The Year of the French

While I was a student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, there was an English professor named Thomas Flanagan. I never took any of his classes, but I was aware of him because he won some big book award for his novel, The Year of the French. Now, over twenty years later, I have read the book. It's quite an impressive achievement.

The book is the first of three books that Flanagan wrote about Irish history. The titular year refers to 1798, when a group of rebels calling themselves the United Irishmen, under the leadership of Wolfe Tone, persuaded the French to assist them in driving the English out of Ireland so that said country could establish a free republic. As so much of the history of Ireland during the British occupation, it ends rather badly, but for a few weeks the French took a few towns in County Mayo and General Cornwallis, who had been embarrassed in the American Revolution, was dispatched to deal with the rebellion.

Flanagan incorporates several strands into his densely packed plot. Interestingly, Tone is a minor character, and only appears once in the book, as he never set foot in Ireland during the uprising. Instead, Flanagan spends the bulk of his narrative on the people directly involved in the action. Particularly engrossing are a schoolmaster, poet, drunkard and libertine, Owen McCarthy, who has a cynical view of things but ends up joining the rebellion (he's sort of like Rhett Butler without a Scarlett O'Hara), and the Moore brothers, George and John, who are Catholic landowners. John, the younger brother, is proclaimed President of the Republic of Connaught, an act of defiance against the crown that is surely a hanging offense, and George does everything he can to see that his brother's life is spared.

The depiction of Irish life at the time is vividly portrayed. The writing, as I said, is dense, with a lot of information packed into each paragraph and quite a few characters to keep track of, but I stuck with it and by the end was genuinely concerned with the fate of those involved. I am now interested in reading the other two books of Flanagan's trilogy. It should be noted that Thomas Flanagan died a few years ago.