Groundwork by Robert Welch Blackstaff Press 202pp, £8.99 in UK
This short historical novel is impressive in its scope. It recounts brief (usually four or five pages long) episodes of the lives of a whole array of characters based around Cork City and County, in an ambitious timespan from 1586 to 1964.
Almost three-quarters of the book deals with several family histories from the Famine to the 1960s. Interspersed between these are various earlier accounts: a tale of English atrocity told by an 18th-century Gaelic poet, and a letter to the authorities from an Elizabeth planter in north Cork, begging them for aid in fighting off the natives who are attacking his family.
The connections between all of these episodes are often deliberately tenuous, demanding the reader to relate them to each other not only in terms of plot development but also in terms of their thematic significance. Taken together, they form a clear impression of lives lived in hardship, of ruinous alcoholism, of abusive and violent men, of an occupied country and an oppressed working/peasant class. In short, readers of Irish history and fiction will find themselves on familiar territory in many ways.
While this may not necessarily be a bad thing, Welch offers more than this. This novel, which is so aware of history as a certain blend of personal, tribal and national narratives, provides us with the opportunity to blend these narratives in our own ways while also providing us with a few strong characters who create their own histories. Of these few, who stand in direct contrast to the many others who suffer from the consequences of their past, one dares to have children out of wedlock, another has the wisdom to choose the safest boat to America and become a successful businessman, and others live by an ultimately rewarding ethos of hard and honest work.
Among all of these, Geoffrey Keating stands foremost. The scholar makes an appearance midway through the novel, proposing to write his Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, his Basis of Knowledge about Ireland. The title of the novel must be connected to Keating's work, as is the novel as a whole. Keating declares that "the history must needs be written, because the pain and chagrin of events is compounded by the wilfulness and error of historians". Keating's history, which aimed to correct anti-Irish propaganda as it was written by the likes of Spenser and others, is a self-conscious rewriting of events.
In a sense, Welch imitates Keating by telling us some stories that we are familiar with, if not in the detail at least in their general flavour, but in such a way that we become aware that different histories of Ireland (and particularly Cork) may be drawn from them.
What is surprising about this novel, given its broad scope and its interest in historical detail, is that it is only some two hundred pages long. The structure that Welch uses - a disconnected, episodic narrative - could easily have supported a book at least half this length again. On the one hand, its focus could have been sharpened to produce ever more detail of the personal histories of its protagonists, while on the other it could have pulled back and painted its various histories on a much broader canvas. Welch's decision not to do so, while a little disappointing, may stem from the cautious belief that what he has created is only a "groundwork" and not a comprehensive history; that what he has supplied here is simply a foundation on which new historical thought can be built.