SOURCE: Hitchings, Henry. “Serendipitous City.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4941 (12 December 1997): 20.

In the following review, Hitchings provides an unfavorable assessment of Carson's The Star Factory.

If Dublin disappeared, it could be reconstructed from the detail stored up in James Joyce's Ulysses. The same claim could be made about Belfast and Ciaran Carson's quirky book of prose pieces, The Star Factory. The difference is that Belfast is forever disappearing, and many of Carson's landmarks are long gone. He characterizes his native city as an “ongoing, fractious epic”, and feelingly explores the twists and turns of its present and its past. His sinuous narrative visits the Catholic Falls and Protestant Shankill, the shipyards where the Titanic was built, pubs such as The Beaten Docket and the Crown Liquor Saloon, the Smithfield precincts destroyed by firebombs in 1974, the Belfast Central Library, and St Peter's Pro-Cathedral. To this tapestry are added memories of...