Latest news with #GeorgeAllenby
The Guardian
30-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- The Guardian
Ghost Wedding by David Park review – a thought-provoking novel about the power of the past
Time is layered in Northern Irish writer David Park's latest novel. The past ever present, it underpins but also threatens to undermine the two protagonists. The story opens in present-day Belfast, with Alex, a man caught up in wedding plans. He loves his Ellie, but doesn't love all the fuss over venues and seating arrangements. The pair are paying a visit to the Manor House, a grand hotel outside the city; Ellie has her heart set on the boathouse by the lake for their reception, and wants Alex to feel the same excitement. This first chapter finds him distracted, though. Impatient with deadlines and invitations, but also keen just to be married; more specifically, to let go of his old life and his old pals from his single days. We're not told why, only that he is tired of 'all the pretences and games' and that marriage represents his 'best opportunity to loosen the connection'. Chapter two returns us to the same place but a century earlier. The Manor House is home to the Remingtons, and the lake and boathouse of Ellie's future dreams are as yet under construction, under the supervision of George Allenby. A young architect, George is also a veteran of the first world war. The fighting is not long over and he, too, would rather put his past behind him. But the lake excavation and the daily sight of his workers in the mud and rain is proving an awful reminder of the trenches. There, he was an officer; here he is once again in charge of men. George is sorely aware of their toiling, and the precarity of their employment set against the wealth of the Remingtons. George's employers are new money, and he finds himself embarrassed at their ambitions to pass as landed gentry. He knows the lake he is constructing is part of this: a charade doomed to failure. Returning to Alex, we find he is also uncomfortable in his work. He's employed by his father in property development. Regeneration in 21st-century Belfast provides riches for some, Alex included, but he sees those left behind, not least the tenants in the shopfronts his father lets out. Among them is a barber and a tattoo artist; Alex pays them visits as landlord, but strives to be more than that, to make human connections. So Ghost Wedding is about class and power as well as the past. This finds its best expression in George's story, in the relationship that develops between him and Cora, one of the Manor House maids. What starts as an allyship against the housekeeper – and against the awful Remington Junior – soon becomes more than that, with Cora visiting George at the cottage in the grounds where he is billeted. She's a gift to him – and to the book. Her sharpness is beguiling, as are her appetites, her humour, her determined independence. Park is one of those rare and precious male writers – like Roddy Doyle, like Colum McCann, who have both championed his work – who write women well. Park describes George falling for Cora extremely well too. Will this love prove impossible? It's beautifully drawn and perfectly chosen for a novel that wants its characters – and readers – to see beyond boundaries. Above all, Park wants us to look beyond the now: beyond 'the calendar on the kitchen wall that pretends to control the space of days wherein we live'. Alex and Ellie are to marry by the lake that George is excavating while he falls in love with Cora; these couples are separated by a century, and by nothing at all: prey to the same dilemmas, hemmed in by the same structures. The past isn't past. When Alex visits his father's building projects, lying empty and derelict, he finds a kind of peace there; but Park fills the rooms for his readers, bringing us the spirits and stories of Titanic dockyard workers, and seamen who crewed the supply boats in wartime. Conflict and shipbuilding are the twin forces that have shaped Belfast and the lives of its people, and Park excels at making this tangible. Alex himself is less finely drawn. We know there's a darkness in his past; that something unspeakable took place, in a tent, at a festival. We learn there was a young woman – too drunk, too high, and left too vulnerable. But what part did Alex play there? And what of his old friends he wants to discard? They and his memories are rather too thinly dispersed through the book to provide drive. It's a hinterland left underexplored, and one that feels less integrated with the novel as a whole. But in George and Cora, and in the Belfast ghosts, there is more than enough to move us – and to prompt thought. 'Time shuffles itself lightly, like a pack of cards. Who can tell what sequence it will deal? Who can tell what will fall across our future days?' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Ghost Wedding by David Park is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Ghost Wedding by David Park: Compelling novel bleeds past and present in tale of secrets and division
Ghost Wedding Author : David Park ISBN-13 : 978-0861549740 Publisher : Oneworld Guideline Price : £16.99 One of the two epigraphs to David Park's 12th novel is taken from Bernhard Schlink's The Reader: 'The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as a matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.' For Park, memory has always been an unfinished business, time endlessly looping back on itself to unsettle the present and trouble the future. In Ghost Wedding, Park narrates the stories of two couples a century apart whose lives are linked to an artificial lake on the grounds of a big house known as the Manor House. George Allenby, a first World War veteran, is tasked with constructing the lake and drawing up plans for a boat house on its banks. One hundred years later, Alex and Ellie opt for the lakeside boat house as their wedding venue. Both George and Alex are tormented by secrets that haunt their current lives and which, in all their awfulness, resist the ready redemption of confession. George, who forms a romantic relationship with Cora (one of the housemaids in the Manor House), struggles with the inevitable moral compromises of warfare and the equally treacherous fault lines of class presumption and emotional betrayal. Alex, the son of a venal and domineering Belfast property developer, constantly doubts his own capacity to act and feels deeply shamed by past failings and a recurrent sense of moral indecisiveness. READ MORE Alex's imminent marriage to Ellie brings with it inevitable reckonings just as the future of George's relationship with Cora involves its own dark appraisals. Park's prose, shuttling across the years, summons into being the distant voices and still lives of an Ulster – both urban and rural – that has been frozen in sepia tones. Among the most affecting pages in this compelling novel are those where the experiences of others bleed into the present. The proposed sale of three medals in the auction rooms owned by Ellie's father prompts the appearance of a sailor reliving the terrors of naval combat in the second World War. Alex's visit to a disused tea merchant's building in Belfast segues into an extended sequence on the furtive intricacies of office romances in an earlier time. Park is clearly fascinated by the malleability of time, the past that is never truly past, the present which is endlessly teased by the future. In a passage towards the end of Ghost Wedding, the narrator notes: 'Time shuffles itself lightly like a pack of cards. Who can tell what sequence it will deal? Who can tell what will fall across future days?' Park, too, shuffles his own cards lightly, and part of his gift is moral latitude, letting the reader decide what to make of the different outcomes, leaving storylines open so that future days are not all spoken for in advance. [ Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin: Inventive exploration of identity, faith and family Opens in new window ] A recurrent feature of Park's writing is a flawless ear for the push and pull of dialogue. The scene where the parents of the newly-weds-to-be meet over a dinner is a masterpiece of purposeful joshing. Park also shows remarkable economy in damning out of his own mouth the feckless son of the Manor House – Eddie Remington – in his revealing exchanges with George. [ The Wildelings by Lisa Harding: Hard lessons in obsession, desire, abuse and power Opens in new window ] Although Park resists showiness, he brings a distinctive grace to sentences which make a virtue of restraint: 'They stand at the lake's edge as if mesmerised by the water's flow, before vanishing again like some early morning mist sifting through the trees.' There is a toughness in Park's depiction of the callous indifference of the wealthy as they sacrifice workers' safety to the indulgence of landscape follies, or when property developers are shown to strategically vandalise cities in pursuit of carefully calculated gains. In Ghost Wedding, the failings are never just individual; they are also collective and they thread their way over time through the lives of communities. The reader sees a recurring theme of public goods being captured by private interests. The second epigraph to Park's arresting new novel is taken from the Gospel according to St Luke. The subject is wedding guests. That nightmare of any couple about to tie the knot: who (not) to invite? Luke is clear. Forget family and friends: 'when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind'. And Ghost Wedding ends with the three-page 'Invitation' where Park announces that the 'tale is told and I prepare a table in the heart's imagination'. Those who are specifically named in the 'Invitation' are Luke's congregation – the neglected, the lonely, the despised, the silenced – who have peopled Park's imagination over the course of his writing career and who, in this latest novel, are richly received at the heartfelt table of his own imagination. Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
