Belfast is more than the setting for the novel’s private encounters: its streets and landmarks carry the visible imprint of political conflict, while its rivers, port, and built history shape how characters see one another and their city. The city moves between beauty and damage, familiarity and surveillance. A drive across town can become an encounter with layered history; an ordinary street or home can also lie within the reach of political violence and state investigation.

Rivers, streets, and the city’s remembered past

Belfast is introduced through movement across its urban landscape. At night, a drive passes the ferry at the docks and crosses a bridge over the River Lagan, its route continuing along High Street, past the Northern Whig building, the electricity showrooms, and the cathedral. The journey turns around Carlisle Circus, where a severed plinth marks the former site of a marble statue of Roaring Hanna, a pastor known for his hostility to Catholics. The Irish Republican Army had destroyed the statue in a bombing. Its empty base makes the city’s political past part of the ordinary street scene: even a monument to a historical figure has been drawn into the conflict.

The city’s shape also records a history older than the conflict. As Michael Agnew drives along High Street, he explains that the River Farset runs beneath the road and that Belfast takes its name from the river’s mouth. He describes an 1830 drawing of people in frock coats walking on the quays beside a sailing boat. His account turns a modern road into a trace of an earlier waterfront, inviting Cushla Lavery to imagine the river course beneath the street. The scene gives Belfast a double geography: the visible city of roads and buildings, and the older landscape that remains legible beneath them.

Cushla Lavery’s view of the city changes during these drives. She had not previously thought of Belfast as beautiful, but its Victorian buildings, illuminated university tower, and ornate architecture become newly apparent to her. That perception does not erase the damage around them. The Europa Hotel is boarded up again, and children call it the Hardboard Hotel because it is described as Europe’s most bombed hotel. The Grand Central Hotel also troubles Michael, who considers the army’s occupation of it an outrage. The contrast between architectural beauty and damage is not a simple opposition: the same streets that offer vistas of historic buildings bear the marks of bombing and military use.

Political divisions in public space

Belfast’s divisions become visible in who can move through the city, and how safely. At night the city centre is cordoned off and its streets are empty. On the return drive across the river, Belfast Lough lies beyond the ships, and the scarcity of other cars gives the journey a sense of exposure. Earlier, armed police travelling in grey Land Rovers drive alongside Gerry Devlin and Cushla Lavery after their car briefly crosses the white lines. The encounter makes even an ordinary drive subject to armed observation.

The city’s sectarian divisions also shape children’s appearance and public passage. During a school outing, Gerry Devlin leads the children across the road while Cushla Lavery stays at the back with Davy McGeown. The pupils wear their own clothes rather than uniforms, partly to protect them, but this makes them identifiable as Catholics because other schools in town require regulation clothing. Their walk up High Street is at once a picnic outing and a public procession marked by communal identity. Fidel watches them pass from his shop; his offer of Creme Eggs has reached Davy, but the boy searches in Cushla’s basket instead of acknowledging Fidel. The encounter leaves the adult unsure whether Fidel expected thanks, showing how small acts of care and recognition carry weight within the city’s divided social world.

Conflict affects the city’s ordinary businesses as well as its streets. The Lavery bar had prospered briefly after the Troubles began, when drinkers left the city to escape the disorder. That period ended as people became afraid to go out. During the strike, the pubs initially remained open, but were later ordered to close. A television report links the stoppage to the effort by electricity supply workers to bring down the power-sharing government, which had operated for only a few months. It shows paramilitaries parading openly and Brian Faulkner announcing the government’s collapse, alongside footage of the bombing in Dublin. Belfast’s political crisis is thus experienced both through street-level restrictions and through images watched from behind a bar counter.

Homes, routes, and the reach of authority

The surrounding roads connect Belfast’s urban life to the countryside without making the city’s pressures disappear. After learning Michael Agnew’s listed address, Cushla Lavery drives from the hill road past an estate, a barracks, and a cemetery, then along a country road by the lay-by where she and Michael had once looked at Belfast Lough. The road narrows between high hedges before reaching his village. At Number 18, she sees Michael’s car outside a white house with mock-Tudor timbering, a sparse garden, and roses growing through the paving. She does not go in; after picturing Michael at a table with his wife, she reverses out of the drive and leaves. The route makes the distance between the city and his home measurable, but does not lessen the emotional and social boundary she encounters there.

The state’s reach into Belfast homes is recalled through the police response to an earlier arrest. During Cushla Lavery’s final year of teacher training, a classmate was arrested for involvement in a bombing campaign in London, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary visited every student’s home. The officer who came to the Laverys drank in their bar and did not search Cushla’s room, treating the visit as a formality. Her family later laughed at the idea that she could make a bomb. Once Michael’s movements become a concern, however, the same kind of inquiry no longer feels routine. Cushla recognizes that police may interview the people who saw her with him, including acquaintances whose names she may not know. Belfast’s domestic spaces are therefore not separate from public events: the home, the bar, and the circle of people who have witnessed a relationship can all become part of an investigation.

Violence, aftermath, and narrative significance

The city’s public record of violence intersects with private loss. At breakfast, a news report announces that an eighteen-year-old man has been charged with murdering Michael Agnew, a prominent Belfast barrister who was shot dead at his home. Betty McGeown begins to weep; Gina Lavery puts a hand on her shoulder and speaks quietly to her. Cushla Lavery meets Davy McGeown’s eyes briefly, then turns to the sink. The report enters a family kitchen as an official statement, but its consequences are expressed through the people gathered around the table and through the family’s anxious attention to the world outside.

The later report of sentencing identifies the eighteen-year-old as Thomas Ronald McGeown, of Hollyburn Estate, and states that he has received life imprisonment for Michael Agnew’s murder. He shows no reaction as he is led from the dock. The report places a formal legal outcome beside the unresolved sense of chance that follows Cushla’s discovery of surveillance photographs. The novel does not make Belfast’s violence feel exceptional to its residents: Cushla reflects that the apparent connection in the photographs may have been bad luck, of the sort that happens there all the time. That thought does not undo the murder or its consequences; it conveys how recurring danger has become part of the city’s understanding of ordinary life.

Across these episodes Belfast is rendered as a city whose geography keeps history close. A river survives beneath a modern street; an empty plinth records an attack; boarded hotels and occupied buildings show conflict altering familiar architecture. Political divisions mark a school procession, a journey watched by armed police, and the reach of investigation into private homes. The city’s beauty remains visible, but never stands apart from its history of violence, disruption, and loss.