The value of the historical novel..

This summer I have mostly been reading fiction. Despite a huge backlog of histories and commentaries on current affairs, I struck out into the unfamiliar territory of the historical novel. It was very rewarding. I started with Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea, went on to Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry, and latterly Sam Hanna Bell’s 1973 classic of the aftermath of 1798 rebellion set in Belfast and around Killinchey, Co Down A Man Flourishing.

All gave the best of value. Although none are histories in any reliable or academic sense, the first two come with several pages of footnotes laying out the research that went into the writing of each. The value of this kind of novel is in precisely in its subjective treatment of historical events.

The O’Connor book is a literary tour de force. You step on at the beginning and it takes you (in the manner of a classy Victorian penny dreadful) through the course of a voyage from Cobh to coffin ship locked New York harbour of 1847, via some vivid flashbacks that fill out a plot that underpins the often paradoxical complexity of Famine-struck Ireland.

Doyle’s re-enactment of the early years of the last century round Dublin has the eponymous hero seemingly at every major historical event in that time – from Edward’s visit to GPO and through to the Civil War. A bit like Thomas Hardy’s use of fate, it’s more of an elastic device than depiction of reality. Ultimately the theme is the gradual transformation of social revolution into social conservatism.

The third book echoes the same theme. Bell rough sketches an emotional journey the early Presbyterian United Irish rebels undertook following the failed revolution of ’98 and the political enactment of the Union with Britain in 1800. What seems to stand behind it is a movement away from the radical polemic of Paine’s The Right’s of Man that argubly excited them to revolution in the first place towards the more nuanced liberal conservatism of Burke’s Reflections of The Revolution in France.

If you’ve the time and the inclination – go out and buy all three!

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty