SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “Music in the Valves.” New Statesman 126, no. 4364 (12 December 1997): 45-6.

In the following review, Eagleton discusses how Carson's The Star Factory represents the next step in the literature of Northern Ireland.

The fascination that Belfast has for its inhabitants never ceases to amaze its visitors. The city looks about as glamorous as Barnsley but has bred as much mythology as Camelot. Legends lurk in its street corners, and fables wreathe its decaying factories.

It has been in turns the birthplace of the 18th-century Irish Enlightenment, the single modern tip of a backward rural colony, the fifth-greatest industrial city in the world, the home of the Titanic, the scene of sectarian slaughter. There are old codgers propping up its bars who have not only never set foot outside the city, but who respond to the suggestion that they do so as they might react to an offer...