Dublin (and the Rare Old Times)

The Rebels of Ireland:
The Dublin Saga
by Edward Rutherfurd
Paperback | Ballantine Books | ISBN-13: 978-0345472366 | February 2007 | $16.95

In assessing the quality of a work of historical fiction, there are, apparently, three basic questions: (1) is it sweeping? (2) is it epic? and (3) is it Michener-, or at very least, Uris-like?

Fortunately for Edmund Rutherfurd, his newest paperback release, The Rebels of Ireland, comes up aces on all three points:

Covering a 300-year period in Irish history, it is indeed sweeping (although slightly less sweeping than his first volume on the subject, Princes of Ireland, which covered over 1,000 years of Irish history).
Ranging across the width and breadth of the island, and examining the effects of economic, political, and agricultural events across social and religious boundaries, it is epic.
Focusing on the fates and fortunes of several fictional families and their interrelationships across generations, while incorporating copious amounts of historical information, it is indeed very Michener-like.

It examines the critical moments in Irish history from 1597 to 1921. From the introduction of the plantation system through the Easter Rising of 1919 and the Civil War, the lives of the novel's heroes and heroines cross not only each other's, but those of Ireland's most important historical figures: Cromwell, James II and William of Orange, Tone and Emmet, O'Connell and Parnell, Joyce and Yeats, and the heroes of 1919.

In short, when it comes to advancing the genre of historical fiction, Rutherfurd does not aim to play the iconoclast. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing: When drink a pint of Guinness, I don't want my pint to challenge my concept of what a Guinness can be: I want rich, I want dark, I want the sweet, sweet taste of roasted barley. (Mmmm. Roasted barley.) When I settle down in my bed at night to unwind after long hours of whatever it is I do all day, I'm usually too tired to sort out a lot of moral ambiguity; I want sweeping, I want epic, I want a novel like Rebels of Ireland. . Rutherfurd's good characters have an appealing likeability; his bad characters have a pleasant dastardliness.

When it comes to presenting Irish history, however, I give Rutherfurd some real credit. In his novel he stands for three extraordinary propositions.

First, not all Irish Catholics were poor.
Second, not all Irish Protestants were bad.
Third, not everyone died or immigrated during the Famine.

Tragic history is never well-served by distortion, and in presenting these truths he pays legitimate respect to the bitter memory of Catholic oppression and tragic legacy of the Great Hunger.

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