Far-Flung Ireland. - Review - book review

The Great Shame
And the Triumph of the Irish in the English Speaking World
Thomas Keneally
Nan A. Talese Doubleday, $35, 712 pp.

Between 1841 and 1881, the population of Ireland declined by almost half, principally through emigration, both forced and voluntary, and the devastation of the potato famines. In this massive volume the highly regarded Australian novelist Thomas Keneally tells the story of what he chooses to call the Irish "diaspora."

The prolific Keneally, searching for a subject after the great success of Schindler's List, both novel and movie, focused on an ancestor of his wife, one Hugh Larkin, sentenced to a lifetime banishment in Australia for participating in an assault on his landlord's mansion. The first part of The Great Shame tells Larkin's story-his deportation in 1833 through his old age as, ultimately, a free citizen. However, Larkin is a tame figure compared with the more dramatic-even melodramatic-characters Keneally traces through their careers in exile. Take Thomas Francis Meagher. Born in 1823, he lived a swashbuckling life: member of the revolutionary Young Ireland movement, under sentence of death at the age of twenty-five for treason (later commuted to "transportation for life" to Australia), an escapee to New York, commander of the Union Irish brigade in the American Civil War, acting governor of Montana, and dead at forty-four as the result of suicide or assassination or drunken accident.

Or John Mitchel, a Young Ireland journalist, transported for sedition. He, too, escaped from Australia to the United States but, unlike Meagher, became a vocal supporter of the Confederacy, believing "slavery the best state of existence for the negro," Christian slavery being preferable to brutal life in Africa. Ultimately, Mitchel returned to his homeland, becoming an Irish member of the House of Commons.

These are amazing tales. Unfortunately, when they are woven together with the stories of countless others the result is confusing, not to say overpowering. Keneally is a skillful writer, as his many novels have shown, and he moves easily from place to place and person to person. But his cast is too large and the movement dizzying; there are simply too many players and incidents to follow.

The research required to produce this history was prodigious: notes and bibliography run to more than seventy pages. Such a scholarly effort is estimable, but it would have been more impressive if Keneally had been more judicious in the use of his raw material. Too often the reader chokes on a glut of facts. John Boyle O'Reilly, for example, is one of the principal characters, but do we need to know that his fellow prisoners in an Irish jail were Color Sergeant Charles McCarthy and Private Patrick Keating and James Wilson of the 5th Dragoon Guards, Private Michael Harrington of the 61st Foot, and Thomas Darragh of the 2nd Queens? These figures appear only at the fringes of the narrative thereafter. Likewise, it appears that the author has recapitulated every American Civil War battle in which an Irish name appeared on the roster-all to prove the point that the immigrant Irish served on both sides of the conflict, often but not always heroically, and suffered much.

Keneally's talents as a novelist help him narrate the escape of four Fenians aboard an American whaler, a rousing story in and of itself. But at other times, particularly in the saga of his wife's ancestor, Larkin, he gives a fictional, or at least unsubstantiated, twist to the factual narrative. How do we know that Larkin "found the unpeopled bush a drastic contrast to the crowded, sociable countryside of Ireland, and in its fearful spaciousness an encouragement to a morbid revisiting of the personal rashness, the unchanged grievances, which had landed him here"? Fiction based on fact is one thing; history embellished with fictional touches is often annoying.

Although Keneally covers much ground that others have plowed before him (notably in Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger and Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore) he also explores (at least for this reader) interesting new territory, especially the saga of the quixotic American Fenians, veterans of the American Civil War, who plotted to invade Canada as a means of sapping British resolve to retain dominion over Ireland.

One of the most pleasurable features of the book is the author's inclusion of contemporaneous poetry, much of it political, a great deal of it amateurish, but nearly all moving and often amusing. Take for instance an anthem written for the Fenian incursions into Canada:

We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war,

And we're going to fight for Ireland, the land that we adore,

Many battles we have won, along with the boys in blue,

And we'll go and capture Canada for we've nothing else to do.

Keneally sets forth multiple meanings for the "shame" referred to in his title: the shame of the failure of nineteenth-century Irish activists to establish a nation; the shame of British rule and anti- Catholic discrimination; "survival shame" analogous to the shame of Holocaust survivors, "the irrational but sharp shame of still standing when so many fell"; and the shame of transportation itself.

Despite the author's daunting inclusiveness, he still leaves the reader with such questions as the role of the Catholic clergy-much mentioned but never really discussed-in opposing Republican rebellion in Ireland and Fenian agitation in America.

All my reservations aside, The Great Shame is a fine entertainment for the reader with enough stamina. The effort is somewhat like listening to a captivating bard in an Irish saloon, telling a rollicking, compelling, and disjointed tale, but one that goes on too long.

James Duffy is a New York writer and retired lawyer. His novel, Factions, will be published by Simon & Schuster next winter.

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