Irish Fiction: The signals are plain: this is an Irish historical novel with tureens of history and hysteria at 9.9 on a post-Renaissance Richter scale - if there was one! Kate Bateman review Patrick Devaney's Through the Gate of Ivory.
. . . we spoke only with our hands and our lips, alone in the gloom of the Great Hall; then, love's sweet ardour dampened, we parted as the last gleam of daylight drained from the mullioned windows
This first novel does not wear its learning lightly. It comes with Latin tags, Irish maxims, English aphorisms, Shakespearean excerpts, quotes from old manuscripts and lines from contemporary poetry. Also, as the language is so dense with literary artifice, the characters so numerous and the plot so convoluted, the reader will have to keep markers to hand for quick perusals of the glossary, the map, the family trees, the bibliography and the list of key dates.
Charles Stanihurst's personal memoir is played out mostly in the west of Ireland. He has escaped there after leaving the Pale in a hurry because he unintentionally assaulted an English officer. The times are dangerous for a man of Charles's sensibility in pre-Cromwellian Ireland, during an early phase of our religious and internecine wars. Honour, scholarly pursuits and the social deprivation he sees around him are his main preoccupations. His Anglo-Irish heritage becomes an issue on several occasions, but especially when he falls in love - which he does twice. He tells us in the epilogue that he has remained unmarried, but is now the parson of St John's parish within the Pale.
However, we remember him saying, of love, that ardour "became a vortex that threatened to pull us past reason and prudence into its quickening centre".
This sweet, sad novel needed trimming. It cannot bear the weight of its flowery language, its complex plot and the mass of historical detail.
Kate Bateman is an English teacher. She tutors in the English Department of UCD
Through the Gate of Ivory. By Patrick Devaney, Lilliput, 267pp, €12.99