What do you do with a fear that has already come true? In X+Y=K, the posthumous novel by the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson, the answer is to turn to the weird: to ghosts, prophetic dreams, and remote viewers, as a way of working through what a divided city lived through. Published seven years after Carson’s death, the book is part memoir, part ghost story, part unfinished weird fiction, and its title asks us to add up fragments of indeterminate value: X+Y=K.
The story that haunts it belongs to Dr. William Jackson Crawford, whose body was found on the beach at Bangor, Co. Down, on July 30th, 1920 — in what would become Northern Ireland in several months’ time. The engineering professor had taken a dose of cyanide, a few weeks after writing to the Spiritualist magazine Light to reaffirm his belief that “the grave does not finish all.” For at least four years he had experimented with the Goligher Circle, a family of working-class mediums from South Belfast. Crawford’s relationship with its lead medium, 16-year-old Kathleen Goligher, has come under scrutiny and, after his death, the Irish astrophysicist E.E. Fournier d’Albe pronounced the group frauds.
The cause of Crawford’s collapse can only be hinted at. A sealed envelope found on his body, addressed to Mrs. Elizabeth Crawford, was never made public: a tantalising answer to the question posed by suicide, which Carson, like the rest of us, could only circle.
The book is divided into three sections: X, a record of Carson’s efforts to conceive of a book about Crawford; Y, an unfinished piece of weird fiction, taking place in Belfast in 1972 at the height of the Troubles; and K, an unreliable reflection on all that has taken place before. That fragmentary approach is fitting for a book so concerned with the scientific understanding of the ineffable, and it suggests something about the Troubles too: that for those who lived through them, the weird may be less an escape from experience than a way of processing it.
Crawford wanted proof that the grave does not finish all. Carson’s book is after something more modest: a form in which what refuses to stay in the past can be looked at. Its central motif is recurrence: dreams that return, a painting seen by successive viewers, a story Belfast keeps retelling.
The Crawford story, localised to various parlours and attic rooms across wartime Belfast, has fascinated many more Belfast artists than it has engineers or scientists – Crawford comes out of it as something of a dupe. Earlier in 2026, I produced a documentary series on the case for BBC Radio Ulster. The former BBC NI journalist AJ West published a novelisation of the Crawford story, The Spirit Engineer, in 2021. Playwright Fintan Brady produced the play A Tried and Tested Account of Certain Mysterious Events which have recently occurred in Mersey Street, which takes many liberties with the original account to explore the themes thrown up by the scientist’s attempts to rationalise the inexplicable.
Derry visual artist Susan McWilliam has spent decades producing work based on the output of mediums and psychics, returning again and again to the photographic images taken of the young Kathleen Goligher during the Crawford experiments. In these photos, the girl is bound to a chair while trails of supposed ectoplasm squelch from between her closed knees. On one of her projects, F-L-A-M-M-A-R-I-O-N, McWilliam worked in collaboration with Ciaran Carson.
In X+Y=K, Ciaran Carson’s fascination with the Crawford story begins during a visit to London shortly after September 11th, 2001, when “the idea of a book based on the Goligher Circle was beginning to form in (his) mind.” Carson’s mind. Or the mind of his surrogate in the book, Kilpatrick. Staring at Turner’s 1842 painting, Snow Storm: Steam-boat Off a Harbour’s Mouth, at the Tate Gallery, Kilpatrick is struck by the reflexive quality of the material artwork — that Crawford may once have looked at this painting himself and that, now, Kilpatrick’s perspective is informed as much by Crawford’s looking as by the artwork itself.
There is no perception without memory, the author reminds us continually; narrative is not up to the task of pinning down the objective truth. If objective truth there is. When Kilpatrick is subsequently visited by an apparition of Kathleen Goligher, he makes no meaningful effort to categorise it; ghost, imaginative impulse, or symptom of his regular migraines. Possibly all three. Or a secret other thing.
In this way, Carson’s novel avoids some of the limitations and ethical concerns expressed by West, in trying to create a historical fictional account of a person: getting inside them and presenting a rounded, consistent account of them. However, people are neither rounded nor consistent. Even in a documentary such as mine, there is an imaginal gap between the documents, interviews, and primary sources and the heart of the individual. Carson concludes that “I could never wholly understand them (Crawford and Goligher), for we can never put ourselves completely in another’s shoes, not even those of our former selves.”
In my documentary, I tried unsuccessfully to contact Dr. Crawford via a psychic medium, just as his widow and colleagues had a century earlier. However, I fear Carson is right. Had I somehow made contact with him in the afterlife, would Crawford have had a clear understanding of where he was, what he did, and why he took his own life? The conversations with spirits that he recorded during his experiments suggest probably not: they are garbled and silly and, as was clear to most who outlived him, the cant of a psychic circle trying to fool him.
This fragility is keenly expressed in material terms when Kilpatrick examines a hand-typed report of Crawford’s held at Queen’s University Belfast: “I was conscious that, no matter how gently I might handle it, I would be contributing to the moment when cover and article would part company, as the fibres of the paper weaken more and more with every opening and closing, every reading of the contents.” Such is the nature of decay; reading the book slowly takes the book away from the reader and what is left is a fallible memory of the book in its place.
Perception Requires Memory
Ciaran Carson’s own writing is not immune to that unreliability either. He places d’Albe’s sittings with the Golighers at 40 Fountain Street; they took place at Chichester Street. This may be a slip. It may equally be deliberate, the author enacting the fallibility he describes: a record that has been handled, remembered and retold has already begun to come apart. The book does not say which, and the uncertainty is part of its argument.
Yet, despite the decay of paper and memory, Crawford and Carson wrote books, something, no matter how fragile, to remain after them. My own copies of Crawford’s books – The Reality of Psychic Phenomena: Raps, Levitations, etc. (1916), Hints and Observations for Those Investigating the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1918), The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle (1921) – must be handled delicately. Still, I read them. Just as Carson did. Not because their records of experiments, their columns of measurements, and their diagrams of tilting tables contain any revelation about the afterlife, but because they represent something about life itself.
They show the complexity of perception: how what Crawford saw with such certainty (psychic operation; spiritual interception; the survival of life after death) can be seen by later readers as obvious credulity. There is no perception without memory, and we cannot read his books without the accumulated knowledge of what happened to him after writing them. Neither can they be read without sympathy, or without some of that credulity transferring to the reader.
It is an uncanny feeling. The books exist in a liminal space. Crawford’s non-fiction is so speculative, so strange, so divorced from what now seems like reality, that it becomes a sort of speculative fiction, a sort of weird fiction. Reading his accounts of the hundreds of séances conducted in his home and in the homes of the Goligher sitters, one finds them not wholly untrue. They create the space of possibility, and one feels the strange sensation of the red-lamped séance room and the ectoplasmic hand that grabs your own.
Thus it makes sense that, in attempting to write a book about the Golighers, Kilpatrick (and by extension Carson) would attempt a work of weird fiction. Towards the end of his life, the 70-year-old Ciaran Carson developed an admiration for the work of China Miéville, whose hallmarks of urban decay and doubleness appear in the novel’s second section.
Y, the unfinished weird fiction written by X’s Kilpatrick, is set in Belfast in 1972. Its protagonist, also called Kilpatrick, is plagued by strange prophetic dreams that resemble events that have already occurred and others yet to occur in the Troubles, each more extreme than the last. Not only does he dream of the shooting of a police officer that he witnessed in 1951, when he was a child, but also of the café explosion that is yet to kill both his parents. In a conflict situation like the Troubles, the past and future are connected in the same imaginal way. What one has experienced in the past (or known to have happened) becomes a haunting potentiality for the future. You could be shot. You could be arrested. You could be caught in a bomb blast. Fear is an act of imagination, and so, Y suggests, is whatever can be done about fear.
To deal with these dreams, Kilpatrick seeks the assistance of the psychiatrist, Fitzwilliam. However, rather than helping the patient, the doctor recognises Kilpatrick’s precognitive powers and recruits him into a secret organisation, Farset (named for Belfast’s hidden second river, and a pun on the Farsight Institute, which researches remote-viewing phenomena), which uses remote viewers like Kilpatrick to mitigate the worst aspects of the Troubles. “Bad guys plant the bombs,” says Fitzwilliam. “We try to stop ‘em.” Of course, the organisation is essentially useless in its task and succeeds only in subjecting Kilpatrick to more extreme visions of his parents’ deaths. Which he cannot prevent.
In Y, the Farset organisation conducts its business in the South Belfast attic in which the Golighers once conducted their séances. In this world, it is also the former studio of the artist, Gerard Fox, who, obsessed with the Crawford story, produced painting after painting of the young Kathleen Goligher, before slashing them. Through his obsession, he accessed his own remote viewing skills and became a member of Farset before cutting off his eyelids and killing himself. Obviously unable to look on reality as it actually is, Fox repeats Crawford’s looking, and ends by repeating Crawford’s fate.
The failure of the Farset organisation to curb the Troubles is due to the limitations of remote viewing, which, Fitzwilliam explains, always produces a “wrong image, but it is composed of factual elements, though these have been combined by the Viewer’s over-eager analytical processes – wanting to know “what it is” – to form an erroneous conclusion.” Rather, the Viewer must assemble the wrong images and jump a gap of incomprehension to understanding.
The Dream Reckons with Reality
It begins to sound like the novel itself, which places its fragments in an equation and sets its characters against each other in different times, looking forward and back at each other, asking to be analysed, but offering no conclusion. Indeed, one might see the whole book, Carson’s final project, as a reflection on the ability of fiction and poetry to adequately address the experience of conflict and the mindset of a divided city.
So much of his poetry dealt unflinchingly with the horrors of the Troubles and with his undying love for that divided city. The book’s own language for it is Fitzwilliam’s: “Psychological topography. The Farset as a liminal boundary. Conflicting territorial imperatives. Where one set of assumptions meets another. Or comes up against another.” The weird story, it suggests, is the appropriate model for exploring such a place.
What Y does well is let the weird sit alongside the mundane. The unidentified flying objects in Kilpatrick’s sky are mistaken for military helicopters, so that a visitation from elsewhere passes for one more piece of the army’s presence overhead. Gunfire is likened to spirit rapping, the knocking Crawford catalogued in the title of his first book, The Reality of Psychic Phenomena: Raps, Levitations, etc. (1919), now carried in the idiom of the street. Carson did not have to invent the link. D’Albe notes that during one of his séances in 1921, the sitters heard distant gunfire: the violence was already audible in the séance room. In Y, the supernatural and the violent are not separate registers of experience but one soundscape, each heard through the other.
As prose, Y is, perhaps, the least successful of the book’s three sections. Where X is patient, precise, and quietly uncanny, the weird fiction is more schematic, its dialogue closer to genre pastiche, and may not satisfy those looking at it solely as a piece in the style of Miéville. As a focused comment on the book’s themes, however, it does more than either of the others: it is where the Troubles, precognition and the failure of analysis meet. The weaker writing may even be part of the point, a form straining to do what X cannot: capture fear from the inside.
The same collision of dream and life runs through Carson’s poetry. In his poem “Collaboration“, for example, Carson imagines comforting a partner who has nightmares of being tarred and feathered for collaborating with a British soldier:
“When you wake I hold you tight, saying, It’s only a dream,
the language of dream has nothing to do with that of life.
And as eventually you sink back into the deep well
of sleep, I wonder if by my words I have betrayed you.”
Carson’s suspicion is correct. In conflict-ridden Belfast, the language of dream had an awful lot to do with life. Dream had the power to intrude on and override life. The ideological dreams of the conflict’s combatants (whether Republican, Loyalist, Nationalist, Unionist, or the British establishment) dictated the lives of everyday people, shaping both their day-to-day lives and questions of life and death.
In 1919, while Crawford was working with the Golighers, G.K. Chesterton, visiting Ireland, he recognised “a dream, at once a desire and a delusion, brooded above a whole city. That place was Belfast.” The dream state was there even before the violence of 1920–22. We might even read Crawford’s susceptibility to delusion and self-destruction as an anticipation of Belfast’s fate: what happens when we believe that unsustainable dream too deeply, what happens when the dream must reckon with reality. Perhaps this is why the story of Crawford has been such a captivating focus for Belfast artists.
Weird Reality, Weird Perception
By the time of Carson’s death, a sensibility had been coming into focus: a turn to the surreal and the uncanny to work through the Troubles and their aftermath. Anna Burns’s surrealist novel, Milkman, won the Booker Prize in 2018. The magic realist novel by Jan Carson (no relation), The Firestarters, came out in 2019. My own edited anthology, The Black Dreams: Strange Stories from Northern Ireland (2021), belongs to the same tendency. Visual artists had got there somewhat earlier: Willie Doherty’s Ghost Story examined the eerie aftertaste of conflict as early as 2007.
Like Crawford’s documentation of his own experiments, the dreams and experiments Kilpatrick records in Y are a desperate attempt to immortalise a dream that felt like reality. As Kilpatrick finds with the report at Queen’s, the more the text is handled, the less stable the text becomes. The paper in the archive may ultimately disintegrate, but particles of the work flake onto the reader’s hands. Each reading repeats the handling, and that, too, is recurrence.
Of cities, Ciaran Carson writes: “Cities, which are aggregates of houses, receive the influence of the people living and walking in them, and radiate that influence into anyone who sojourns there. Anyone who dwells for a time must be imprinted by the character of that city.” So too of art. If Crawford did look on the Turner painting, as Kilpatrick suggests, he must have taken on some of its character and the painting itself has taken on elements of Crawford, now passed on to the new viewer.
So in the final section, K – the aggregate of Kilpatrick as author surrogate and weird fiction protagonist – the documentary and fictional elements commingle and bleed into each other: one set of assumptions comes up against another. The unidentified flying objects of Y materialise in the real sky; the imagined artist who painted in the Golighers’ attic has an exhibition in the real Tate. We are left with some amalgamation of memory and imagination, which is, of course, all we ever truly have in life, as in fiction.
K says so outright. The proof of the work lies not in our coming to know Crawford better but in our coming to know Carson a little less clearly. He is refracted through Kilpatrick, he is refracted through his own efforts to understand his fascinations, process, and his experience living through the Troubles. What comes out is not a sum total, but a sum: X+Y=K, where the parts have no definite values. As Carson said, we cannot even really know ourselves in the end.
A city knows itself no better than a person does, and recurrence, the book’s central motif, did not end with Carson’s death in 2019. Nothing was learned. This September, the Orange Order was given permission to march the Garvaghy Road in Portadown from Drumcree church for the first time in 28 years. Drumcree was the flashpoint of the 1990s parading disputes, and a standoff followed that lasted around two weeks. What one has experienced in the past, as Y has it, becomes a haunting potentiality for the future; in Portadown, that potentiality briefly took physical form.
Peace is fragile. It too is a sort of dream, and it depends on that dream being held in common. Such dreams can be unsettled.
In the end, the Farset organisation cannot stop a single bomb, and X+Y=K never pretends otherwise. What it offers instead comes at the end, when Kilpatrick finds a process by which to cope with the loss of his parents. The weird, in this reckoning, does not prevent what recurs; it gives the person who must live with it somewhere to put it. That is a modest claim, and perhaps the only honest one for a book about a conflict whose dreams dictated the lives of everyday people.
Although the novel ends with emotional and striking concreteness of sorts, I am reminded of Fitzwilliam’s observation that over-analysis leads only to an “erroneous conclusion”. I don’t even know whether this represents a novel Carson himself completed, or three related parts assembled after the fact. The latter seems a more appropriate tribute to the poet and novelist who was suspicious of tribute and memorialisation itself. How much of it would he recognise? Now that it is published, now that it is read, it can never be the same novel again anyway.