The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson

Author:Ciaran Carson [Carson, Ciaran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838933661
Publisher: Head of Zeus

1 Both Dinneen and Mc Cionnaith were Jesuit priests, and their training in dialectical oratory and moral taxonomy must have stood them in good stead in the field of lexicography.

2 Another clergyman, the Rev. Cobham Brewer, Ll. D., though of what denomination I do not know, but from a reading of other entries, notably that for ‘Catholic Church’, I would strongly suspect him to be High Church of England.

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY REDEEMER

If Odd Man Out suggests that Belfast is a universal city, I cannot help but see bits of Belfast everywhere. Berlin, Warsaw, Tallinn, New York, to name some, have Belfast aspects; and recently, in Paris for the first time, I picked up this book of photographs that I want to explore, since its various grisailles remind me of the light of Belfast, or rather, a remembered light, since the bulk of the images date from the period 1947–51.

The photographs, by Willy Ronis, are of the Belleville-Ménilmontant district. Beautifully composed and contemplated, they simultaneously reveal and withhold. No. 41, Devant l’église Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix, place de Ménilmontant, for example, is a baroque conundrum, signalled initially by that preposition ‘devant’ (in front of). Devant: yet more than half of the picture is taken up by what looks like a side-chapel of the main church, whose tower and the first stage of its spire make up the background; either that, or two churches coexist in an unlikely contiguity. I look at it again; perhaps there are two different establishments. The texture of the light suggests an intervening space, as it parallels the buttresses and window-columns, fading in defined verticals back from the viewer or the lens, till the dimmed tower and spire seem to hover in another recessed realm.

Below this architectural enigma is a horizontal frieze formed by the back-yard wall of a shop or dwelling whose gable end is the left-hand frame; poised against the wall, in various conversational clichés, a minor Bayeux of characters; the rest of the foreground is occupied by a big black motor-vehicle resembling a limousine or bus, or hearse. Its roof is covered in flowers: the scene, it would appear, is of a wedding and a funeral, the wedding confirmed by the sunlit presence of a woman wearing brilliant white among the small throng of guests. She has a white jacket on, chaplet, veil, just-below-the-knee-length skirt, white, sling-backed, wedge-heeled shoes. She cradles a bouquet of white flowers in her left arm.

Although I must have stared into this photograph for some hours, off and on, it is only now that I’ve been able to resolve the problematic Rorschach blot draped against the flowers on the roof of the vehicle. One could interpret it as a black flag, or shroud; but it is, in fact, a man, his rump strained towards us and his head invisible, as he stoops to attend to the wreaths. Momentarily confused by this Charon phenomenon, I started, paradoxically, to doubt the hearse; perhaps it was, all the time, a wedding limousine, and the

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