Derry

Derry enters the novel as the place where Gerry’s architecture office, in the Diamond, is firebombed. The attack is never explained: its perpetrators and motive remain unknown. Through Gerry’s recollection, the city becomes bound to the destruction of a place devoted to making things, and to the lasting material traces that fire leaves behind.

The Diamond and the firebombing

Gerry recalls the attack while watching television news of burning buildings. He has seen this kind of violence before: his own office in the Diamond was firebombed, and he cannot establish who did it or why. He considers whether the Provisional IRA might have been responsible, but that remains speculation rather than an identified cause. His question about how a struggle for Irish freedom could include the burning of books and the destruction of buildings makes the attack part of a wider conflict over what political violence destroys.

What the fire left behind

The morning after the attack, Gerry walks carefully through the devastation, looking for anything salvageable. The wood is blackened; surviving Venetian blinds are buckled and warped, and lampshades hang over desks. The damage is not only to a building but to accumulated work: plans, drawings, notes, measurements, and the materials on which architects’ ideas depended. The smell of burned work stays in Gerry’s clothes for weeks, making the office’s destruction persist beyond the site itself.

Derry in the novel’s imagery of destruction

Gerry’s imagination turns the attack into a miniature city burning: model streets, churches, schools, and halls catch fire, while plans curl into ash. This imagined scale makes the loss legible without diminishing its reality; the office contained years of labor, not merely objects. His recollection also connects the attack to the burning of Bombay Street, where Catholics were driven from their homes by a Loyalist mob, and to an attempted burning of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. These references do not establish a single perpetrator or motive for the office bombing. Instead, they place Derry within a pattern of destruction that crosses buildings, books, homes, and communities, setting architecture’s work of creation against violence that turns inhabited places into absence.