The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan
St Patrick’s day gives me a good hook for re-posting this review, in the hope of inspiring a few more people to read this superb book. Ralph Peters calls it “the finest historical novel written in English, at least in the twentieth century,” going on to say “except for ‘The Leopard,’ I know of no historical novel that so richly and convincingly captures the ambience of a bygone world.”
In August of 1798, the French revolutionary government landed 1000 troops in County Mayo to support indigenous Irish rebels, with the objective of overthrowing British rule in Ireland. The Year of the French tells the (fictionalized but fact-based) story of these events from the viewpoint of several characters, representing different groups in the complex and strife-ridden Irish social structure of the time.
Owen MacCarthy is a schoolmaster and poet who writes in the Gaelic tradition. He is pressed by illiterate locals to write a threatening letter to a landlord who has evicted tenants while switching land from farming to cattle-raising. With his dark vision of how an attempt at rebellion must end–“In Caslebar. They will load you in carts with your wrists tied behind you and take you down to Castlebar and try you there and hang you there”–MacCarthy is reluctant to get involved, but he writes the letter.
Sam Cooper, the recipient of the letter, is a small-scale landlord, and captain of the local militia. Indigenously Irish, his family converted to Protestantism several generations ago to avoid the crippling social and economic disabilities imposed on Catholics. Cooper’s wife, Kate, herself still Catholic, is a beautiful and utterly ruthless woman…she advises Cooper to respond to the letter by rounding up “a few of the likeliest rogues,” jailing and flogging them, without any concern for actual guilt or innocence. “My God, what a creature you are for a woman,” Cooper responds. “It is a man you should have been born.” “A strange creature that would make me in your bed,” Kate fires back, “It is a woman I am, and fine cause you have to know it…What matters now is who has the land and who will keep it.”
Ferdy O’Donnell is a young hillside farmer on Cooper’s land. Far back in the past, the land was owned by the O’Donnell family…Ferdy had once shown Cooper “a valueless curiosity, a parchment that recorded the fact in faded ink the colour of old, dried blood.”
Arthur Vincent Broome is a Protestant clergyman who is not thrilled by the “wild and dismal region” to which he has been assigned, but who performs his duties as best he can. Broome is resolved to eschew religious bigotry, but…”I affirm most sincerely that distinctions which rest upon creed mean little to me, and yet I confess that my compassion for their misery is mingled with an abhorrence of their alien ways…they live and thrive in mud and squalour…their music, for all that antiquarians and fanatics can find to say in its flavor, is wild and savage…they combine a grave and gentle courtesy with a murderous violence that erupts without warning…”‘
Malcolm Elliott is a Protestant landlord and solicitor, and a member of the Society of United Irishmen. This was a revolutionary group with Enlightenment ideals, dedicated to bringing Catholics and Protestants together in the cause of overthrowing British rule and establishing an Irish Republic. His wife, Judith, is an Englishwoman with romantic ideas about Ireland.
John Moore, also a United Irishman, is a member of one of the few Catholic families that have managed to hold on to their land. He is in love with Ellen Treacy, daughter of another prominent Catholic family: she returns his love, but believes that he is caught in a web of words that can only lead to disaster. “One of these days you will say a loose word to some fellow and he will get on his horse and ride off to Westport to lay an information with Dennis Browne, and that will be the last seen of you”
Dennis Browne is High Sheriff of Mayo…smooth, manipulative, and devoted to the interests of the very largest landowners in the county, such as his brother Lord Altamont and the mysterious Lord Glenthorne, the “Big Lord” who owns vast landholdings and an immense house which he has never visited.
Randall MacDonnell is a Catholic landowner with a decrepit farm and house, devoted primarily to his horses. His motivations for joining the rebellion are quite different from those of the idealistic United Irishmen…”For a hundred years of more, those Protestant bastards have been the cocks of the walk, strutting around on acres that belong by rights to the Irish…there are men still living who remember when a son could grab his father’s land by turning Protestant.”
Jean Joseph Humbert is the commander of the French forces. A former dealer in animal skins, he owes his position in life to the revolution. He is a talented commander, but the battle he is most concerned about is the battle for status and supremacy between himself and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Charles Cornwallis, the general who surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, is now in charge of defeating the French and the rebels and pacifying the rebellious areas of Ireland. Seen through the eyes of a young aide who admires him greatly, Cornwallis is portrayed as a basically kindly man who can be hard when he thinks it necessary, but takes no pleasure in it. “The color of war had long since bleached from his thoughts, and it remained for him only a duty to be scrupulously performed.”
This book is largely about the way in which the past lives on in the present, both in the world of physical objects and the world of social relationships. Two characters who make a brief appearance are Richard Manning, proprietor of a decrepit and debt-laden castle, and his companion Ellen Kirwan:
He ran his hand along the stone. When was it this keep had been built? The fourteenth century or the fifteenth. The MacDermotts had held it in Cromwell’s day…When the Cromwellian army moved west from Sligo, the MacDermotts had been blown out of their keep, quite literally. The yawning crater in the east wall was the work of Ireton’s artillery…
And here stand I, Manning thought, inheritor of that conquest, sick at heart because other armies are moving along the same road. Faces flushed by candleflame in Daly’s gaming rooms, children, like himself, of Cromwell’s spawn, bank drafts written against the harvests of Muster and Connaught. Ellen Kirwan, taken by right of Cromwell’s conquest, peasant’s daughter brought gawky and long-legged into the big house, her legs spread to receive that ancient conquest, Ireton’s battering cannon. More wife than mistress now, fussing over him, reminding him to shave, knitting patiently by firelight as he worked and reworked the account books.
“It is a sorry mess that history has made of us,” he tells Ellen. “Old wounds and old debts. God help us all.”
The book is also about the way in which history is driven by words and abstractions. “Words have a splendor for us,” observes Malcolm Elliott, “and so we send them off into the world to do mischief.”
Ellen Treacy:
On a rise of ground from which she could see the distant bay, she stopped and sat motionless, the reins slack in her thin, capable hands. The bay was empty, not a sail or a hull in sight, the water lifeless and gray. History had come to them upon these water, three foreign ships riding at anchor, filled with men, muskets, cannon. History had come ashore at Kilcummin strand, watched by fishermen standing beside their huts. Poetry made actual. Not her mother’s, not Goldsmith’s or The Seasons by Mr Thompson…That other, older poetry, the black letters of an alphabet remote from English, with prophesies of ships from France, gold from Spain, the deliverance of the Gael. History, poetry, abstractions, words which had transformed and shattered her world.
An incredibly good, involving, thought-provoking, emotionally-affecting book. I recommend it very highly.
I read this book before, on a previous recommendation from Mr. Foster. Thank you for that recommendation, Mr. F. It is an excellent read, and thought-provoking — best read with a map of Ireland close to hand.
It would be a great addition to the course list in any Black Studies curriculum — a reminder that man’s inhumanity to man has always been the norm; and white Europeans have been abusing other white Europeans since time immemorial, just as black Africans have been abusing & enslaving other black Africans since the beginning of time.
The book was turned in a movie for Irish television in 1982; however, it doesn’t seem to be available through any channel.
This should either get remedied (assuming the movie is well done) or a new one should be made; the story is very amenable to visual treatment and could do very well if properly marketed.
Not sure that the book is really amenable to a movie. The story with the multiple points of view could not really be compressed into 90 minutes or 2 hours. It would be better done in the typical Chinese fashion as a 24 episode series, with a total length approaching 20 hours.
Since China has never forgiven the English for launching the opium epidemic and the Opium Wars, and since the English are the Bad Guys in this history, there may be a chance that China would fund a suitable Irish production. After all, China funded the movie “Midway” about the US response to Pearl Harbor — probably because China has never forgiven the Japanese for their invasion & war, and was happy to pay for a movie featuring the Doolittle raid bombing Tokyo.
Whenever I read comments like that minister’s about the ‘wild and savage’ music, and such comments did and do get made about styles of music I regard as staid and conservative, if not necessarily formal or art music, I wonder how they’d react to tock and roll, let alone hip hop.
I can’t even listen to trad Irish music and figure out what about it sounded ‘wild and savage’ to the ear of an Englishman of the time. Simple, perhaps, compared to Mozart. But wild or savage? huh.
Broome’s thoughts on the balance between gentility and courtesy, though, would probably have been right on the money for the Irish culture of that time, or indeed of the day before yesterday. Applies to a LOT of cultures, certainly any with tribal OR aristocratic values, let alone both.
It also applies to gangland cultures, of course.
This is about the third or fourth time I have read this article and every time I look for the book but here in Australia it has proven to be very hard to find. But I’ll keep trying because it sounds like exactly what I enjoy reading most – convincing historical fiction. So much in that genre, so little that is really top notch. If I may, I would recommend another example of such writing that I came across completely by chance and thought one of the best things I had ever read: The Man on a Donkey, by H F M Prescott. It is set in Tudor times and is essentially about the destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII, and the Pilgrimage of Grace, a sort of spontaneous rebellion that came close to toppling the king, which I had not even heard of before, told from the points of view of many diverse narrators.
The author was a distinguished academic historian and as far as I know this was her only novel. Not only does it display the remarkable knowledge of historical detail that you would expect of such an author, but she also has that very rare and wonderful talent of writing speech and thought that seems authentically contemporary – but remains comprehensible to the modern reader. It feels like a window into another age, not just the usual novel with a ‘colorful’ backdrop and a few olde worlde expressions.
miksa,
Here’s a link to Amazon in the US, not sure how that would work for you, I’ve bought books from the UK.
https://www.amazon.com/Year-French-Thomas-Flanagan/dp/159017108X
Of course such a book might be proscribed down under, wouldn’t want the plebs getting ideas.
Here’s an Archive.org link:
https://archive.org/details/yearoffrenchnove00flan
They seem to offer several ways to either view or buy, I haven’t used them and again access from Australia might be a problem. A VPN might help.
I would think finding an American used book dealer wouldn’t be too hard, some make half their money off of foreign orders.
For a subversive idea, maybe you could get a bootleg American Kindel and then only allow it access through a router on a VPN that thinks it’s in America.
Thanks – appreciate the suggestions. I have a Kindle and a VPN so I might give that a try. I’m sure I can find an American dealer with the book, but the shipping costs tend to be a bit steep to Australia.
miksa….”The Man on a Donkey” sounds interesting.
The book is the first of a trilogy. Both subsequent books are equal in merit. “The Tenants of Time” about the 1867 Fenian uprising, and its sequalia, and “The End of the Hunt” about 1918-1922 and the founding of Irish independence. Flanagan recreates the atmosphere of inevitability and melancholy better than any writer I have ever read. Very Irish, although Flanagan was an American.
re Thomas Flanagan…his daughter, Caitlin, writes at X at @CaitlinPacific. She quoted her father as saying:
“It is not the romantic, rather sentimental Ireland of many Irish Americans that I love, but the actual Ireland, a complex, profound , historical society, woven of many strands, some bright, some dark.”