FictionEven when recognising the imperative to at least pretend to be beyond both critical fright and personal prejudice, the book reviewer may at some point have to face a bête noir that is sure to incite self- defensive dread: sheer piles of pages. The novel, it seems, has been particularly beastly to the reviewer in this regard. It is the genre that above all others regularly elicits the but-life-is-too-short remonstration. Though reviewing is not an area of writing generally steeped in self-reflection, some great literary reviewers, who usually move cockily or blithely between the piles, have on occasion stopped to reflect in horror.
"The reviewing of novels", moaned Cyril Connolly, is "the white man's grave of journalism: it corresponds, in letters, to building bridges in some impossible tropical climate . . . for each scant clearing made among the springing vegetation the jungle overnight encroaches twice as far. A novel reviewer is too old at thirty; early retirement is inevitable."
Except in comparatively rare instances, serious novels nowadays tend to stay on the safe side of the average reader's consideration - and thus also of the reviewer's life and attention spans . This is how Lara Harte began as a novelist. Part of the then ebullient upsurge of native talent, and of equivalent interest from British publishers, her first novel, First Time (1996), is still remembered - written as it sensationally was when she was just 18 - as one of the prime literary proofs that Ireland in the 1990s was now to be all about newness and youth and Dublin, and so on. Her similarly themed and styled novel, Losing It, followed in 1999. All hype - and subsequent calm - aside, these remain more than mere socially symptomatic novels; they are lively and exploratory stories that continue to appeal. They are also quite short.
Harte then took a different and largely successful turn with Wild Geese (2003), a historical romance in which considerable attention to period setting was tempered by her talents for strong characterisation. Wild Geese was not an especially elongated story, yet it made heavier demands on her quickly established readership.
Whether partly encouraged by the largely favourable critical response to her distinctive mix of the literary and the popular, or motivated mainly by organically emergent preoccupations, Harte has produced a second and much longer historical romance in Honour Bound.
Her material, the life of Michael Mallin, is very promising. Not one of the immediate names on our lips when we speak of 1916, Mallin was second in command of the Irish Citizen Army and, with Countess Markievicz, commanded the St Stephen's Green garrison. There is some uncertainty as to the detail of his advance involvement in the Rising, but he was executed with the other leaders in the aftermath.
It is good that fiction, long or short, serve knowledge by the way, but it is not good for this novel that having read it one wants to know more about Mallin, not about Honour Bound.
The problem is not length per se, but an absence of reduction, a failure of exclusion. Inspired by the extant letters Mallin wrote to his sweetheart, Agnes, during his six years with the British Army in India, Harte has carried out astonishingly comprehensive research. It is just a pity she remembered so much of it when creating a passage for Mallin from Ireland to India and back again. In a lengthy author's note at the end, Harte says she "felt the only way to recreate my subject was to do so with the speculative hand of a novelist, fleshing out the surviving bones of his story". The opposite is rather the case: she allows her research notes to weigh down, to fatten out, a story that not infrequently reveals in its better episodes her true novelistic ability to attend to visual and emotional details and the complexities of close personal interaction.
Given its subject, it is no facile invocation of the Yeatsian history-literature equation to insist in the context of Honour Bound that novelists have little business with grey truth; the painted toy of invention is all. We know this; it should be a given, implicit in advance and implied on every page. If, in projects such as this, novelists do not wish to be thought of as some strange breed of failed historians, there surely has to come a point, if not in the accumulation of research then in its imaginative digestion, when they silently declare for themselves and their prospective readers that, in the compositional moment at least, history is nothing short of bunk.
John Kenny lectures in the English department of NUI Galway
Honour Bound By Lara Harte Banyan Tree Books, 559pp. €14