Introduction

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Melanie Swiatloch
he saw” (ibid. 58). Their trip is crowned by an army helicopter that watches over
the city. This is contrasted by the opening of the first chapter which states the
sisters’ true feeling about home:
Home was a huge sky; it was flat fields of poor land fringed with hawthorn
and alder. It was birds in flight; it was columns of midges like smoke in a
summer dusk. It was grey water; it was a mad wind; it was a solid stone
house where the silence was uncanny (ibid. 1).
That Belfast is not only a place of evil has been noted by Laura Pelaschiar, too.
She has observed that Belfast in the 1970s and the 1980s was “initially portrayed
as a home to alienation, confusion and violence” (Pelaschiar 117). She has realised
a change in the 1990s, however:
In the nineteen nineties Belfast has gradually become a new, fertile urban
location, no longer a place from which escape is necessary, but rather a
laboratory for opportunities, a post-modern place depicted as the only
space where it is possible to build and articulate a (post)national conscience,
the only location for any possible encyclopaedic, multivoiced and multiethnic
development of Northern society (ibid. 117).
A first indication that the North might not only be a place of melancholy is shown
in Where They Were Missed, too. Before entering the city Saoirse realises an unexpected
beauty of the Strangford Lough area around it:
It’s pretty, really pretty. When you think of the North you don’t think of it
as being pretty; you tend to think only of bombs and things like barbed
wire and concrete barriers in the rain, but here by the edge of the Lough is
one of the prettiest places I’ve seen (ibid. 223).
This postmodern pulsation is felt by Tigges, too, who describes McLiam Wilson’s
Eureka Street as “demotic” and with a breath of “postmodern flair” (Tigges 180).
That Belfast is no longer a place from which one wants to escape is also illustrated
by Jake and his friends. Except for Chuckie everyone has been away for some
time. Slat Sloane spent some years in Manchester. Donal Deasely was in Bayeux,
Bremen and Barcelona. Septic Ted experienced living in Scotland. Finally, Jake
was in America for several years before he went to London. Nevertheless, everybody
has returned to the old home: “They’d gone away, they’d come back. It used
to be that Northern Ireland’s diaspora was permanent, poor denuded Ireland. But
everyone had started coming back. Everyone was returning” (McLiam Wilson
141).
What all five of them experience is a certain attraction to Northern Ireland although
they all have seen the evils produced there. This sensation is also described
by Pelaschiar who argues that Belfast resembles a cage or a labyrinth, that is, a
place one wants to escape from but cannot do so. At the same time the city has a