© The Author(s) 2021
A.-M. Evans, K. Kramer (eds.)Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination Literary Urban Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55961-8_15

15. ‘Our Native Reminiscence’: Clinging to ‘Lost Time’ in Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

Deirdre Flynn1  
(1)
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
 
 
Deirdre Flynn
Email: Deirdre.Flynn@mic.ul.ie

Bohane is a dystopian city of the future populated by residents who want to ‘reach again for the whimsical days of their youth and for the city as it was back then’ (Barry 2012, 178). Set in a city on the west coast of Ireland in 2053, Bohane is isolated from the ‘Nation Beyond’ by bogs where nostalgia seeps from the peat. The unknown past that brought this city to its present has created a digital-free dystopian future that is an uncanny multiple space, mixing steampunk with the Wild West, Americana with Irish ethnicity. Had the author, Kevin Barry, not pinpointed the year for this text, it would be difficult to locate this postmodern city in time. Yet Barry’s ‘reveal’ of the specific temporal setting of City of Bohane, simultaneously attempts to suspend the importance of the future for the functioning of the narrative: the story, he claims, could have easily been set in 1853 as 2053; time does not matter. What does matter are the ‘ever present’ ‘tiny fires’ that connect these people to each other, to the urban geography of Bohane (Barry 2012, 214). The layers of time, history, memory, and nostalgia in the Bohane cityspace are the invisible threads tying these people to their city. This chapter will discuss how, in this imagined future, the past haunts the urban space, shapes its present, and determines its future, and how nostalgia makes this dystopia a pseudo-utopian simulacrum for its residents. Never mentioning the trauma that ended the utopic days of ‘lost time’, the residents in Bohane have created a new space for memory and nostalgia out of their gothic and postmodern present.

Published in 2011, during the economic austerity that followed the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger, City of Bohane is Kevin Barry’s first novel. Set in the near future, this dockland, working-class urban space is recovering from an unexplained collapse that has left it in limbo, without modern technology or access to fossil fuels. The unnamed crisis generates nostalgia for the past, and seems to keep the city in a state of paralysis, stuck in a cycle of perpetual violence. Residents describe their longing to get back to the ‘lost time’ before that undisclosed phenomenon, and often watch old CCTV footage of the city as it was. The story follows the ageing Logan Hartnett as he starts to lose his grip on a city built on violence and nostalgia. When his old rival the Gant Broderick returns after 25 years, the gangs of Bohane prepare for a fight to decide who will have control of the city. This chapter will explore how Barry’s use of gothic and postmodern tropes mirrors the fallout from the collapse of the Celtic Tiger in 2008.

In Gothic , Fred Botting explains that gothic forms are constantly being reinvented, especially in that interplay with postmodernity and the ‘the accompanying freedoms of consumerist, corporate, creative and post-industrial orders’ (2014, 14). In Bohane, gothic and postmodern forms have merged in order to allow a discussion of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland coming to terms with the economic crash of 2008. Gothic postmodernism represents an ‘even darker vision of contemporary existence’ (Beville 2009, 99). This heterogeneous mix, like the city itself, takes elements of Lyotard’s eclecticism (1992, 8) and the uncanny gothic city best described by Maria Beville or Julian Wolfreys (2008, 168–180):

Focusing on the city as a plural space, a complex of hidden and liminal sites, the city in postmodernist literature is effectively presented as a ghostly locus of the uncanny: decentred, fragmented and defined by the otherness encountered in the crowd and in the simulacra of signs that swarm our field of perception. (Beville 2013, 14)

The ‘plural space’ threatens a radical decentring of spatial and temporal relations, lost in the multiple references, and the swarm of streets. It can be hard to situate City of Bohane in a definite geography, time, or even genre, as Mark Hamill of The New York Times notes in his review calling it an ‘Icelandic saga welded to a ballad of the American West’ (Hamill 2012). The labyrinthine streets of Bohane become unsettling and decentring as the residents ‘hark back’ ‘to particular phases in the evolution of the self’ (Freud 1919, 10), ‘time becomes loose’ (Barry 2012, 60). This ‘unheimlich place’ is what Freud would call ‘the entrance to the former heim [home] […] to the place where everyone dwelt once upon a time and in the beginning’ (Freud 1919, 15). This is a city haunted by the past, the spectres of which are on every street. Obsessed with nostalgia and tradition the residents of Bohane are stuck in Derrida’s ‘spectral moment’ in a timeless space that ‘no longer belongs to time’ (Derrida 1994). This nostalgia and tradition spectrally tie the city to the past, and deconstruct the concept of time.

Consequently, as Ferdinand Lion says, ‘Whoever sets foot in a city feels caught up as in a web of dreams, where the most remote past is linked to the events of today. One house allies with another, no matter what period they come from, and a street is born’ (Lion , qtd. in Benjamin 1999, 435). This makes Bohane difficult to define and locate, neither dystopian nor utopian, and yet not a heterotopia. As Maria Mianowski says Bohane is ‘a paradoxical place, at once futuristic, neo-western, and more retro-oriented than techno-oriented, since the characters use none of the technology that characterises the beginning of the twenty-first century’ (Mianowksi 2017, 97). The lack of technology in the text adds to the malleability of temporal location of Bohane.

The Gothic and the postmodern are in conversation here, as the residents come to terms with a trauma they do not wish to talk about. This trauma has decentred them and their interaction with time and space in the city becomes a negotiation between past and present, history and memory, time and space. The text demonstrate the ‘confusion, loss, doubling and iterable fragmentation, disorientation, anxiety’ (Wolfreys 2010, 4) of the urban gothic and the ‘labyrinthine enigma that metaphorically stands in for the dizzying plurality of contemporary urban living’ of the postmodern cityscape (Bentley 2014, 175). Time is ‘coming back to haunt’ the residents of Bohane, who have buried the memories of the trauma that ended the ‘lost time’ in true postmodern and Gothic style (Gomel 2010).

The Isolated City, Migration, and the ‘Celtic Tiger’

Isolated from the rest of Ireland, Bohane is surrounded by bog land. It stands apart from many dystopian visions of the city: that of the ecumenopolis, or the technology-saturated, or the completely alone. Jeremy Tambling considers Bohane ‘something amorphous’ and resisting representation (2016, vii). Despite being ‘isolated’, the city still communicates with Ireland, bound by their laws and the recipient of their financial aid. The rest of Ireland is called the ‘Nation Beyond’ or ‘NB’ for short. As a result, Bohane does not fulfil the criteria of the ecumenopolis, the world-wide city, best described by C.A. Doxiadis (2005, 189–206). Between Bohane and the Nation Beyond lie the bogs of Big Nothin’, a metaphorical wall of nostalgia that insulates and isolates Bohane. To the residents, the peat preserves memories and hides secrets. Yet, Bohane is also a global city, filled with people from across the world who choose isolation. Its global inhabitants feel a sense of identity that sets them apart from those who do not live there. As a result, as Maebh Long points out, the residents of Bohane, regardless of origin, feel no connection to anything outside their city and bog:

A city of streetwalkers, a neo-noir urban hell […] Bohane’s isolation renders it an aggressively independent frontier city, and its inhabitants treat those from Haiti and Tipperary as equally foreign. (Long 2015, 3)

This is a city of multiplicities and clashes between cultural and chronological references populate the urban space. Bohane becomes a plural space that at once is foreign and recognisable, a mixture of past and present.
The multi-ethnic mix of Bohane is reminiscent of Celtic Tiger Ireland, a period of exponential economic growth that started in the mid-1990s and lasted until the (Global) financial crash in 2008. The term ‘Celtic Tiger’ deliberately compares the ‘size and scale [of Ireland’s economic growth] to that experienced by the Tiger economies of South East Asia’ (Smyth and Liverpool John Moores University 2012, 132). Low unemployment, foreign investment, and unprecedented growth meant that Ireland was ranked as one of the richest countries in the world, and during this period inward migration increased exponentially. By the year 2000, 188 different nationalities lived in Ireland and in 2006 alone over 100,000 inward migrants were recorded (Fanning and Munck 2011, intro). In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there has been a 240% increase in the number of foreign-born people residing in Ireland (McIvor & Spangler 2014, 5). Prior to the Celtic Tiger ‘from 1990 to 1994, Ireland was the only Member State with a negative net migration rate’; however, ‘by 2007, Ireland had the third highest migration rate across the 27 EU Member States’ (Ruhs and Quinn 2009). According ‘The Globalization Index’ (Foreign Policy/AT Kearney Inc.), Ireland was the most globalised society in the world in 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004 (Singapore was ranked first in 2001). Passing through the streets of Bohane in 2053 is this mix of ethnicities and cultures. It becomes an uncanny reminder of the huge inward migration that occurred during the Celtic Tiger era:

Yes and here they came, all the big-armed women and all the low-sized butty fellas. Here came the sullen Polacks and the Back Trace crones. Here came the natty Africans and the big lunks of bog-spawn polis. Here came the pikey blow-ins and the washed-up Madagascars. Here came the women of the Rises down the 98 Steps to buy tabs and tights and mackerel—of such combinations was life in the flatblock circles sustained. Here came the Endeavour Avenue suits for a sconce at ruder life. The Smoketown tushies were between trick-cycles and had crossed the footbridge to take joe and cake in their gossiping covens. The Fancy-boy wannabes swanned about in their finery and tip-tapped a rhythm with their clicker’d heels. (Barry 2012, 31)

This is a vibrant cityscape filled with colour, with culture, with life, with memories. And while Barry has said this story could easily have been set in 1853 or 2053, it is hard to imagine this city in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, as inward migration before 1960, and even until 1994, was miniscule and emigration at an all-time high.1

Ireland was one of the hardest hits by the global economic collapse that followed the Celtic Tiger. During the austerity that followed, politicians tried to apportion blame on everyone, with then finance Minister Brian Lenihan telling RTE’s Primetime that ‘we all partied’ during the corrupt and wealthy days of the Celtic Tiger (Primetime 2010). The disjunction between the lived experience of citizens and that of those in power is similar to the rift between Bohane and the Nation Beyond. In Bohane, their ‘lost time’ offers a further disconnect: a trauma that has left time out of joint, as the present and the ‘lost time’ are unsettled. The collapse has changed the cityscape, and the Nation Beyond. The residents have experienced what Gerry Smyth calls an ‘extreme assault’ on their identity because of the Celtic Tiger and the subsequent recession (Smyth and Liverpool John Moores University 2012, 134). What emerges from this ‘lost time’ and the trauma that ended it is a multiplicitous city, a plural space that has turned to nostalgia and rose-tinted memories in order to deal with this melancholic loss.

In her discussion of Irish recession literature, Molly Slavin suggests that there is a ‘lens of melancholia’ on post-crash fiction because of this grief at the loss of the promises of the Celtic Tiger: ‘public, shared, but unnamed, unconscious, and unspecified grief’ (Slavin 2017). In City of Bohane, this grief, this loss, seems to seep from the bog that surrounds the city, as if this ‘unnamed’ grief was buried in the peat. The past becomes as Marie Mianowski points out ‘an underground force contaminating the present, just as the landscape contaminates the character’ (2017, 102). This repressed trauma is an element of the Bohane taint that haunts the streets of the city and the people that live there. The collapse of the Celtic Tiger had a huge impact on Irish society, not just economically, leading to years of recession and austerity, but Irish identity was altered by what Gerry Smyth describes as ‘the return of the real with a vengeance’ when the reality of the ‘momentous, ignominious fall’ hit home: ‘The levels of corruption, ignorance, incompetence and sheer stupidity that precipitated economic disaster shocked everyone’ (Smyth and Liverpool John Moores University 2012, 134–135).

Utopia versus Dystopia

Lieven Ameel suggests that the city is often seen as opposite of utopia, where order does not take hold (2016, 785). At the same time, Ameel adds that ‘utopian environments are typically located in a more or less inaccessible place, distanced from the reader in terms of place and time […] in a distant past or future’ (2016, 786). Bohane is a city distanced from the Nation Beyond and as a result of its uncanny cityscape, and chronological uncertainty, the reader is also decentred. Bohane has its own specific rules and an order that may make little sense to those ‘unfortunate enough not to come from this place’ (Barry 2012, 148). These rules are similar to what Ameel describes as a rigid and immobile social form necessary for a utopia or a ‘harmonious society’ (Ameel 2016, 791–794). On the other hand, Bohane could just as easily fit into Latham and Hicks discussion of the dystopian city in literature from the second half of the nineteenth century. This ‘dystopia version’ of the city, they say, depicted ‘baleful imaginary societies in which cities themselves feature as the main symbols of negative possibility, as spaces of oppression, blight and ruin’ (Latham and Hicks 2014, 163). They claim that these ‘grim ominous visions’ now outnumber any ‘rosier alternatives’ (Latham and Hicks 2014, 167). The Nation Beyond sees Bohane as a dystopian violent urban outlier. Marie Mianowski also shares this view and sees the style Barry uses as symbolic of that:

Through the use of montage, pastiche and parody, the ambiguous narrative voice creates a literary space that fails to name the loss that the post Celtic Tiger generation deeply laments, and draws instead a kind of dystopic aporia where denaturalisation and degeneration prevail, hence confiscating any possibility of thinking out the future. (2017, 98–99)

Mianowski is correct in her description of Bohane as a post Celtic Tiger literary space, dealing with the consequences of the crash; however, the lament that the residents of Bohane feel is for nostalgia, for memories of a pre-crash state. They love their isolated urban aporia. A postmodern contradiction, Bohane is their utopia: a melancholic simulacrum based on the ‘lost time’. Their identity is dependent on this past, and the violent history of the city is integral to their present. As we are told early on in the novel, violence is fundamental to their attachment to the city: ‘it is a fond tradition in Bohane that families from the Northside Rises will butt heads against families from the Back Trace’ (Barry 2012, 5). Even if the faces of those in charge change (Gant, Logan, Jenni), Bohane’s destiny is marked out. Nostalgia is something they can depend on, unlike the economic bubble that brought about the crash. Dystopia and utopia are intertwined in this urban space.
From the perspective of the Nation Beyond, Bohane is a dystopian mess. In the city, the Bohane Authority are fearful of how the violent outbreaks will impact funding from the Nation Beyond. The city’s violent reputation precedes it but the violence is part of a tradition; it becomes a performance of nostalgia, and a public declaration of their urban identity:
‘SBJ wept! As if our fuckin’ name wasn’t bad enough!
‘Oh those bastards outside in the Nation Beyond will be laughin’ up their sleeves tonight!’
‘It’s the end of a Beauvista tram!’
‘Think the NB tit was gone witchy on us b’fore? It’ll be witchy on us now mos’ certain!’
‘Ne’er a sign o’ Mr Mannion, nah?’
‘They’re at it again! That’s what they’ll all be sayin’! One half o’ Bohane tryin’ to ate the other half!’ (Barry 2012, 156)
From the outside, beyond the nostalgia-steeped bogs, Bohane is perceived as a dystopian city. The Nation Beyond reprimands Bohane financially for its behaviour. Yet as the Bohane Authority discuss the violence, they know that trying ‘to keep the place in some manner civilised’ was not an easy task, because violence is a vital component of Bohane identity (Barry 2012, 156). Throughout the novel, the residents rely on traditions that come from the ‘lost time’ to define their identity, like the whistle that blows and marks the start of the feud:

The whistle was a plain melody that rose once and then fell, that was melancholy, that was sourced from the lost-time in Bohane, that had a special power to it—a power that I cannot even begin to explain to those of you unfortunate enough not to come from this place. (Barry 2012, 148)

Like the whistle that has its own power because of its link to tradition, their need for violence is unexplainable to those not from the city. The Nation Beyond will never understand, because they see this place as a dystopia; Bohane natives see themselves as fortunate. This is their utopia, based on a Baudrilliardian simulacrum of the city before the ‘lost time’. They are re-creating Bohane as it was, through nostalgia , tradition, and isolation.

Memory

In Ireland, the decade 2010–2020 marks a number of important centenaries, including the 1913 Union Lockout, the Easter Rising of 1916, and women’s suffrage in 1918. How Ireland chooses to remember these events has been an important debate over the decade. Emilie Pine, in her work on Irish memory, has said that decoding and analysing the trauma and these memories is vital:

What has been uncovered in the process are events and subjects of national importance, including the traumas of child abuse, the pain of emigration, and the legacy of conflict. These recovered memories—both of the individual and the collective past—are problematic, and the question remains of how to reconcile them with the present. (Pine 2011, 2)

The residents of Bohane face a similar problem, how to reconcile their past with their present. The collective past of the city, which experienced the trauma that ended the ‘lost time’, is a shared memory that is insulated by their outlying bog. It is also a selective memory, captured and archived in their CCTV system, offering glimpses of life from before the trauma that they do not discuss. Through controlling this visual reproduction of life before ‘lost time’, the anonymous narrator has an important role: curating collective memory. Men and women who want to ‘reach again for the whimsical days of their youth and for the city as it was back then’ frequent the ‘Ancient and Historical Bohane Film Society’ (Barry 2012, 178). Here, they watch old silent footage as far back to the 1930s of the streets of the city, while an old 78 plays on the turntable at the narrator’s office. As Long suggests, Barry’s narrator is a collector of ‘memories and desires’ ‘who assembles the past through his possessions’ offering the people ‘a directly visual access to the past though his security tapes, and operates as an amalgamation of flâneur , who walks by and with the people of the crowd’ (Long 2015, 13). He allows them to virtually walk through the streets of old and encourages that melancholic ‘taint’ of nostalgia so present in Bohane. This is their form of commemoration, a curated, personalised visual reproduction of the past before the crash. Pine suggests that ‘memory is thus perceived as more accessible as well as more intimate, and for these reasons remembrance culture frames itself in terms of memory as opposed to history’ (Pine 2011, 6). Bohane’s residents are not looking for history, but memory that feeds their nostalgia, aligning themselves with Irish remembrance culture from the decade of commemoration.

This also coincides with public feeling during the Celtic Tiger era: a sense that Ireland needed to look away from the past and look forward. As Gerry Smyth points out, ‘During the lifetime of the Tiger itself there was much talk in all walks of Irish life about ‘new times’, about the necessity of orienting the nation towards the future rather than towards the past’ (Smyth and Liverpool John Moores University 2012, 135). However, with the onset of the crash, this was reversed and there was a move towards commemoration and remembrance, assisted by the onset of the decade of commemoration. The residents of Bohane have turned to the past after their ‘lost time’ trauma, using an eclectic nostalgia to define identity and stabilise a sense of place.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is the Bohane ‘taint’: something residents are addicted to. Those that have left say they feel the call of the taint calling them back. Barry tells us that nostalgia ‘was a many-hooked lure’ in Bohane and that Gant Broderick, who has recently returned from England ‘had fallen victim to our native reminiscence’ (Barry 2012, 60). As he walks to see Macu, a woman he had a three-week relationship with over 25 years ago, the Bohane nostalgia takes a hold of him: ‘[h]e could not settle. The level of drooling lust was unspeakable. Nostalgia was off the fucking charts’ (Barry 2012, 129). The nostalgia seems to come from the peat bogs, and Old Mannion thinks that these bogs hide much of the history of the city. He is fearful that cutting away the bogs will uncover these painful memories, unearth problematic traumatic experiences that have remained hidden:

These times, the city of Bohane was powered largely on its turf, and the bog had been cut away and reefed everywhere. Who knew what passages to its underworld had been disturbed? The bog’s occult nature had been interfered with, its body left scarred, its wounds open, and might this also be a source of the Bohane taint? (Barry 2012, 116)

The scars are open and obvious, and seem to be causing this taint: a curse left waiting to be filled, decoded, and analysed. Like the decade of commemorations, these scars ask how traumatic legacy should be remembered. The people of Bohane, like Old Mannion, do not want to uncover this past; they want to mine selective memories. In passages inflected with Gothic tropes, the residents dig up the bog and burn it, unearthing the physiological taint underneath, harking back to Siobhan Kilfeather’s morselised bodies, to the Irish obsession with the past detailed in Hand.2 Yet as Oona Frawley points out, ‘Irish literature’s keen involvement with nature landscape, and man’s interaction with that landscape can be read, then, as a verbal charting of not only the physical but also the social landscape’ (Frawley 2005, 268). Barry, either consciously or playfully, writing this novel just after the crash, mirrors the social landscape of Ireland at the time.
Nostalgia plays a vital role for the residents of Bohane in 2053, and for the Irish during the decade of commemoration. It becomes, as Frawley points out, about ‘the preservation of the past. In allowing the past, by way of memory and longing, to filter in to the present, nostalgia serves to bridge the two effectively; allowing an individual, or even an entire generation, to adapt to change’ (Frawley 2005, 270). Nostalgia allows the residents of Bohane to bridge time, to easily pass from ‘lost time’ to present day without having to engage with the trauma that connects it. The Bohane Authority hopes that the ‘lost time’ might with the years that passed fade into less painful memory (Barry 2012, 157). However, the residents cannot avoid the taint of nostalgia, the dreams of days during the lost time. Nostalgia calls them back. For Gant Broderick, like Old Mannion, too much reminiscing about the ‘lost time’ is dangerous, like cutting away the bog and uncovering the past, it requires caution:
‘I was drawn back to the lost-time,’ the Gant said.
‘And did you find it a dangerous place to linger?’ Big Dom showed his skill.
‘Yeah,’ said the Gant. ‘It’s too sweet back there.’
Big D thinking: headline LOST-TIME TOO SWEET FOR THE LINGERING. (Barry 2012, 200)
The newspaper is one of the methods of curating these memories and the ‘the most popular and prestigious column’ in the paper is ‘All Our Yesterdays’:

It was penned by Dominick himself, in a limpid and melancholy prose, and its stock was reminiscence and anecdotes of the Bohane lost-time. It appeared—twenty-seven inches of nine-point type over three column drops—in the Thursday evening edition, and the queue for it formed early outside the paper’s office and snaked far down the streets of the New Town. (Barry 2012, 196)

In order to deal with the trauma, the residents turn to nostalgia, tradition, and curated memories for a sense of stability. The past is where they find a true sense of their identity. This is the reason the Gant returns to Bohane. It is here he feels at home. The old Bohane, and his memories of the past and its people, draw him back to this city stuck in the past. By returning, Gant hopes he can reclaim some of this former glory. By returning to his past, while in the present, he will make his past a reality once more. He has not only fallen for nostalgia but also for selected memories from his past, in particular a simulacrum of a former girlfriend. Both are impossible to get to in this Baudrillardian representation of reality. When his ex-girlfriend, now 43, confronts Gant, he cannot look upon the reality of the present. He meets Macu in person for the first time in 25 years and he is afraid to look on her present corporeality: ‘Every word that spilled from her spun him back to the lost-time. It was better if he didn’t look at her—better to let the dream persist’ (Barry 2012, 142). By acknowledging that the time has passed, he acknowledges that the trauma has happened, and therefore must confront that trauma. When the past and the present collide, he sees it ‘with migraine intensity—that their time was gone […] She was no longer what he needed or wanted. Reality infected him with its sourness and truth’ (Barry 2012, 145).
As Barry said in an interview, ‘the people are preoccupied with the past. It’s a very Irish thing. The romance of Bohane is a romance with the lost-time’ (Mills 2013, np). Hand claims there is a sense that the Irish are ‘unable to move on, debilitated and held back […] In Irish life and culture, this has led to a constant debate—battle even—concerning the past and its significance in the present’ (Hand 2002, 25). What the residents of Bohane are doing, by turning to the past, is representative of a common Irish response to an Irish trauma, as Oona Frawley explains:

In the face of a changing or threatened social structure, place and nature can be conceived of as a steady and unaltered realm beyond the reaches of the fluctuating culture, and it is for this reason that I believe Irish literature so frequently uses the natural world as a site for nostalgia. (Frawley 2005, 270)

In the face of a changing world, Bohane stays the same because it focuses on the past, because it avoids and ignores the trauma. As Gant has come to realise, reality is full of sourness and truth and to be avoided at all cost. The residents must answer the call of nostalgia because it is, as Frawley describes, steady and unaltered when it is curated. As a result, the bog lands of Big Nothin’ hold a mystery for them. The bog becomes a receptacle for remembrance, a landscape that can contain and absorb an image of a city that is unattainable, a simulacrum. When Gant speaks with Dominick from the Bohane Vindicator newspaper they speak ‘at length’ about the ‘lost time’: ‘They talked of the great feeling for it that had drawn Gant to the creation once more. They talked of those who had passed, and of how their spirits persisted yet and carried always on the air of the city (or lingered, maybe, away yonder on the bog plain)’ (Barry 2012, 198). The ‘lost time’ is unattainable, but continues to haunt the present. The spectres in the streets are not just names and references but the spirits of the dead. As Barry has told us ‘in the Bohane creation, time comes loose, there is a curious fluidity, the past seeps into the future, and the moment itself as it passes is the hardest to grasp’ (Barry 2012, 60). Past and present merge here in this city.
The Gothic expectation of the bogs of Big Nothin’ allows Logan to use them as a site of possibility. He plays on the superstitions of the residents of Bohane to assist with the control of the city. Knowing that the violence that has erupted needs to be contained, in order for the city to fulfil its cycle of violence and unstable peace, he stages a sighting of the Sweet Baba Jay, their semi-catholic religious icon. The local butcher kidnaps a 12-year-old Norrie3 girl and carves ‘a pair of clover-shaped stigmata’ into her hands (Barry 2012, 192). Knowing the power, the bog holds with residents, Logan tells her:

‘You were drawn to Big Nothin’,’ he said. ‘You felt a strange drag from the bog plain. Something brought you to the High Boreen—it was a particular star in the sky, a bright, bright star. And then, upon a high knoll … do you know what a knoll is, Little Cuse?’[…] ‘And the goat spoke to you, Little Cuse. But as he spoke to you, it was the words of the Sweet Baba you heard, y’check me?’ (Barry 2012, 192)

By April, images of the Sweet Baba Jay appear across the city, keeping the residents of the Northside Rises, and further afield, busy with miracles and prayer. The bog allows the utopian existence to continue. Not only does it isolate it from the rest of the nation, it also hides their secrets and exerts a power over the city that can be exploited to maintain their contradictory utopia.

Ancient and Historical Bohane Film Society

The anonymous narrator’s film society is crucial to Bohane because as an act of curation. As the curator, archivist, and a Bohane resident he cannot but be biased. He knows how to choose the accompanying music to the silent film to create the most sentimental effect: ‘an old 78 on the turntable I keep by the projector […] It was a slow-moving calypso burner that gave a lovely sadness, I felt, to the scenes it worked with’ (Barry 2012, 192). He knows that this viewing is steeped in nostalgia, and he wants to accentuate that the ‘lost’ in ‘lost time’. His curation, in this instance, ‘produces as much as it records the event’ (Derrida 1995, 17). His decision to show certain memories rather than others can be understood as what Maunther and Gárdos call non-innocent practices (2015, 155). Just as Logan harnesses the bog to control the city, the narrator curates what memories the residents see. Yet his choices are not impartial: he has favourite reels and scenes:

I picked a favourite compendium; a really lovely reel. It shows the snakebend roll of Dev Street, deep in the bustle and glare of the lost-time, at night, with the darting of the traffic as it rolled then—ah, the white-tyred slouch-backs, the fat Chaparelles, the S’town cruisers—and the crowds milling outside the bars, the stags and the hens, and it was a different world, so glaringly lit. (Barry 2012, 180)

The narrator is aware that he is prejudiced in his selection, that he uses the selection to ‘produce’ or enhance sentiment with his ‘favourite compendium’. He exercises his control over not only the archive, but also the memories shared with the residents, helping to define their collective memory of the ‘lost time’.
While the taint may emanate from the bogs of Big Nothin’, it is accentuated by the curation of the archive. In their work on archive and memory, Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook challenge the notion that archives are passive. They suggest that archives have the ability to control the past, and the archivist becomes a storyteller, wielding ‘enormous power’ (Schwartz and Cook 2002, 13). As a result, they posit the archive is a fundamental way in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, and therefore we have to be cognisant of the power of the archive (Schwartz and Cook 2002, 1):

Archives—as records—wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity, over how we know ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies. And ultimately, in the pursuit of their professional responsibilities, archivists—as keepers of archives—wield power over those very records central to memory and identity formation through active management of records before they come to archives, their appraisal and selection as archives, and afterwards their constantly evolving description, preservation, and use . (Schwartz & Cook 2002, 2)

As readers we must wary of what the archivist is presenting to us, how he represents the city, and its past. The narrator/archivist’s editorial choices are important, because he is responsible for maintaining the simulacrum, the image of Bohane that is unattainable, represented and re-presented in the reels he maintains. He preserves this image of Bohane, one that he himself believes in, that calls to him too:

This different world also calls to him I was as always drawn into it, I was put under a spell by the roll and carry of the Dev Street habituees. If all had changed in Bohane, the people had not, and would never:

That certain hip-swing.

That especially haughty turn-of-snout.

That belligerence. (Barry 2012, 180)

This version of Bohane helps to maintain the residents’ obsession with nostalgia. It curates their present, and while as Emilie Pine notes, ‘cultural artefacts, such as photographs, are useful ways of illuminating history’, we must note that ‘they are only ever representations, versions of the actual event’ (Pine 2011, 2).

Although set in the future (2053), Bohane is stuck in the past, exhibiting a conditional memory that is maintained through careful maintenance of its memories. The newspaper, the bog, and the narrator all work in conjunction to preserve and maintain a simulacrum of Bohane’s ‘lost time’ through nostalgia and tradition. The residents become obsessed with the ‘lost-time’ limiting them to a present based on something they can never achieve. They see their city as utopic, as they strive to endlessly repeat tradition, rather than confront the trauma that has created this technology-free present. Their future is dependent on re-living a time that is lost.