THE TENANTS OF TIME
Thomas Flanagan
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988
824 pp. $21.95
In 1858 an Irish revolutionary secret society was founded in New York. It bore the name of the Fenians, or the Fenian Brotherhood, a double derivation: one from the legendary hero of the misty Irish past, Finn MacCool, the other from the Phoenix National and Literary Society, a secret band of rebel patriots in Ireland. Within a few years, the Brotherhood spread to many conventicles in England, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and France. After the American Civil War some of its leaders came secretly to Ireland to gather people for the purposes of armed rebellion. In 1866 a Fenian armed group invaded Canada. In 1867 scattered risings occurred in the south and west of Ireland. It is then and there, that Thomas Flanagan's massive book begins.
All these rebellions failed, some of them ignominiously. By 1870 the name "Fenian" began to disappear, though other Irish Republican brotherhoods continued to exist, and outbursts of revolutionary terrorism persisted. But their focus shifted to matters involving land and politics. In Ireland the struggle became one between tenants and landlords. In the House of Commons in London, the issue of Irish self-government, and eventually that of Irish independence, had come to the fore. There was plenty of drama in both places. It involved, among other things, the popular ostracism of Anglo-Irish landowners such as Captain Boycott, whose name instantly became a widely known word in the English language. It involved the rise of an Irish constitutionalist party, led by Isaac Butt. It also involved its new leader Charles Steward Parnell and the secret intrigue and scandal leading to Parnell's fall and the divisions, not only among English liberals but, more importantly, among the Irish themselves, as well as the rise of a new generation of mostly Catholic political leaders in Ireland (Butt and Parnell had been Irish Protestants). By 1905, violence seemed to have subsided, but there was plenty of fire in the ashes. The Ulster rebellion and the eventual achievement of the Irish Free State were yet to come.
Readers may find it odd that a review of a novel should commence with such a relatively lengthy summary of the political history of a now fairly distant time. But in this case of Flanagan's book this is unavoidable. It is necessary not only for the more or less obvious reason: to enlighten the reader by giving him a minimum of information about the historical background of the novel. But there is another reason which is less obvious but--surely in the eyes of this reviewer--more important. It is that The Tenants of Time is not really a historical novel. In a historical novel history serves as the background, in order to give yet another dimension to the main story which is incarnated by imaginary persons, men and women living in a certain place at a certain time, but imaginary persons nonetheless. In The Tenants of Time, history is the foreground. It is the main story. It is incarnated by many people who really and truly existed, there and then. There are a few people, including protagonists, who are "fictional" figures, created by the author. They serve to hold a plot together, and for that purpose they are important. Yet, representative as they are of their place, time and type, they do not represent Flanagan's main purpose. That main purpose, welling up from the main source of his authentic interest, is a representation of history. Flanagan is drawn to
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