In 1937 the poet W.B. Yeats wrote: "When I stand upon O'Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises". It is a pleasing fancy to imagine that Yeats, as he sets himself amid urban discordancy in this ominous passage, was but a short walk from the edifice in Fleet Street/ D'Olier Street where The Irish Times newspaper has daily come to life throughout this turbulent century. For there is something about the very nature of newspapers, whatever the ostensible politics of their owners and leading articles, that reflects the uncontrollable, heterogeneous conditions of modernity that Yeats so deprecated and against which he hoped a few strong leaders would prove effective. Indeed a newspaper offers immediate reportage, opinion, gossip, rumour, advertisements, story and chronicle, text and visual image in quotidian juxtaposition in a way that can seem truer to the contingencies of 20th-century history than other less ephemeral forms of record and social narrative. And there is in its openness to the variety of human experience an inevitable democracy of feeling about the human condition. Which is why dictators close newspapers, and free societies nurture the "freedom of the press".
Fintan O'Toole's Book of the Century is a working journalist's personal celebration of newspapers in general and of this newspaper in particular. In offering a judicious and succinct account of the Irish century as it draws to an ambiguous close (whither the North? whither the Irish language in whose cause so much energy has been expended? whither the Church whose authority has been central?) he focuses on how The Irish Times responded to specific events, issues and movements. He manages this with a deft touch, so that his own narrative seems at once attentive to how the newspaper has changed over time (from Unionist redoubt with its own distinctive, Irish take on things, to the present kaleidoscopic mirror on a rapidly changing society) and to the broad movements of Irish and European history. The control of perspective is impressive indeed. So on the one hand we learn of John Healy, who took over the editorship in 1907, that "his grammar was extraordinarily conservative . . . His inflexibility was such that he insisted that the first editorial always consist of three paragraphs of 22 lines each and the second of a single paragraph of 35 lines", while on the other we informed that "in the entire 19th century the total number of deaths caused by all the wars waged throughout the world was about 19.4 million. In the Great War, 26 million would die, half of them civilians killed by the malnutrition, disease, lack of medical care and the breakdown of social services that resulted from the conflict".
In a note reader, the volume explains how it should be read (for this book is no mere coffee-table production for millennial scanning; it is a complex piece of work that seeks to suggest the immediacy of history as it constructs a history of its own): "the book is designed so that each two-page spread is read as one page. A time line runs to the extreme left and right. The two outer columns contain Fintan O'Toole's text and the inner columns contain original articles published in The Irish Times throughout the century". Some of these latter are photocopies of original newsprint; usually they are reprinted in more readable form. Then there are the tellingly chosen photographs deployed throughout the book, so that each two-page spread has its sense of significant juxtaposition that is a newspaper's response to the daily events and their temporal unfolding. Pages 208 and 209, for example, are built up as follows: a time line takes us from June 21st, 1963, from the election of Pope Paul VI to the November 22nd assassination of John F. Kennedy. An Irish Times story from 1967 concludes on this page. It tells how priests have been granted permission to attend the theatre (the time lines, O'Toole's text and the reprinted stories and photographs are not temporally synchronised); another story about racism and Dublin landladies begins on the same page, while O'Toole quotes from a de Valera speech on partition and records the beginning of the 1956 IRA campaign. On page 208 is a photograph of Donogh O'Malley, accompanied by these diverse texts. Page 209 is given over to a fascinating photograph (of an event which, as it happens, I witnessed myself) captioned "A Taste of things to come". It records the mass protest in 1963 against the decision to establish the New University of Ulster at Coleraine rather than Derry. It shows the nationalist Eddie McAtteer, with the unionist Mayor of Derry, Albert Anderson, and a young John Hume before a large crowd at Stormont.
The links, associations and implications of these juxtaposed images and texts makes this two-page spread a hermeneutic challenge of intriguing proportions (readers will make various, individual connections between the diverse elements). And each two-page spread in the book will offer a similar semiotic experience. Accordingly, this volume is a constantly stimulating testament to the heterogeneity of that modernity Yeats so abominated, the coming of which is the main burden of O'Toole's artfully constructed narrative contribution to the work as a whole.
Terence Brown is the author of Ireland: A Social and Cultural History