Crow Station

1985 is a cool wet summer. Dan White and his wife, Charlotte, have a new son, their first. Dan is using the summer vacation to prepare one of those obscure endowed Memorial Lectures that the older universities have accrued over the centuries. He is also intrigued by his discovery that the Cold War is coming to Ireland in a big way, con trails up and down its east and west coasts indicating the kind of edgy manoeuvring that could easily slip out of control.
But they are happy, excepting perhaps Charlotte’s tendency to agonise over her son’s impending loss of innocence. Then Charlotte’s mother is killed in an apparently senseless motor accident and both their lives seem suddenly to change, a switch in levels, as it were, rather than in direction. Charlotte becomes a mother without a mother, a disturbing situation for her which presses her with the question of what she is, child or parent. Dan, for his part, remembers the demise of his own parents, but also acquires a research student with a disturbing take on gender politics and some unwelcome attention for his Cold War theory. Then both Dan and Charlotte discover that they do not know how to mourn, that they cannot comprehend death and its effect on them. So they counter death and a funeral with a birth and a pre-christening party, inviting the mourners to celebrate their son’s birth.
Richard Butler returns to Dublin to climb a mountain while awaiting his publisher’s decision about his latest offering. He is drawn into the circle of a widow and her boisterous teenage daughters, an invitation to become a father without the discomfort of fathering. He is also drawn into the ménage about Dan and Charlotte. And as Richard ascends his mountain to encounter its resident spirit and answer its very pertinent question, Charlotte ascends to her bedroom to restore her mother while Dan finds himself drawn by his research into arcane thoughts that offer him a kind of salvation too.