has flaws but still brilliant
I have been aware of this book since it came out. However I was sceptical that a non Irish person could hit the right notes about Irish history. Browsing in Hodges Figgis I found it on sale and decided it was such a bargain i would add it to my `should read' pile.
What was I waiting for. It is brilliant.
Reviews note that the events of Humbert's invasion in 1798 is a footnote to the history of the time. In fact it is a footnote to a footnote. Flanagan is like a scientist who has only a fossilized sliver of DNA from an ancient animal but is able to bring it breathing, moving and roaring back to life.
Flanagan presents us with a tragedy that carries the characters and the reader to its inevitable painful conclusion. The novel has echoes of the Troubles, but he never allows his story to become a leaden parallel. Now in a time of peace, the novel stands on its own as an examination of its time. Flanagan doesn't fall into either of the traps of historical fiction, excessive sociological detail or just making stuff up. He tries and succeeds in making his story contemporary to its times. This gives it an immediacy that makes you want to go wikipedia mad to see if the characters are all real. He maintains a delicate balance of historical accountability and fictional accuracy.
There are flaws though, the female characters are mere sexual or romantic foils for the male characters and there is too much nervousness and scepticism on the part of the Irish rebel protagonists that doesn't match their subsequent actions.
This book extracts the tragic components of Ireland's painful history, from a micro-moment in European history and makes that moment as real as if it happened in our own lifetime.
The Books behind the Books
I loved the Thomas Flanagan trilogy.
By chance, I believe I came across the primary source books for each of the three.
The Year of the French seems quite obviously informed and inspired by Thomas Pakenham's Year of Liberty, a novelistic but dense nonfiction recounting of the western uprising in 1798.
The End of the Hunt takes much of its feel from "The Big Fellow", Frank O'Connor's beautiful account of Michael Collins' revolutionary career.
If these two are obvious the third is less so:
The Tenants of Time builds very effectively upon the foundations of Micheal Davitt's book, "The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland." This book, by an 1867 Fenian who became a leader of the Land League movement and an obstructionist member of the British parliament, is rich in detail about the Land League and the parliamentary struggle of the late 1800's that shows up in the Flanagan book.
I recommend these books to readers who have finished the trilogy, just as I would recommend the trilogy to all.
Engaging historical fiction
This is an engaging account of a period in Irish history that frankly I'd never even known of before. My only complaint would be that it's a little on the long side.
More history than novel
I was born in Ireland, of an Irish mother and an English father, but this book has taught me more about my country and the tangled relations between my peoples than I ever knew before. By tracing the events that took place in a single year (1798) in a remote part of the country (County Mayo on the West coast), Thomas Flanagan pulls together threads stretching back many centuries, embracing all classes of Irish society, threads still tangled in the fighting in Northern Ireland in 1979 when the book was published, almost two centuries later.
The Year of the French commemorates the landing of a small expeditionary force sent out by revolutionary France to foment further revolution in Ireland against their arch-enemies, the English. The fleet, three vessels carrying a mere thousand men, had not been intended for such a remote spot, but the ships were forced into harbor by contrary winds. Under the command of the extraordinary General Humbert, however, the soliders achieved some striking early successes, rallying a substantial number of the populace to their side. But the promised reinforcements from France do not arrive, and it is only a matter of time before the British can regroup and bring their greater strength to bear. As history knows, the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 was doomed to failure. But Flanagan also shows how the brutal British reprisals further sowed the seeds of rancor that would blossom in successful revolution over a century later.
It would be easy to see the discord in Ireland, then as in the quite recent past, as being a struggle between English and Irish, landowner and peasant, Protestant and Catholic, rich and poor. But what Flanagan so successfully demonstrates is that while all these things contributed, the strife was not at all so clearly defined by the obvious fault lines. The French arrival triggered the rising of two quite different groups, temporarily joined in the common cause. One was the Whiteboys, local groups of agrarian terrorists, peasants seeking revenge on exploitative landowners by such means as cattle-maiming and crop-burning. The other, the United Irishmen, included a number of these landowners themselves, ranging from members of great families down to small squireens; motivated by a vision of political independence rather than social revolution, they included not only men of Irish stock but also some Englishmen who had lived in Ireland for so long that they called it home. Even the division between Catholic and Protestant, though a better indicator than most, was no sure predictor of which way an individual's allegiance would fall.
As a book of history, THE YEAR OF THE FRENCH is superb; I wish I could be as enthusiastic about its qualities as a novel. This is a long book and quite difficult to get through, especially in its first 150 pages. Not that Flanagan's writing isn't first-rate; he has an interesting technique of interspersing regular narrative with excerpts from diaries and memoirs supposedly written by various observers of the events, and his feeling for the style of each writer is spot-on. But it is a dense and complex texture that tends to overshadow the ordinary human emotions in the story. There are historical novels that you read for the facts and others (costume dramas, as it were) that you read for the people. Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE, the greatest of all, manages an almost perfect balance between the two. It seems clear that Flanagan was aiming for a similar synthesis; he is perfect on the big political picture, and he fills his story with numerous characters -- passionate, rascally, or self-deluding -- that should have provided human interest aplenty. But despite several likeable figures and memorable scenes, I found myself almost always reading for the story and caring much less what became of the people. This would be little problem in a history, but for a novel it is crucial. Hence the absence of the fifth star.
As The Mud Churns
This book has the most wooden prose, the greatest number of stock characters (or "cast", as Flanagan dubs them), the most stereotyped perspectives of any "historical novel" of this sort I've had the misfortune to come across, and (piqued by the glowing reviews and the fact that the NYRB reissued it--lending credence, by dint of Flanagan's association with it, to the description of it as "reviews of each other's books") to actually purchase and plough through.
You will find no original ideas here, no refreshing imagery, no stylistic virtuosity, only page upon page of tired descriptions of lush Irish landscapes and poor bogtrotters marching merrily away with pikes in one hand and jugs of whiskey in the other to have their innards blown out by English grapeshot. Whoever the reviewer for the New York Times was who compared this book to War and Peace must have skipped the philosophical sections of Tolstoy's work or perhaps been tossing down some of the hard stuff himself. ----You WILL learn what a spalpeen is (and sundry other Irish terms), and, if you have NO idea of what happened in 1798, you will learn some history, about as much as you would from a good encyclopaedia entry on the events. But that's it.
There are so many great Irish histories out there and great Irish writers of all sorts (From Yeats to Donleavy to Banville--Notice my omission of Seamus Heaney, Flanagan's poet. I couldn't put it better than James Dickey put it to me once, "He's no Yeats.") that there's scarce need to waste your time with this book.....unless you enjoy soap operas; for this is what this book amounts to, an Irish soap opera, and a rather bad one at that.--I suppose I'll give it two stars for the historical value, and for those who like their history dished out in this ridiculous manner.
(15 reviews)
