BIOGRAPHY: ALAN TITLEYreviews Enigma: A New Life of Charles Stewart ParnellBy Paul Bew Gill & Macmillan, 272pp.
€24.99

WHY PARNELL is still such an enigma after all these years is more a question for contemporary Irish politics than for those historians who have already adequately explained him. The books on Parnell may grow apace, but we don’t have to pretend that we do not know who he was and what he was after.

This latest book does indeed puzzle over the traces, but ultimately it clarifies what most people had already known, not least the author himself.

This is an expanded and largely rewritten version of his 1980 work on Parnell, which didn't carry the title Enigma. It is more than twice the length of that original book, and, while following its layout and chapter headings faithfully, it has added a depth and a breadth of research that drive home the study of more than 30 years ago. Occasionally paragraphs stay entirely the same, but they are then augmented by commentary and by evidence and by sources that make this a very full and rounded portrait of the man and his times.

It must be said that some of our best writers are historians, far better than bad novelists and clumsy literary critics. Paul Bew is one of those historians, and he writes with clarity and lucidity, marshalling vast research into a tight narrative and drawing conclusions from the evidence that few could quibble with. His summary that Parnell was “a conservative, constitutional nationalist with a radical tinge” is as good a nutshell that we could wish, and the rest is fine padding with a golden fringe.

Bew has to cut through a lot of the gunge and the myth-making before he arrives at his considered conclusions.

Parnell himself did not help, as he could be a conservative, a radical, an agrarian reformer, a wild nationalist and almost a Fenian, depending on time, place, inclination and audience. Nor did his followers help by heaping mythology upon him, lusting after a leader who would lead them into some kind of promised land.

Parnell simply wanted to be practical and to do whatever a politician is supposed to do. He might have sincerely believed that he could bring the landlords with him to achieve some revived Irish parliament, but the people who voted for him never really divined the divide between his privileged background and their servitude.

Everybody is a fool in the tide of things. Bew’s emphasis is, inevitably, on the man and on his party. The story is told often as briskly as a novel, with the evidence attached.

Capt O’Shea appears as the cad he was, Katherine as a strong political woman and Gladstone as someone learning about Ireland slowly, as British premiers have to do, or not. Other bit players are not as strongly drawn, but we know their type. The description of the disintegration of the parliamentary party is dramatic, and Parnell’s last days are tragic, tearjerkingly so, as that kind of telling is inevitable in this case.

There is a kind of history, however, in which the hinterland suffers. Bew is wise enough to let us know that Parnell hadn’t the least clue about what was going on outside his charmed circle. There is an Ireland beyond his ken that adds to the enigma of the title. For all his weird charisma – and it was weird – it was never going anywhere and went so far only because he got lucky. He got lucky because of the way in which the British electoral system fell in his favour and because Gladstone was one of those very few British prime ministers who read a book about Ireland.

That may have been his crowning achievement: bringing at least one British political party to the realisation that some kind of self-government was inevitable for Ireland. The great stir of things burbling away beneath the surface hardly features in the narrative – yet it was this that decided the course of the country for the following generations.

An interesting feature is a counterfactual appendix by Patrick Maume, guessing at what might have happened had Parnell lived until 1918. All accounts of the past contain a hidden pocket of other possibilities, and it is good that some of them be made explicit even though they are not history themselves. The problem is that counterfactual history can be countered by other iffy things that might be just as plausible. One reading of Bew’s fine narrative would be that Parnell had shot his bolt anyway and that his death was a good career move.

This is a rich book, balanced, nuanced and finely drawn. The author’s attempt to elucidate the “enigma” of Parnell is as good as we will get, yet the more we know the more the mystery deepens. He can still be seen as a masterful tactician, a supreme parliamentarian, a reader of the political mood or, against that, just as a tricksy hack who loved the political game and played it with skill and aplomb.

Negotiating the subtleties and rivalries of the Irish parliamentary party, and drawing us into the mystery of Parnell’s personality while retaining a firm grip of the narrative, is a fine achievement.

Alan Titley recently retired as professor of modern Irish at University College Cork. His Nailing Theses: Selected Essayshas just been published by Lagan Press