The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New by Thomas Keneally Chatto & Windus, 732pp, £25 in UK
In 1920, as Thomas Keneally points out almost in an aside, Eamon de Valera, on a visit to New York to raise funds for the infant and as yet unrecognised Irish Republic, paid a courtesy call on a man whose name, even now, would be for the most part unrecognised by all except the keenest student of Irish 19th century history. He was James Wilson, the only survivor of the Fenian prisoners who had been daringly rescued from Western Australia by the whaler Catalpa forty-four years earlier. That visit, which links us deftly into the 20th century, is almost the final strand in a story of extraordinary complexity and richness, whose skeins Keneally has woven into a narrative that is by turns urgent, compelling, funny, clear-sighted, tragic, hugely informative, lyrical and passionate.
Other writers will salivate at his list of acknowledgments: five research assistants, not to mention his wife Judy, saluted here for her "robust help and companionship", together with numerous academics and friends and no fewer than three editors. When all is said and done, though, the credit belongs at the end of the day to the man at the keyboard who has assembled enough facts to fill a flotilla of convict ships, and then wrestled them into co-operative submission to his vision. Its major achievement is that it takes the overwhelming succession of 19th-century images which have become almost historiographical cliches - the Famine, the convict ships, O'Connell and the Young Irelanders - and breathes new energy and vividness into all of them.
Keneally does this partly through the quality of the research: there are fresh sources here which gleam like gold in the silt at the bottom of a prospector's sieve. It is a measure of the book's theme that the location of the primary sources mirrors the diaspora of his subjects: New South Wales, Boston, Montana, Sydney, Dublin, New York, Tasmania, Perth. If I mention that Mallow is on the Blackwater, not on the Lee, it is not in any spirit of begrudgery, but only because, in such a smooth flow of factuality, the solitary eddy is immediately obvious. And a British spell-checker (I assume) has, in a final despairing blow for Empire, translated "Dail" into "Dial". It is a feeble gesture of resistance in the face of such scholarship.
Keneally also achieves freshness, emphatically, through the quality of the writing. The author of twenty-three novels has learned a thing or two about story-telling, and here are stories in abundance, knitted into each other with a deftness that makes it all look deceptively easy. The structure of the book is centred on twin themes: the United States and Australia. These are linked through the biographies of men and women, famous and obscure, whose own lives intersected, both with each other and with the great themes of nationalism, power, rebellion and exile. The biographies themselves are contextualised in a prose which uses detail sparingly, but to powerful effect. There are half a dozen pages about The Nation in which you can almost hear the editors arguing and smell the printer's ink; the maladroit adventure of the Fenian invasions of Canada comes across in all its foolhardy ineptitude; you can almost feel the shells that decimated the fighting Irish during the American Civil War, and smell the sea breezes that wafted the Catalpa and her convict cargo towards freedom.
The names of some of the major protagonists are already familiar to us, but even these are treated with a freshness that brings them instantly back to life. There is Thomas Francis Meagher, the "dandified Catholic with no aversion to drink"; William Smith O'Brien, the Mandela of the Young Irelanders; James Stephens, the revolutionary proto-Marxist who "advocated Presidencies for life and would not be averse to envisaging one for himself"; and the Unitarian lawyer John Mitchel, he of the "blazing eyes [and] great charm". It is almost unfair to single any one of them out, but the most fascinating of them, in Keneally's account, is John Boyle O'Reilly, the complex Fenian and poet, acquaintance both of Whitman and Wilde, who ended up as a Home Ruler and died, possibly of an overdose of chloral hydrate, in his adopted city of Boston.
Keneally writes not only about these men but also about their wives, children, friends, relations, contemporaries and gaolers in extraordinary breadth and depth. Just as importantly, he is sensitive to the issues and realities of social class in a way that makes so much Irish history seem grimly, and misleadingly, two-dimensional. The grit in his literary and historical oyster is a powerful petition from the illiterate Elizabeth Larkin in County Galway, begging the authorities to be allowed to join her exile convict husband in Australia. The adventures of that husband, the "humble criminal" Hugh Larkin, an ancestor of Keneally's wife, open the book with a grand sweep of narrative that is almost an essay in itself and is a vital linking thread of the story until his death is recorded almost three hundred pages later.
Above all, however, what makes this book work is the power of Keneally's imagination. He has transmuted the raw material of diaries, letters, newspapers and recollections into a brilliant tapestry in which all the colours of its century glow as if they had been spun only yesterday. He breathes life into his characters by writing, not just about their doings and their travels, but about their emotions, hopes and fears. Nor is this just novelistic bravura: whenever the reader feels that Keneally is going over the top, he has only to turn to the notes, where he will find a meticulous justification for all but the most intimate of surmises - and sometimes for these too. And, in relation to the latter, if Keneally cannot be allowed his licence, who can?