FictionWhen wars end, the real trouble begins. The slave-holding American South lost the civil war but the psychic scars left by racism were carried, by white people as well as black, for more than a century after Abolition. A colonial power may be expelled by a movement of national liberation, but habits of self-doubt may persist long after the occupier has gone.
Likewise, a freedom-fighter may escape the hangman's noose and the life of the convict in Tasmania, finding fame and fortune in the Land of the Free, only to discover that his early sufferings are not so easily transcended. In the end, he may in fact be sabotaged by his very virtues. Such a figure is James O'Keeffe, hero and anti-hero of Joseph O'Connor's latest novel, whose title indicates not just the name of the town in which much of the action is set but also these bitter, underlying truths. O'Keeffe, known as "the Blade" (in much the same way that Thomas Francis Meagher was called "the Sword") is at once brave Irish rebel and tawdry showman, fearless abolitionist and sometimes racist, harsh dispenser of Reconstruction Law and sensitive soul having a very hard time of it. All this against a background of anarchy and improvisation in the West of 1865-1866.
Such a tale has been retold in a vivid, boy's-own style by Thomas Keneally in his devoted scholarly study The Great Shame and in telescoped, immensely dramatic form by Donal O'Kelly in Catalpa - but O'Connor opts for a more psychological and layered approach, which stresses the inner uncertainties of men and women who are anything but what they seem to others. In this book heroes may be clowns, prostitutes holy, cowards brave, scientists sentimental. Although Redemption Falls is written with the panoramic sweep of a major Victorian novel - witness its repeated references to George Eliot and Charles Dickens - it is filled also with interior monologues and implied soliloquies, which could only be written by someone who has studied the works of late modernism.
History, so it is said, is what gets written in official narratives by the winners, whereas "tradition" is what ordinary people, often life's losers, remember as having actually happened. But what transpires when (as is so often the case) nobody really wins a war or can even say what winning or losing might truly mean?
O'CONNOR WRITES OUT of conviction that there can be no history, only histories: and so he has produced what I would call a "choric novel", narrated not only through the consciousness and actions of O'Keeffe, but through the poems and ruminations of his loving but unhappy wife, Lucia-Cruz McLelland; the gossip of local townspeople; the newspaper diatribes of his enemies; the oral narrative of his black serving woman. The letters and reports of a whole retinue of officials are set into constant tension with ballads and come-all-yes, which offer many alternative versions, especially on the Confederate side. As in Star of the Sea, prequel to this book, O'Connor alerts us to the fact that popular balladry is as likely to lie in extenuation of barbarism as any government document.
O'Keeffe is a major literary creation: with every new version of him put into circulation he becomes more unfathomable, fascinating, a man who in the end seems strange even to himself. "People like not being able to understand things straight away," he muses at one point: "What was life itself but an appearance not comprehended?" There is much mystery at every turn in this plot, but no lack of final clarity, for O'Connor is incapable of writing an obscure sentence. However, he insists that in a world in which even our interior monologues may be as deceptive as a newspaper editorial, it isn't enough to have one or two persons' accounts - as Toni Morrison has said, a writer needs "a whole community of memories". To have produced such a kaleidoscope is a superb artistic achievement, worthy of comparison with Morrison's own book Beloved.
Redemption Falls also deals with the voyage of a troubled woman, Eliza Duane Mooney, in search of her younger brother Jed, one of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war. Like Morrison's Beloved, this child appears in the story as both victim and judge, as tormentor and liberator. Seemingly mute after many traumatic episodes, he is adopted by O'Keeffe as a sort of surrogate for the son the Irishman guiltily abandoned in Tasmania: but, like "the Blade", the child becomes the site of endless ambiguity, a focus of endless gossip and speculation. (The debt to George Eliot's Silas Marner is deftly and openly acknowledged in the text.)
O'Connor shows well how the anxieties of adults about their own "lost" values are forever projected onto the image of childhood. In this book childhood returns many sentimental adults to those very nightmares that led them, in some desperation, to evoke it.
Star of the Sea used the reports of dead bodies arriving on coffin-ships in 1840s America to cast an angular light upon a contemporary Ireland in which refugees from Eastern Europe arrived asphyxiated in container-trucks in Rosslare. With its tales of soldiers pressed prematurely into battle, Redemption Falls seems to presage our own world with mere boys making up armies in Eritrea and Bosnia.
O'CONNOR HAS CLEARLY done a massive amount of research, especially in New York archives, and the reader is struck by analogies between the vigilante mobs who threaten O'Keeffe and the Klansmen of a more recent age. That Irish persons, who might have known better from their own colonial experience, were drawn to take the side of slave-holders as well as of the abolitionists, is central to the theme.
Star of the Sea ended with the arrival of its shipful of disparate and desperate characters in America. This is a story set 18 years later (Eliza Mooney being the link), concerning the instability of an Irish America that never really knew which side it was on in the great debate of that age.
In more recent decades, Irish- Americans have written fine novels and scholarly monographs treating Ireland as a stable entity that can be assessed, controlled and ultimately contained by their seemingly objective, authoritative narratives: but O'Connor here brilliantly reverses the manoeuvre, in the process demonstrating just how shaky and uncertain is the ground on which every Irish-American stands. He clearly loves and has learned from the work of many leading American novelists of today, from the brooding but exact lyricism of Cormac McCarthy, through the trauma narratives of Morrison, to the garrulous oldest-widow-tells-all style of Allan Gurganus - but to this rich blend he has added a gift for storytelling and an amplitude of language all his own.
The result is a big book filled with memorable, flawed but utterly real persons. It affords all the pleasures of old-time 19th-century plot-line (appropriately enough since it's set smack in the middle of that period), but in a fashion that honestly reflects all of our 21st-century uncertainties about the power of storytelling to heal anybody or to illuminate anything. O'Keeffe the stage-rebel yearns to tell adoring audiences "I am an imposter", but he knows that, although men distrust fictions, they cannot live without them. "Only the wind stays the same in the end", we are told, "and the bodyless who live in the songs".
Yet there is a surprising sting-in-the-tail that, after all the preceding horrors, is a moment of mellowness and happiness. It shows how even the most damaged persons can survive trauma and report it with clarity. This book consolidates and deepens O'Connor's stature as a major novelist. He has taken on the US without in any way abandoning his Irish roots. It will be hugely interesting to see whether the US is ready for him.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature and drama at University College Dublin. His most recent book is The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge University Press)
Redemption Falls By Joseph O'Connor Harvill Secker, 457pp. €13.99