Flanagan’s Ireland

Thomas Flanagan wrote three novels about Ireland, so it is inevitably said that he wrote a trilogy, but that is misleading. It’s better to think of the books as (a) an elaborate extended prologue followed by (b) an enormous diptych. It’s best to think of the books this way because it’s best to think of the history of Irish rebellions this way.

The Year of the French (1979) narrates the unsuccessful Irish rebellion of 1798 through the eyes of several characters, most notable among them a poet named Owen Ruagh MacCarthy. After this fiasco, it was many decades before the idea of outright revolt took strong hold once more in Ireland.

The Tenants of Time (1988), the longest of the three novels, also shows us history through the eyes of a few persons, mainly residents of an imaginary West Cork market town called Kilpeder, who participated in the Fenian rising of 1867. A young aspiring historian named Patrick Prentiss — a Dubliner, Oxford-educated — tries to understand what happened in that uprising, and his enquiries lead him from that moment right through to the rise and fall of Parnell and then, a year after Parnell’s death, to a murder in Kilpeder, a strictly local tragedy.

The End of the Hunt (1993) returns us to Patrick Prentiss, whose inability to discover what had really happened in Kilpeder caused him to give up history in favor of his father’s profession, the law. Though an Irish nationalist, he fought for Great Britain in the Great War and lost an arm doing so. He returns to a Dublin that is, as Yeats famously wrote, “changed, changed utterly.” This story covers — with flashbacks to the Easter Rising and a kind of epilogue set in 1934 — the period from 1919 to 1923, that is, the War of Independence and the Civil War.

I call all this a prologue followed by a diptych because no characters from the first book appear in either of the latter two — though Owen MacCarthy is briefly mentioned in The Tenants of Time — while the second and third books are connected by the figure of Patrick Prentiss and the town of Kilpeder. We’re regularly encouraged to remember that the events of 1922 continue, in a condensed and accelerated way, the key events from 1867 to 1893.

All three books are currently published in the U.S. by New York Review Books, but the second and third in electronic form only, which is unfortunate. (And more unfortunate because the electronic version of The Tenants of Time has hundreds of errors: it was clearly scanned and then inattentively corrected.) I’d love to have these wonderful books in a uniform edition, but, as you can see from the photo above, I don’t. In the editions I have the first is 516 pages, the second 824 pages, and the third 627 pages — though because The Year of the French is set in much smaller type than The End of the Hunt, I believe the two books are roughly equal in length. In any event, they’re all very much worth reading and re-reading. I’ve just been through the whole series for the first time in a good many years, and I expect to read them again before my reading days are done.

The major characters of the novels are fictional, though real persons play significant roles in each of the novels: General Jean Humbert and Wolfe Tone in the first novel, Parnell in the second, Michael Collins and Winston Churchill in the third.

The Tenants of Time — like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, a book Flanagan greatly admired — is set in motion by a young man trying and largely failing to grasp the character of past events; and at the conclusion of The End of the Hunt we hear of another young man who hopes to write a book about the Civil War. So it goes, generation by generation, and Flanagan has considerable sympathy both for youthful enquiry and the resignations of age — resignation to incomprehension, to the mysteries that even those we know best hold for us. Often in Flanagan’s books an older person learns (sometimes from a younger person) something surprising about a dear friend or lover — something hidden and even unsuspected for decades. And if some people grow garrulous in old age, others become more secretive and never tell what could be told. No one knows — this is what Patrick Prentiss learns, this is what turns him from history to the law — no one knows the whole story of an event, or even of one ordinary person.

In 1934 the distinguished judge Patrick Prentiss is listening to an old friend talk about another old friend, one long dead, and as she mentions a dark moment in that man’s life she says, in passing, “You know all about it, Patrick.” But Patrick does not know about it, though, when he hears it, he thinks that he should have guessed. More than a decade after than friend’s death, Patrick’s mental portrait of him undergoes revision. And if he did not know that, what else does he not know? About that friend, about other friends, even about himself?

For some, of course, the appeal of history is to unearth secrets, however carefully hidden — perhaps not to know everything, but to know more and more, even at the cost of digging up old bones (metaphorically and sometimes literally). And for still others, the appeal of fiction is to imagine all that the historian will never discover. This is perhaps why Flanagan wrote novels.

Seamus Heaney, who became friends with the Flanagans when he came to Berkeley — where Flanagan then taught — in 1970, wrote many years later,

I [fell] under the spell of Tom’s strong Hibernocentric mind and imagination. It’s no exaggeration to say that he reoriented my thinking. When I landed in California I was somebody who knew a certain amount of Irish literature and history, but my head was still basically wired up to Eng. Lit. terminals. I was still a creature of my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, Belfast. When I left, thanks mostly to Tom’s brilliantly sardonic conversation, I was in the process of establishing new coordinates and had a far more conscious, far more charged-up sense of Yeats and Joyce, for example, and of their whole Irish consequence. I was starting to see my situation as a “Northern poet” more in relation to the wound and the work of Ireland as a whole, and for that I shall be ever in his debt.

And I love this portion of the reflection of Flanagan Heaney wrote for the New York Review of Books: “When The Irish Times called him a scholar, they could well have been using the word in the older Irish vernacular sense, meaning somebody not only learned but ringed around with a certain draoicht, or aura, of distinction, at once a man of the people and a solitary spirit, a little separate but much beloved.”

(See also this lovely remembrance, largely of Heaney but also of her father, by Thomas Flanagan’s daughter Caitlin.)

Heaney and Flanagan had something important in common, in addition to their literary interests: Heaney was a Catholic from Ulster, and so too were Flanagan’s forebears. That meant, until quite recently, that their people were in the minority. Complications upon complications; “the wound and the work of Ireland” indeed.

Flanagan — and in this too he is like Faulkner — communicates his sense of an ever-ramifying and ever-elusive historical truth through multiple narrators. It is interesting to note how many readers of Flanagan’s novels think they know which characters he most sympathizes with, which ones he agrees with — interesting because Flanagan himself claimed not to be so sure. In an interview given soon after the publication of The End of the Hunt we get this exchange:

Q. Would you say that your novels are informed by any particular position in the ideological debate on Irish nationalism?

A. I think that in a way I have been cravenly avoiding positions, or my position is spread across the board. I think that one reason why I began with the idea of a variety of narrators is that, obviously, there are a variety of positions to be argued out and presented. I think, to borrow a word from historians, I am more interested in “mentality” than I am in political positions. Employing multiple narrators certainly helped a lot with The Year of the French. And it helped with The Tenants of Time. Now I have become suspicious of the convention because it is a convenient convention, because you have as many perspectives as you have narrators, which means amongst say four or five or six narrators. But in fact in the circumstances of Irish social history, any kind of social history of any nationality, you would need forty or fifty narrators instead of four or five narrators.

That duly noted, all of Flanagan’s major characters are Irish nationalists or closely associated with nationalists; none is a British loyalist. So the political positions that these novels explore from the inside are, basically, the Patient Gradualist and the Urgent Revolutionary, which are, not incidentally I’m sure, the two sides of the Irish Civil War.

Why did I return to Flanagan’s books? Because they move me. Because they attend equally to the shape of great historical events and the shape of ordinary human lives, and do so in ways that seem truthful to me. Because — being partly Irish and married to someone more Irish still (a Collins whose ancestors are from Cork) — I am interested in Irish history. Because certain recurrent themes in Irish history echo very strongly themes in the history of the American South. Because I am perpetually interested in the theory and practice of political revolution — and of the alternatives to it. So look for more along some or all of these lines in future posts.