Category Archives: Historical novel

My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor

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Summary: an outstanding historical thriller of Europeans united against the Nazis

Philippe Sands once wrote a very fine book on the origins of the international law on crimes against humanity and genocide, East-West Street. This does not in my mind absolve him of writing The Ratline: a pointless, rambling wastrel of a book, undertaken, it seems at the behest of the son of a Nazi, who believed his father was, nevertheless, a good man.

He wasn’t.

The Ratline in question in the book’s title was a bit of a Godot character. It never really shows up. The Nazi in question could not stump up the cash to pay the venal and corrupt Vatican officials who were offering Nazis a way of escape from the allies’ dragnet to South America and Southern Africa.

Despite his high profile role in the Vatican Hugh O’Flaherty doesn’t show up in Sands’ Ratline either. Not that this committed anti-Nazi Irishman would have had anything to do with it. But he is an altogether more interesting character, with a much more interesting story to tell of a single night than Sands found to tell in the years he covers before, during and after the war in The Ratline.

O’Flaherty was the head of one of the key Italian resistance networks of the Second World War, run vastly more effectively and altruistically out of the Vatican than the later Ratline. With his pan-European group of Irish, Italian, Dutch and British friends he kept thousands of Jews and escaped prisoners safe as the Gestapo grip on the city tightened.

My Father’s House is a wonderful historical thriller that, by focussing on a single mission by the group introduces us to its various personalities. These take turns narrating the events of the mission. This is an elegant and compelling way to explain to the readers their previous lives before the horrors of the Nazi occupation forced heroism upon them. One scene, in which the British ambassador to Rome, a member of O’Flaherty’s group, encounters O’Flaherty and his deputy, British officer Sam Derry, in the Vatican gardens is particularly chilling. Derry is rehearsing the false names and addresses he will give up under torture if captured.

It is a wholly gripping and deeply moving story of love and friendship in the face of adversity, and asserts a position for O’Flaherty’s alongside Casement as one of the great Irish humanitarians of the Twentieth Century.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

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Summary: already a modern classic

In the middle 1980s, Bill Furlong is a fuel merchant in the town of New Ross in the South-East of Ireland. He is doing alright in difficult financial times. But on the verge of middle age, this father of five daughters is beset with the usual worries, about money, about the future of this daughters, about getting them into the good school in town. Perhaps, he feels these worries more keenly than others because, this is the only family he has, his mother having died when he was a child and never knowing his father.

In the run up to Christmas, Furlong’s work brings him all sorts of places, including to the laundry that the nuns run, where they take care of girls who have become pregnant out of wedlock. This was a fate Bill’s mother avoided because of the kindness of her employer, a Protestant woman farmer who made sure this didn’t happen.

Small Things Like These is a very small book about an enormous thing. It is a beautifully written and intensely moving story of an ordinary man in an ordinary place, finding the courage to do something properly heroic. There are books fifty times the length of this one that have less to say, less memorably.

This book is sure to achieve the status of a modern classic and justly so. It is an outstanding piece of work, utterly exquisite.

Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris

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Summary: a fine historical thriller based on the manhunt for the regicides of Charles I

The Act of Oblivion was a key law in British history. It paved the way for restoration of the monarchy by promising to forget the offences of most, but not all, of those who had waged war on Charles I.

Exempted from the act were the regicides, those who signed the death warrant of Charles. For them the fate of hanging, drawing and quartering awaited.

Many foolishly surendered to the crown and were tortured to death in this way in spite of their pleas for mercy. Others had to be hunted down.

Robert Harris’ book focuses on the manhunt for two of the regicides: William Goffe and his father-in-law Edward Whalley. Goffe and Whalley have had the good sense to make for North America as Charles II approached English shores. But, they wonder, as the search for them reaches across the Atlantic, is this far enough?

Act of Oblivion is a fine thriller. It is also a fine historical novel. It would be a superb introduction to the English Civil War for anyone ignorant of the subject. It is, appropriately enough, a warts and all portrayal of the period, charting the descent of the parliamentary cause into a horrendously bigoted, brutal military dictatorship. It also details the bloody revenge of the royalists following the collapse of the Commonwealth

Other reviewers have described Goffe and Whalley’s principle pursuer, a fictional character called Richard Naylor, as a “monster.” But I think this misses the point of the book.

While the principle sympathy of the book is with Whalley and Goffe, Nayler has become what Goffe and Whalley once were and would have continued to be had they not fallen from power: a merciless zealot.

Early in the book Harris quotes the biblical verse “an eye for an eye.” Because Martin King was not born until the 20th Century he cannot go further. But this book is an illustration of King’s point that, if pursued, this maxim of vengeance leaves the whole world blind.

Silence Among The Weapons, by John Arden; and UnRoman Romans, by Siobhan McElduff

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Summary: two wonderful books that in different ways remind the reader of the consequences of violent prejudice for ordinary folk

John Arden (1930 to 2012), a long-term resident in Galway, was a distinguished playwright, and an English member of Aosdana, the elite Irish artistic association. Silence Among the Weapons was his only novel, and was short-listed for the Booker when it was first published in 1982.

1982 was when I first tried to read the book, which I found difficult at the time and brought it back to the library once I had finished part one. This recounted events in Ephesus leading up to the arrival of the Roman general Sulla’s brutal army. 

Over the subsequent years I have often wondered what became of Ivory, the book’s principle narrator, and his lovers, Cuttlefish, an Ethiopian who has been enslaved since childhood, and Irene, an agent of the Persian King. So, I decided to track down a copy and finish what I started all those years ago. 

Like Arden himself, his principle characters are theatrical types. It is from their perspectives that the “great” events are viewed. These include the conflict between Sulla and Marius for mastery of Rome, and the ferocious Social War unleashed against the Italian allies of Rome who had the temerity to claim greater civil rights.  (One part of the book, dealing with Ivory’s adventures with pirates, I thought was probably an allusion to Hamlet who went on a similar jolly before turning Elsinore into a charnel house.)

Silence Among the Weapons led me to Siobhán McElduff’s wonderful book, UnRoman Romans. This is a reader of the ancient sources that she compiled with her students. It deals with the experiences of and attitudes towards people like Ivory and his friends: the slaves, the thespians, the dancers and the gladiators who “elite” Romans despised but upon whom their privilege depended.

I suspect the lives of Arden’s characters are based more upon his own experiences in the theatre than on the ancient texts. But one thing he seems to get very right: McElduff notes that “the Romans were frequently quite appalling in their treatment of those they considered outsiders or different, ” and this is something that Arden conveys starkly.

There is a clear intent in Arden’s writing to sound modern in spite of the ancient setting. Hence his references to “police” and theatre “green rooms” among other things. This is, I think, both to increase the reader’s empathy for his characters and their circumstances, and because, for Arden, Sulla, Marius and the Social War are mere examples of the colonial violence that has plagued the world for centuries. The second part of the book, for example, dealing with the eruption of the Social War makes very clear allusions to the beginnings of the Troubles in Derry: Arden even traces the beginning of his conflict to the reaction of the “City” to the reasonable demands of a “Civil Rights Association.”

I must say I still found portions of Silence Among the Weapons difficult: for one thing I would have expected a playwright to be able to present dialogue more clearly, but much seemed buried in long paragraphs. But the book is well worth persevering with. It is often funny, occasionally horrific, and the characters appealing. One hopes against hope that they can somehow escape the random carnage that is engulfing their world.

It is a great pity that, in spite of its remarkable success upon publication, that Silence Among the Weapons now appears to be out of print and in little demand. A book that asserts the importance of remembering ordinary people in the midst of the machinations of warlords should never be forgotten.

Ashenden, by W Somerset Maugham; The Mask of Dimitrious, by Eric Ambler; and Bad Actors, by Mick Herron

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Summary: a glimmer of a new day on Spook Street?

As the increasing brutality and lawlessness of Boris Johnson’s British government becomes manifest, the forlorn cry of “We are better than this” emerges from time to time from the ineffectual British Left. To which, many South Asians, Africans and Irish respond with the question, “When exactly?”

England has certainly been different to this, as the attitudes on display in these three spy novels written over the course of the past century demonstrate. But it is not clear that it was much better when they were written.

Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden concerns the adventures of the eponymous writer who is recruited into British intelligence during the First World War, as Maugham himself was. The book is mostly set in and around Geneva, Maugham’s own principal intelligence haunt during his spooky days.

Starting in Istanbul, the superb Mask of Dimitrious traces a route through central Europe to Paris in the interwar years. It concerns another writer, Charles Latimer, as he tries to piece together the career of a man who has taken advantage of the bloody chaos following the collapse of the Central Powers to reinvent himself as a master criminal.

Bad Actors, is Mick Herron’s eighth novel in his glorious Slough House series. It follows the hilariously grotesque Jackson Lamb and his Joes as they collide with on-going Russian machinations to take advantage of Brexity Britain.

Each book echoes its antecedents. All three have a fine sense of place. But aside from this they are tonally quite different: Maugham a master of supercilious Englishness; Ambler more hard-boiled but with a keen awareness of the pity of post-First World War European history; and Herron is carefully attuned to how the farce of Brexit nourishes a similar authoritarianism to that which haunted the central Europe of Ambler’s book.

Taken together with Greene and Le Carre these novels suggest a society that has fundamentally changed over the century, shedding at least some of its ignorant self-satisfaction. Instead there appears to be a growing awareness of how Britain has often been an amoral or malign influence in the world. Now, reflected in Herron’s black comedic works, Britain’s silliness is increasing in proportion to its diminishing economic prospects and political influence.

Perhaps then there is a faint glimmer of hope that Britain can become “better than this.” Until then, different generations of spy writers offer interesting insights on how well it has understood what it has actually been.

The Sunken Road, by Ciaran McMenamin

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Summary: an exceptionally fine novel of the pity of war

Todd Andrews, as a youth an IRA volunteer, as an adult a distinguished public servant, once observed that two of his comrades on Bloody Sunday 1920 behaved “like Black and Tans.” As Diarmuid Ferriter notes in his history of the Irish Civil War, Between Two Hells, such judgements on both pro and anti-treaty troops became commonplace as that internecine conflict wore on.

So, it is a brave decision that in The Sunken Road, Ciaran McMenamin has taken just such a species of IRA volunteer as his protagonist.

Francie Leonard is a brutal man, brutalised by his First World War experiences, one of the few Catholics in the 36th Ulster Division. He has been fighting in the South with the IRA for much of the War of Independence. Now, visiting his native Fermanagh following the signing of the Treaty, he has to go on the run again when police inspector Crozier, a man he knew in France, gets onto his trail.

The book alternates between Francie’s experiences in mainland Europe, including the Battle of the Somme, with his childhood friend and fellow soldier Archie, and a few days in 1922 around the battle of Belleek and Pettigo, as Francie, with Archie’s sister and his own former lover, Annie, try to evade Crozier.

It is difficult to hold much sympathy with Francie once one learns that he had no compunction shooting a RIC inspector through his wife, irrespective of how bad a bastard the said inspector was. So, I found it tough going sticking with Francie past this early revelation. Nevertheless, it is a tribute to McMenamin’s skill as a writer that one comes to understand how Francie could have become reduced to such depredations. Further, like the priest Francie encounters on Loch Derg, one begins to hope for his redemption and that love may offer some renewal for him, something that the priest sees as possible, even if Francie cannot.

McMenamin’s descriptions of battle and violence are particularly powerful, and the friendships between Francie, Annie and Archie, and later Molloy, an American comrade of Francie, are beautifully drawn.

The Sunken Road is an exceptionally fine novel from a very gifted writer.

Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

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Summary: A sort of American Don Quixote with less philosophical substance and more genocide

Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, two retired Texas Rangers decide to take a herd of cattle from Texas to the north west, for no good reason other than they’re bored in a way that can only be alleviated by the risking of their own lives and those of others. On the way they cross paths with thieves, murderers, and impoverished and defeated Native Americans.

Obituaries of Larry McMurtry noted his admiration for Don Quixote, and this shows, superficially at least. Lonesome Dove is also about two characters wandering the countryside talking nonsense, though the meanderings of Gus and Call are considerably more sanguinary than those of Sancho and Quixote.

Lonesome Dove is a beloved novel and a Pulitzer-prize winner. But unlike Don Quixote, there seemed to me little beyond the bickering. McMurtry himself was reported to have lamented the impact of the book, hoping to have written about “a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization… a kind of Gone With The Wind of the West”… which makes me like McMurtry rather more than his book, which is itself way better than Margaret Mitchell’s vile pro-slavery porn.

But whatever my reservations, Lonesome Dove is certainly an entertaining tome, its brutal characters not without charm or humour, and filled with some exciting moments of violence and with brilliant dialogue throughout.

The Women of Troy, by Pat Barker

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Summary: continuing the story of Briseis, perhaps with diminishing returns

By any measure The Women of Troy is a fine novel. I just have a niggling wish Pat Barker hadn’t written it.

This book is set in the days following the fall of Troy, but before the Greek fleet has embarked for home, it’s departure delayed by inclement weather. However It adds little to the peerless Silence of The Girls, Barker’s retelling of the Iliad and Euripides’ Trojan Women. Instead, borrowing heavily from Sophocles’ play, Antigone, The Women of Troy deals with the conflicts arising around the burial of Priam. While gripping it has few of the arresting insights on war and slavery that made its prequel so powerful.

So, there’s a bit of a Jaws 2 vibe to the whole thing. Still, paradoxically, I will be waiting with bated breath for a further sequel: the character of Briseis is a superb creation and I feel invested in her well-being now.

Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Summary: in the tradition of War and Peace but maybe better

Half of a Yellow Sun is an incredible book. A sort of a 20th century War and Peace but, for me, carrying a heftier emotional wallop than Tolstoy’s masterpiece.

Thirteen year old Ugwu gets a job as “houseboy” for Odenigbo, a lecturer at Nsukka University in Nigeria. There he meets Olanna, Odenigbo’s posh, beautiful girlfriend. He doesn’t quite realise for some time, as he continues with his household duties, that the two have effectively adopted him as part of the family, ensuring that he goes to school, planning university for him, and, when they can, taking care of Ugwu’s blood relations.

Into the orbit of this non-traditional family, comes Olanna’s non-traditional sister Kainene, a business executive, and her English boyfriend, Richard, an academic drawn to this part of West Africa by his love of its art. None of these adults receives much approval from their other relatives and parts of their communities for their choice of lovers. As the story is told from the perspectives of Ugwe, Olanna and Richard, the barbs and abuses they receive, and the tensions they endure, allow for particular insight into the diversity of Nigerian cultures and British and Nigerian attitudes towards each other.

But all of these prejudices pale in the face of the bloodbath of civil war that engulfs Nigeria and leads to the establishment of the breakaway state of Biafra.

When I was growing up Biafra was still a by-word for famine and the punchline for knuckleheaded racist jokes. With Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie describes the horror of the war there through the eyes of this small group of young people.

As well as the specific details and dynamics of that half-forgotten war, Half of a Yellow Sun tells the universal story of the impact of war on ordinary people, shattering life and love and brutalising and breaking even the best of people.

It is a masterpiece and wholly deserved of its reputation as one of the greatest books of the 21st century.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

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Summary: a spectacularly absorbing story of the collision between dreams and realities

Since its publication in 2000 Chabon’s Pulitzer prize-winning Kavalier and Clay has come to be regarded as a modern American classic. It is the story of two cousins, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Prague, and Sammy Clayman, who when then meet in New York in the late 1930s discover that they have just the complementary talents necessary to produce successful comic books. This includes one storyline featuring a Nazi-fighting superhero known as ‘The Escapist”.

The book skips back and forward in time, from Joe’s escape from Prague, up to the early 1950s taking leisurely excursions along the way into Jewish folklore, the legends of escapology, and the birth of the American superhero genre. 

It is a wildly entertaining piece of work, often funny, occasionally horrific, with central characters Joe, Rosa and Sam who you properly care about, aware that the brutal realities of the time may also consume them as they have so many others. 

Exquisite.