Introduction

Construction of Identity in Northern Irish Novels 255
are aware of all the acronyms standing for unionist and nationalist groups but
when the OTG graffiti start appearing nobody knows what group is hiding behind
it. The letterings itself mean war, not only in their messages but also because it is a
war between the people painting them on the walls and “a civic-minded person”
(ibid. 22) who paints it over again. In the end one of Jake’s friends, Donal, comes
up with the theory that OTG stands for nothing: “I think it’s entirely random. It
could be any three letters of the alphabet. It doesn’t really matter what they are.
This is the city of the three-letter initial written on walls. I think someone’s satirizing
us” (ibid. 356). Apparently, the person responsible for the OTG’s just wants
to indicate the senselessness and insanity of the three-letter war and the Northern
Irish conflict in general, and this quite successfully.
The marching season becomes also visible in One by One in the Darkness. When
London-based Cate Quinn returns home to visit her family she cannot but notice
the Protestant messages on the outskirts of Antrim. Union Jacks and Ulster flags
announce the twelfth of July although it is only mid June and red, white and blue
coloured buntings are decorating the streets (Madden 6). Although two of the
three sisters have chosen to live in the city – Helen in Belfast and Cate in London
– all three of them consider the countryside as their true home. The city and the
country thus stand in clear contrast to each other, the one depicting the familiar
native land, the other one a place of estrangement and crisis. Helen for example
has not furnished her house in Belfast as she feels “no particular attachment” to it
(ibid. 24). Her home in the city serves more as a necessity, she never feels belonging
to Belfast at all. “She’d needed a roof over her head, there was no more to it
than that. […] She’d bought furniture and curtains in the same frame of mind in
which most people bought pints of milk and loaves of bread: she needed them”
(ibid. 24). Nevertheless her home in Belfast functions as a safety mode for Helen.
Her father being killed by Protestants in her uncle Brian’s house she has lost her
feeling of security and now welcomes “the sterility of the place in Belfast” where
no bitter memories accompany her (ibid. 44). “It was, psychically, a blank” (ibid.
44).
Belfast itself is depicted as a two-faced city. A friend of Helen’s, David, is expecting
a visit from his London boyfriend Steve. Being afraid that he will be disappointed
by the city David takes Steve only to the nice places that let Belfast
appear less harmful than it really is. So he shows him the Belfast Lough, the
Mournes and a nice pub in town (ibid. 56ff). On his second visit Steve gets to
know the real Belfast, however. “This time, when David collected him at the airport,
he didn’t drive into Belfast by the motorway, but went over the Divis mountain,
through Turf Lodge and then down the Falls Road, pointing out the heavily
fortified barracks” (ibid. 57). Steve even meets an army foot patrol, sees the Republican
murals in the lower Falls and the Loyalist murals in the Shankill area.
“The ‘Peace Line’, an ugly structure of corrugated iron and barbed wire, which
separated the two communities, apparently shocked Steve more than anything else