This book already received rave reviews in America. Two major US book clubs have snapped it up and, at the last count, three film producers were circling. Irish best-selling author Morgan Llywelyn has written a timely and gripping novel that should cause a stir this side of the Atlantic, too.
Perhaps with an eye to the multi-party talks on the North, she has the real-life historical character and 1916 Proclamation signatory Thomas MacDonagh say to the central, fictional, character, Ned: "Time and again the gullible Irish have undertaken political negotiations with the British government in good faith, only to be deceived."
The American publisher bought world rights for 1916. The downside of this for Irish sensibilities is it can be mildly irksome to have colloquialisms such "local", where the pint is "pulled", highlighted with inverted commas. But that's a minor quibble.
The stage is wartime Dublin and the historical and fictional characters are woven into a masterful plot. Llywelyn tells the story of a conspiracy of poets: Joseph Mary Plunkett, Thomas Mac Donagh and especially Padraic Pearse - portrayed very much as "the gentle headmaster of Scoil Eanna".
After an extended exposition to set the context, the action accelerates brilliantly from the funeral of O'Donovan Rossa with Pearse's chilling words: "They think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace!"
Cripples, teachers, poets, brave and mostly honourable men people this work. Doubtless the historians will quibble about the details. But the research behind it certainly seems impressive. And as a heroic novel it works magnificently.
The biblical allusions to Christ's passion and death are palpable, the "triumph of failure" theme ever present: "Early next morning they were marched down Sackville Street and across O'Connell Bridge, surrounded by soldiers with bayonets at the ready. Dubliners turned out to laugh and jeer. `Serves ye right, ye shitehawks, ye bowsies!' `Them Tommies'll put manners on yiz!' But one Dublin fireman, hosing down the smoking rubble near the bridge, called out, `God bless you, lads!'
There is a scene in which a British officer strips Tom Clarke who, "robbed of his clothing and his dignity, stood with his scrawny, shrivelled flesh humiliatingly exposed to the women staring down at him from the windows above. Michael Collins growled to the man beside him, `We'll get that fellow's name. Pass the word.' "
A footnote explains: "Captain Lee Wilson, later an RIC inspector in Wexford, who was mysteriously killed in 1920."
The epilogue quotes Liam Mac Uisten's inscription in the Garden of Remembrance: We Saw A Vision: ". . . The vision became a reality. Winter became Summer. Bondage became Freedom. And this we left you as your inheritance.
"O Generations of Freedom remember us, the Generations of the Vision. . ."
The novel enables us to do precisely that: to remember them, these conspiratorial poets and to consider our inheritance. Poignantly, the final words are: "Dublin, Republic of Ireland".
Joe Armstrong is an executive member of the Irish Writers' Union and a regular contributor to The Irish Times
