Domestic espionage: David Park's Swallowing the Sun as Troubles thriller

David Park's standing as an author of finely observed works, in which individual frailties are pitted against larger scenarios of conflict and trauma, was recently acknowledged through his winning of the American Ireland Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Truth Commissioner, projects a model of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission onto a Northern Ireland setting, and won the 2009 Christopher Ewart Biggs Memorial Award. The novel this essay examines, Swallowing the Sun (2005), can be read as a re-working of the conventional Troubles thriller. In this novel, the traumas of domestic violence feed into and interweave with state violence in Belfast. Poverty and class inequities are highlighted as causes for both private and public conflict. David Park revises the Troubles thriller to suggest that the pressure to be quiet in the face of suffering is the real enemy to both individual and state welfare. Swallowing the Sun is a powerful challenge to established ideas about genre and context in Northern Ireland, and a moving work from a Northern Ireland author who has, until recently, been relatively overlooked.