First Impressions on the Narrator

    First off, I wonder if Prya doesn’t have some particular interest in narrator, as this is the third book that does something interesting with the narrator. The first, “Cracking India” gave us this split adult/child non-fiction-based narrator. The second, “Out of Place,” was a memoir with the central character as scholarly narrator, but lacked, for the most part, the intimacy of a memoir, held at arm’s length as we were as readers. And finally, we get this anonymous, but seemingly incongruously, intimate narrator. Why anonymous? Is it to suggest that this narrator’s experience is not unique and that s/he and family could be substituted for any other Irish family?
    The narrator of “Reading in the Dark” reminds me of the narrator in “Cracking India” in that it is this split child/adult narrator. However, in “Reading in the Dark” I hear the adult in the child narrator’s recollections not through blatantly stated judgments as in “Cracking India,” but rather in the selection and shaping of the presentation of the child’s memories. Overall, Deane keeps the language simpler (there are no globules here) and presents the child’s memories as the child would remember them, in the simple things, like the shoes gathered around the table the night his little sister died:
    “I recognized Uncle Manus’s brown shoes: the heels were worn down and he was
    moving back and forward a little. Uncle Dan and Uncle Tom had identical shoes,
    heavy and rimed with mud and cement, because they had come from the building
    site in Creggan. Dan’s shoes were dirtier, though, because Tom was the foreman.
    But they weren’t good shoes” (Feet, pg. 13).
By choosing to share this childhood recollection the adult narrator tells readers that this was a family crisis, as even the men were crying. And that Irishmen were in this together, because no matter what your station, foreman or grunt, you were all still equally fucked. 
    So in “Reading in the Dark” we get this extremely self-conscious narrator, as in “Out of Place,” where Said was obviously conscious of his position and notoriety in the literary world as he shaped his memoir. However, in “Reading in the Dark” it is not the adult who primarily tells the story, but rather an adult sharing his childhood memories as if s/he were there again. Thus, there is none of the verbal posturing of Sidhwa’s “Cracking India.”
    In fact, the narrator shares the “theory” behind the construction of his story by showing us a simple childhood scene that profoundly impacted the narrator as a writer. The narrator described the puffed up tale he intended to share with his classmates to the one about a boy and his mother patiently waiting for a weary-worn father to come home for a quiet supper and evening repose. Though the narrator acquiesces the superiority of the latter over the former, he can’t resist pointing out that the underbelly of his classmate’s simple tale has to be told by someone, hence, the adult-side of the narrator, which is necessary to point out the hidden subtexts in the child narrator’s experiences. 
    So without directly saying it, like Said did in the opening of “Out of Place,” Seamus’s narrator enters into a contract with us, explaining the “why” behind the split narrator, as Sidhwa did not. Each choice produced a different effect. Sidhwa perhaps wanted her readers to fell discombobulated and distorted as her narrator’s identity was cracked, but Seamus seems to wants us to trust his narrator, as if he were inviting us to be co-conspirators.