The Troubles

The Troubles is presented less as a narrated political history than as a conflict carried into New York through Irish migration, pub culture, memory, and Callan’s personal history. Its significance lies in the way it shadows an intimate relationship: Siobhan has come to America to get away from gangsters, while Callan recognizes in her account a version of the criminal world he inhabits and says he is trying to leave. The past is not sealed off from the present; it returns in songs, neighborhood habits, and Callan’s collection of stories about lives ending violently.

A conflict carried into the pub

Callan meets Siobhan at the Glocca Mora pub on Twenty-sixth and Third, where he is having a beer and listening to Joe Burke play Irish music. He first notices her long black hair, then her face and gray eyes. When they speak, she says she has just come over from Belfast and grew up on Kashmir Road. Their exchange immediately gives the conflict a personal geography: Belfast is not an abstract setting but the place she has left, and her arrival in New York is bound up with a wish to distance herself from the life associated with it.

Callan answers by identifying his own Irish family connection: his father was from Clonnard. Siobhan recognizes the name, but turns away, explaining that she came to America to get away from all of that. Callan’s question about why she is in an Irish pub lands against the room’s music. The band has shifted from flute to banjo and is playing “The Men Behind the Wire,” a song whose lyrics invoke armored vehicles, guns, and men standing behind those imprisoned. The scene makes the pub a place where the conflict persists in cultural memory even for someone seeking distance from it. Siobhan’s reply—that it is where Irish people go—captures the contradiction: the gathering place offers familiarity, but its songs can bring the history she wants to escape back into the room.

Siobhan’s attempt to leave the violence behind

Later, in bed, Siobhan tells Callan that she left Belfast because she was tired of gangsters. The novel does not give a detailed account of her life there; instead, it lets Callan interpret what she means. He understands the Provos as having become little more than thugs, controlling in Belfast many of the same things that he and O-Bop control in the Kitchen. This comparison does not equate the political histories of Belfast and New York, but it shows how Callan recognizes a shared pattern of control in the places he knows.

His response is that he is trying to get out. Siobhan urges him simply to leave, while he answers that it is not so simple. The exchange marks a difference between her departure and his predicament: she has crossed the ocean to escape a world she associates with gangsters, whereas Callan remains entangled in the criminal life he sees as comparable. The Troubles therefore enters their relationship not only as the history Siobhan has left, but as a measure by which she challenges Callan to imagine leaving his own environment. His stated wish to get out establishes a point of contact between them, but his admission of difficulty prevents that wish from becoming a promise.

Callan’s stories and the expectation of violent endings

The Troubles also belongs to the larger store of stories through which Callan understands his life. Looking back toward Manhattan, he sees the apartment he shared with Siobhan: Saturday breakfasts, her mussed hair, coffee and a mostly unread newspaper, and the gray Hudson beyond the window. That domestic image is followed by the assertion that Callan grew up on fables. The names that follow range across Irish history, literature, politics, and religion: Cuchulain, Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, Roddy McCorley, Pádraic Pearse, James Connelly, Sean South, and Sean Barry. The list then reaches John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bloody Sunday, and Jesus Christ.

Callan’s conclusion is stark: they all ended bloody. The range of names matters because it places the memory of political struggle alongside other stories of sacrifice and death, without separating them into a tidy chronology. The Troubles is one element in a wider inheritance of narratives whose endings have taught Callan to expect violence. The novel does not establish that each name belongs to one identical tradition; rather, their accumulation shows the breadth of the stories he carries and the common fatal ending he draws from them.

Memory, belonging, and the prospect of escape

The treatment of The Troubles moves between public memory and private life. At the pub, music makes the conflict audible; in bed, Siobhan makes its human consequence explicit by saying she is tired of gangsters; in Callan’s later recollection, a quiet picture of shared domestic life sits beside the violent endings of the stories that formed him. These are different kinds of evidence within the narrative, and their juxtaposition keeps the conflict present without turning the relationship into a political lecture.

For Siobhan, leaving Belfast is a deliberate attempt to get away from a world of gangsters, though the novel gives no basis for claiming that migration has erased its presence. For Callan, the familiar pub and the neighborhood’s Irish life coexist with a criminal world he recognizes as resembling the one she rejected. His response is neither an account of successful escape nor a claim that the two situations are identical. Instead, he acknowledges the desire to leave and the difficulty of doing so. Through this contrast, The Troubles functions as both remembered history and a lens on the novel’s continuing concern with whether people can break from violent worlds they know intimately.