very scale of this novel, at 150 pages one of the shortest winners of the Booker prize, carries with it a lesson; that something small but exquisitely crafted and realised – a novella or the sympathetic display of a single significant object – can have just as much impact on an audience as something apparently weightier.
The protagonist, Tony, is a backward-looking character whose contemplations of history and memory frame the novel. The scope is deliberately narrow, focusing on his own life, past and disappointments, but the contemplations are expansive and deeper than they seem.
They look into the grey areas of our pasts, where facts and fictions, myths and memories, certainties and stories meet, merge and blur.
As we develop a new modern history gallery at the Ulster Museum, this novel resonates with me, particularly in terms of the nuances of contested history, in which there are no real winners or losers: “History isn’t the lies of the victors… it is the memories of survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”
It questions what history is. Memory? Experience? The misremembered past?
“What you end up remembering,” says Tony, “isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
His view of the past is a warning against accepting just one viewpoint, rather than expanding our horizons to absorb the views of others and allow for alternative histories and interpretations.
Hannah Crowdy is the interpretation manager at National Museums Northern Ireland and is the Museums Association’s Northern Ireland representative
The protagonist, Tony, is a backward-looking character whose contemplations of history and memory frame the novel. The scope is deliberately narrow, focusing on his own life, past and disappointments, but the contemplations are expansive and deeper than they seem.
They look into the grey areas of our pasts, where facts and fictions, myths and memories, certainties and stories meet, merge and blur.
As we develop a new modern history gallery at the Ulster Museum, this novel resonates with me, particularly in terms of the nuances of contested history, in which there are no real winners or losers: “History isn’t the lies of the victors… it is the memories of survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”
It questions what history is. Memory? Experience? The misremembered past?
“What you end up remembering,” says Tony, “isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
His view of the past is a warning against accepting just one viewpoint, rather than expanding our horizons to absorb the views of others and allow for alternative histories and interpretations.
Hannah Crowdy is the interpretation manager at National Museums Northern Ireland and is the Museums Association’s Northern Ireland representative
