As I scanned my bookshelves in the parlor in the pale light of a Saturday morn I took down my paperback copy of ‘The Year of the French’ by Thomas Flanagan. I’m not sure where I got the book. Perhaps from my father’s library after he died. I remember there was a television series on one of the Boston broadcast channels in the 1980’s. I wanted to watch because I wanted to hear about the attempt to spread the liberating ideas of the French Revolution to Ireland. When I had the book in hand I decided to look up the television series online. I came across this interesting post on the book talk site Goodreads.

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Talk about a book freighted with weird and erroneous expectations. I was nine when it was published, twelve when the momentous occasion of the Irish-made (or half-Irish-made) production locked the nation to their screens every Sunday night. It was a big deal. The book was ubiquitous. It seemed to be in every library, bookshop, house, waiting room and – seeing as my Dad was a mechanic – left under the back window of half the cars in Ireland. All I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with it. Irish history is REALLY DEPRESSING. Also bloody. No matter what happens everyone dies in the end. And not peacefully in their beds surrounded by loved ones. They’re hanged. Shot. Bayoneted. Blown apart by cannon balls. Ridden down by big cavalryman waving terrifying sabres. There’s also the odd burning at the stake, being flayed with whips and, big favourite, being drawn and quartered to go with the hanging. And that’s to say nothing of the wretched thousands in a constant state of starvation just filling in the background.

The same, it seemed to me, was also true of most Irish literature, whether it be books, poems or plays. Anytime I watch The Importance Of Being Earnest I almost expect it to end with the cast dangling wittily from a highly fashionable yet slightly disreputable gallows. Is it any bloody wonder I preferred the cosier, warmer, gentler escapes of Stephen King and Clive flippin’ Barker? Irish history made The Books Of Blood look like See Spot Run.

I also knew, because I was taught history in an Irish school, that we have a way of valorising our struggles, complaining about our oppression, sentimentalising all the death and torture, ennobling the suffering of the peasants, and bitterly blaming it all on the Brits. It seemed only safe to assume that Thomas Flanagan did the same. At best it would be a torrid pot-boiler, at worst it would be a trudging rehearsal of every grievance and injustice inflicted on the long-suffering Gaels, a tragic failure of yet another struggle for freedom.

So, yes, I avoided the book and the series.

Given this attitude, I have no idea why I actually picked the damn thing up and read it. I simply saw a copy and made the decision. It seemed removed enough from my school days and Sunday nights in 1982 running through the living room and stealing glances at the television, terrified lest I see a hanging or a keening widda or a barefoot orphan being bullied by a landlord. The time had finally come to see what all the fuss was about.

If there is a better literary historical novel dealing with the subject of Ireland then I desperately want to read it. Heck, if there are any out there only half as good I want to know about them. This is an astonishing, sweeping, vivid, impassioned portrait of a deeply dysfunctional world thrown into an ugly state of chaos and violence that is as pointless and fruitless as it is sudden and appalling. Written with incredible skill, mimicking the disparate Irish and English voices faultlessly, invoking both the beauty and grim drudgery of the landscape, examining the lives lived on all levels of society and justifying them to the reader without ever trying to apologise or to avoid implicating them for their actions, this is a panoramic novel of intellectual weight and cumulative emotional power. It tackles the ugly sectarian, social, political, economic and cultural divisions that renders conflict and hatred inevitable. The various sections of Irish society are utterly alien to each other and there is no bridging the gaps save through small simple acts of humanity that are dwarfed by the sheer weight of history.

Flanagan deftly creates a series of fully realised characters to serve as witnesses to the tragic events. A poet, a parson, a United Irishman, a Catholic landowner. George Moore, the latter, is one of the few not carried away by the forces unleashed when the French land. His brother, however, is swept along by the tide, and not even his cold aloofness can protect him from the consequences.

As expected, it all ends very very badly for an awful lot of people. Flanagan absolves nobody for their actions, but neither does he withhold judgment from the conditions that make them almost inevitable. The two great powers, Britain and France, regard Ireland as little more than a distraction and the bulk of Irish people as little more than savages ruled by a corrupt, incompetent, self-serving gentry. It’s a horrible mess, but a mess it must remain for reasons economic, social, religious and, thanks to the charming theories of Rev Malthus, ideological. It’s almost unbearable, and this is only ONE incident, relatively insignificant, in centuries of bloody history. Is it any wonder we hate to think about it? Is it any wonder that those who do think about it are driven nearly half-mad by it?

Strumpet City is getting a lot of attention at the moment, and I hope to read it myself in the next few weeks. For now, though, I think I’ll set aside this brilliant, shining, monumental work and pick up something less appallingly upsetting. Something with the end of the world and zombies. That should cheer me up and restore my faith in humanity a little.

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What he said.

I’m still trying to find out where I can watch the video.

Here’s the music from the Chieftains…