Reading in the Dark has been the subject of an essay by Dermot Kelly in Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany.[2] Kelly describes the work as a "metaphysical detective story in which the clues add up to an epiphany of entrapment...Deane's novel excavates nationalist alienation with devastating singlemindedness" (p. 435).
He also comments on Deane's art as a poet, "rehears[ing] certain images until they become emblematic", in this case a confrontation between republican gunmen and loyalist police.
In Secret Hauntings [3] Linden Peach highlights the secrecy which "has been such a feature of Irish cultural life", and which is portrayed in this work with great poignancy. Deane is concerned with "the impact of concealment" particularly on "the mother figure upon which this burden is most spectacularly visited... Deane's novel seems all the more terrible for being located in an apparently ordinary domestic setting". Peach also discusses the way in which Deane's novel incorporates religious symbolism - not only in the way the characters lead their lives, but also in the similarities between Biblical events such as Christ's betrayal and burial and the betrayal and entombment of Uncle Eddie at the Fort. (p. 50).
The novel has also been discussed by Amy McGuff Skinner in her 2007 Ph. D. dissertation Intimate Terror: Gender, Domesticity, and Violence in Irish and Indian Novels of Partition.[4] Here Deane is quoted as saying: "What we misleadingly call ordinary life is destroyed by politics in our part of the world, generation after generation. I had to show how that happens." (p. 161) and further: "There's no talking cure, no implication that by revealing everything you will somehow overcome it". (p. 176)
In her work, McGuff Skinner cites critical writing by Elmer Kennedy-Andrews,[5] Gerry Smyth,[6] as well as a review by Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.[7]
History Lessons: Post-colonialism and Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, by Liam Harte:[8]"...an analysis of the inter-relationship of Irish history, politics, and culture".
