Fiction:The late Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French (1979), claimed that "when we hold to our ears the convoluted shell of the past, what we hear are our own voices". But, he added, there is a dialectic between shell and voice that emboldens the writer of historical fiction.
Because the voices the novelist hears are inflected by a complex mixture of what we know, feel and imagine about the past, they make possible "imaginary opposites, imaginary others. Historical fiction licenses these imaginings in ways that history itself, history proper, does not".
Flanagan knew better than most that the historical novelist's task is not only to recuperate the past to illuminate the present, but to challenge the reader's perception of what history is. The question of how and by whom the past is configured is certainly a defining feature of modern Irish historical fiction. From John Banville's Birchwood (1973) to Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way (2005), the best examples of the genre are animated by a critical self-consciousness about the nature and narration of history, and a concomitant desire to complicate received truths.
WHILE JOHN MAHER'S debut novel cannot match Banville's inventiveness or Barry's lyrical grace, it nevertheless compels through its subtle emphasis on the need to remain open to plural readings of history and culture, so that the power of the past to determine the future might be mitigated.
Though predominantly a meditation on unresolved grief, the novel also explores themes of colonisation, religious prejudice and language shift through the prism of private trauma. Set in the aftermath of Queen Victoria's 1849 visit to Ireland, it dramatises the anguished predicament of Dr John Drew, a "woebegone" Church of Ireland minister living in Aghadoe, "a small damp town in the Queen's County". Drew's daily thoughts are consumed by a desire to decode the inscriptions on ancient clay tablets, an obsession that inures him to the pain of having recently lost his young son.
Gradually, however, Drew's attempts to translate the scriptures of the dead transform his understanding of death itself, and relativise his sense of faith and history. He comes to regard the past as a palimpsest that encases a polyphony of voices - "One tongue lurking beneath another" - and recognises that his own religion may be little more than "the vanity of a cleric deducing the words of a Galilean divine who died almost two thousand years earlier in Palestine". Paradoxically, such scepticism brings him spiritually closer to the Catholics he once demonised, notably the disaffected former schoolmaster Fox Keegan and Nan Tours, a seamstress with a gimlet eye for gossip. All three emerge as restless, questing individuals who are uneasy with the doctrinaire allegiances of planter and Gael.
Maher wisely resists the temptation to moralise or to judge Victorian manners and beliefs by 21st-century standards. Instead, he invites us to trace the shadowy threads of modernity within obscure historical moments. Recurring references to sectarian clashes in Ulster, Chartist disturbances in London and "trouble in the Punjab" evoke a sense of simmering crisis that has clear contemporary resonances. Far from emphasising the remoteness of the past, The Luck Penny brings it into propinquity with the present and suggests that change and reconciliation, both personal and political, must be predicated on an affective understanding of actual - as opposed to imaginary - others.
Liam Harte lectures in Irish literature at the University of Manchester. His latest book, Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-First Century, edited with Yvonne Whelan, has just been published by the Pluto Press
The Luck Penny By John Maher Brandon, 294pp. €14.99