Jack Byrne

Abandoned children from Liverpool centuries apart yet connected through the immigrant’s story is how Dr Mary Burke, University of Connecticut, presented my first novel Under The Bridge as part of her course.

I was delighted to assign Jack Byrne’s Under the Bridge to my spring 2024 British Literature survey course at the University of Connecticut. Jack very generously offered to speak with my students toward the end of semester. The survey class explored texts from the mid nineteenth century to the present day and were often part of a tradition of marginalized voices emanating from the geographical and ideological peripheries of the United Kingdom and the former British Empire. Our readings emphasized how such literary works successively challenged mainstream British identity and values.

We began with canonical works by Emily Brontë and Oscar Wilde and then moved on to World War I poets from Britain, Ireland, and India. After that, we read John Osborne before moving on to the British-Caribbean writers Zadie Smith, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Jenny Mitchell. Class members also attended the Gerson Irish Reading by Martin Doyle that I organized in April 2024. Doyle is the author of the 2023 critically acclaimed memoir of the Northern Irish Troubles, Dirty Linen. I had also assigned the memoir, and it helped students understand the uses of that history in Under the Bridge too.

Jack Byrne’s Under the Bridge was the final work we read during the semester, and it was a perfect capstone to a course in which we repeatedly discussed the political, social, racial, and ideological divisions of British society. Jack’s novel covered so much of that, and he discussed such divisions in his immediate family too when he met with the class. In particular, Jack spoke touchingly of his brother and father and the reasons why his family members were ambivalent about their Irish heritage, a deeply personal note that students appreciated. In addition, Jack was generous with describing his process to students. Many are budding creative writers themselves, so they really appreciate it when a published author is open about that issue.

Most particularly, students of the course were brought full circle by the immigrant story and Liverpool port setting of Under the Bridge. The foundational moment of the discovery of the racially ambiguous Heathcliff at that same port in the very earliest book we had covered, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, had provoked much discussion and analysis early in our semester. We began the course discussing Liverpool’s history of slave ships and Irish Famine refugees in relation to the main theories of Heathcliff’s possible origin, and we returned to these same histories with Jack’s historically layered mystery novel of Liverpool’s diverse immigrant world.