The Year of the French (2 page)

But it is not enough to speak only of one style, although there is indeed, throughout the whole book, the indelible mark of a sensibility. There are different styles adapted for each of the five major narrators. The success of this polyphonic structure of voices is underwritten by Flanagan’s great and appreciative knowledge of the masters of nineteenth-century fiction, Irish, English, American, and French. There are also subtly flexed variations on social and historical types. We know from the work of Scott and Edgeworth and from later critical writings by Manzoni and Lukacs that the stereotype is unavoidable in historical fiction, since in it the individual person must always serve at least to some extent as a representative of a community. The danger of course is that the stereotype may turn out to be crude and destructive. In the case of Ireland and Irish writing, there is immense temptation in this regard, since its colonial history has made the stereotyping of “native” character so easy and vulgar an attraction. The author who succumbs to the temptation presents a cartoon “realism” that impedes the possibility of analysis.

Perhaps it is in the figure of the poet-schoolmaster Owen Ruagh McCarthy that Flanagan most obviously takes up the challenge of the stereotype and the struggle to overcome it without entirely abandoning the useful narrative functions it can command. If one reads some of the memoirs of Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century or even looks at some of the most famous representations of the histrionically doomed Irish poet, victim to drink, drugs, and history, like Joyce’s representation of the poet James Clarence Mangan, who died of cholera during the Famine, then one can see some of the sources for Flanagan’s Owen McCarthy. Other sources lie in the realm of folk memory.

But not many. This is a historical novel in a profoundly literary sense; it draws on printed and written sources, but rarely looks to folklore. This makes it the more choice that the novel could legitimately be said to have given a great impetus to the revival of folklore accounts and memories of what the local people have always called
Bliain na bhFranchach
(“the year of the French”). The film of the novel is certainly central to this aspect of its influence. But it is also a tribute to the novel’s capacity to endure such a transient and polemical adaptation and thereby reveal its richer resource. It was the fact that this novel came from outside Ireland and that it delved into such detail about the local area that, for many local historians, increased the prestige of the local memories and revived that prestige in time for the bicentenary of the invasion in 1998.

So here we have a great historical novel created by a great literary scholar and raconteur, that has already been incorporated deeply into the contested literary and cultural history of modern Ireland. It helped to bring into focus within one concentrated sequence the calamitous history of a century and a country when Ireland was invaded by the French for one month in the late summer of 1798. The history of its own reception since its first publication in 1979 is by now part of the history of the reception and interpretation of 1798 itself.

—S
EAMUS
D
EANE

For Jean, as always
,

and for Ellen and Kate
.

In memory, as always
,

of Ellen Treacy of Fermanagh

and Thomas Bonner of the Fenian Brotherhood
.

MacCarthy was light-headed that night when he set out from Judy Conlon’s cabin in the Acres of Killala. Not drunk at all, but light-headed. He carried with him an inch or two of whiskey, tight-corked in a flask of green glass, and the image which had badgered him for a week. Moonlight falling on a hard, flat surface, scythe or sword or stone or spade. It was not an image from which a poem would unwind itself, but it could be hung as a glittering, appropriate ornament upon a poem already shaped. Problems of the craft.

Halfway to Kilcummin strand, the sullen bay hammered flat to his right, and to his left a low stone fence, he took the flask from a back pocket of his long-tailed coat. Within the coloured glass, in the clear light of summer’s evening, the whiskey was a drowned moon. When the flask was empty, he sent it on a high arc towards the shore. Like moonlight’s glint upon water. Or its glow upon her rounded breast. No, the image demanded a flat surface. Until he had the image, he would be its slave.

At Matthew Quigley’s tavern, a long, low cabin across the narrow road from the rock-strewn strand, he put his fist to the door, knocked, and waited. Quigley opened it for him, a short, bandy-legged man, bald, with a large head round as the full moon.

“You are late,” he said.

“I am,” MacCarthy said. “I had better things to do.”

“You did to be sure,” Quigley said. “In the Killala Acres.”

“It is where I live,” MacCarthy said. Quigley stood back, and he entered the tavern, bending his neck to the low door. He was a clumsily built man, tall and raw-boned, with long arms reaching towards his knees from heavy, sloping shoulders. It was a ploughboy’s body, and a ploughboy’s head, thatch of coarse red hair like a beacon fire on a hill, long, thin lip.

Three men sitting by the cold fireplace looked up towards him, and one of them spoke. Malachi Duggan, a heavy bull, shoulders hunched forward. “You are late.”

“So it would seem,” MacCarthy said. “I don’t own a watch.”

But he did. A handsome gold watch as thick as a turnip, given him years before by some gentlemen of North Kerry after a poetry competition, with branches and sprays of flowers traced upon its casing. Useless now, smashed one night in Newcastle West, the casing bent, and a litter of cogs, wheels, and springs beneath the splintered white dial, a shattered moon.

“You will take a drop,” Quigley said, and filled a glass for him.

“He has never been known to refuse one,” Phelim O’Carroll said. “Have you, Owen?”

“ ’Tis a modest boast,” MacCarthy said, and sat down with them. O’Carroll the widower, with a strong farm held from the Big Lord himself; he worked it with his nephew, a harmless half-cracked creature, and a half-dozen labourers. The fourth man was Donal Hennessey; he held less land, but he had two growing sons, and a strapping handsome wife, with long legs and smooth lovely haunches. She had been shaped expressly for the purpose, but Hennessey would have little knowledge of such matters. She gave him children and that was the bargain.

Hennessey did not matter, nor O’Carroll, nor Quigley. Duggan mattered. He sat facing MacCarthy, hands on heavy knees. The eyes were pale blue, watchful; round as moons.

“We have been waiting for an hour,” he said. “An hour spitting into a dead fireplace while we waited for a schoolmaster.”

“Sure it couldn’t have been too hard for Donal and Phelim here, with Matthew Quigley’s good whiskey to keep them company. It was hard for a man like yourself who never has a thirst.” MacCarthy raised his glass to Quigley.

“It is not for a joke that we asked you here,” Duggan said.

“It is your help we want,” Hennessey said, placating. “You can help us.”

Whiskey, raw, burned MacCarthy’s throat, and then spread its warmth through him. Light from the unglazed window fell upon the glass: imprisoned fire.

“Only a letter,” Duggan said. “There is a letter that we want you to write for us in English. A letter to a landlord. You know the kind of letter we need, and there is none of us can write it.”

“You cannot be serious,” MacCarthy said. “ ‘Remoreseless Tyrant beware. Long has your heel been ground into our neck.’ ”

“We are serious, right enough,” Hennessey said.

MacCarthy spoke in English. “‘A terrible vengeance will fall upon you. Tyrant beware.’ ”

“By God, that must be beautiful English. You rattle that out like an agent. What did that mean, Owen?”

MacCarthy did not answer him. He spoke to the watchful bull, Duggan, heavy dark head balanced easily on thick-muscled neck.

“What is it to be, a warning to the agent of the Big Lord?” He shook his head. “He would use it as a wad to start his fire.”

Matthew Quigley, greasy-apronned, leaned forward to refill their glasses, Hennessey’s, O’Carroll’s, MacCarthy’s, his own. Duggan had no glass.

“It is no warning this time,” Hennessey said. “And it will not go to the Big Lord’s agent. It will go to Captain Cooper here in Kilcummin, to tell him what we have done after we have done it. We are going to hough the cattle that he has turned into the new pasture.”

Slashed tendons and bloody bellowing in the night.

“Write your own letter,” MacCarthy said.

“An easy thing for you to say, Owen,” O’Carroll said. “You have no land to worry about. A schoolmaster has only his books, and who would take those from him?”

“You would,” MacCarthy said. “You would take the fine words that are in them. Do you not think the magistrates would wonder who sent Cooper a letter in handcrafted English?” He saw himself standing before the magistrates, and his letter being passed from hand to hand. “Much better you scratched out the letter yourselves, ignorant men confessing an ignorant crime. Draw a coffin on it, is what the Whiteboys used do in the old days. Cooper has enough Irish in him to understand a coffin.”

“It is no crime,” Quigley said, “when slaves ask for simple decency.”

“Is it not? The magistrates would quarrel with you there, and so would Hussey in the Killala chapel.” Whiskey lapped at the edges of his spirit. He drank again.

“A priest has no understanding of these matters,” O’Carroll said.

“I know,” MacCarthy said. “He has no land. If you mean to protest slavery, you might put in a word for your own. There are no worse slaves in this barony than those poor lads you bring in from the hiring fair and keep half starved on potatoes an honest man would not throw to sows.”

“Now that is a hard saying, Owen,” Hennessey said. “Poor Phelim does the best he can for those lads. He has the life squeezed out of him by the Big Lord’s agent, and so do I. And well you know it.”

MacCarthy drained the whiskey. “But you have no need to look abroad for slaves, have you, Donal? They are bred for you at home.”

Puzzled. “My sons, do you mean?”

“Do you call them so? There is no great resemblance.” In a corner of his imagination, the mother of Hennessey’s young sons stood wide-legged by cabin door.

“This is a letter that you will write,” Duggan said. The others looked towards him. MacCarthy watched their eyes. They followed where he led, hard farmer, bully, faction fighter. Three years ago, on a fairday, he led the men of Tyrawley against those of Erris, stout stick in hand, neither pleasure nor anger shaping the creased, stolid face. Leaning against the gable end of the Belmullet tavern, MacCarthy had watched, disdainful and awed. “You will use your fine English for this letter, and it will be a long one. You will say that this will happen whenever a farm is taken for pasture by any landlord or any middleman. And there will be no other warnings. We want that known.”

“You want that known,” MacCarthy said. He held out his glass and Quigley refilled it. A poet’s privilege. “Four men in a tavern want that known.”

“There are more than four, Owen,” Hennessey said. “You may be certain of that.” He was a marvel. Insults dripped from him like rain from a cow’s flank.

“The Whiteboys of Killala,” Duggan said. “You will sign it that way. The Whiteboys of Killala.”

“The Whiteboys of Claremorris were on public view two years ago,” MacCarthy said. “Two of them, in Castlebar, outside the courthouse. Gibbeted and soaked in tar.” Beyond the window, a corner of the moon. Elegant, aloof.

“Out of how many?” Hennessey asked. “The people will be with us in this.”

“By God they will,” Duggan said. For the first time he smiled.

“Not my people,” MacCarthy said. “I am from Kerry.” Clear water and bright cliffs; bird song.

“You are here now,” Duggan said. “In the barony of Tyrawley. You would do well to remember that. It is not four men in a tavern. It is a matter for the men in all the townlands.”

“I do not think so,” MacCarthy said. “You have a grievance to pay Cooper for, because he turfed out the O’Malleys to make pastureland, and you have given yourselves a grand name, the Whiteboys of Killala.”

“ ’Tis a good enough name,” O’Carroll said.

What did it matter? The Whiteboys of Macroom, the True Men of Bruff, the Honest Men of Tralee. For thirty years now they had been starting up in one place or another, and the end was always the same, bodies on a gibbet. But this was a strange year for Whiteboys, with every pedlar and travelling man bringing stories into Mayo of the great fighting in Ulster to the north and Wexford far off to the south. They had not been Whiteboys, those United Irishmen. Now they were nothing at all. Two months ago, the armies of England had smashed them.

“It is a very good name,” Duggan said. “Every landlord in Ireland knows it, and he knows what it means. There will be cattle killed and fields burned, and there is worse that could follow after. This is nothing new in Mayo. There are bodies of agents and bodies of bailiffs sunk in the bogs of Belmullet, with their eyes squeezed out of their heads and their backs cut to ribbons by thornbushes.”