Irish Wake

By Mayo Mohs

THE YEAR OF THE FRENCH by Thomas Flanagan

Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 516 pages;

$12.95

The year is 1798, and in County Mayo, on Ireland's impoverished west coast, an army of the French Revolution has landed to rouse the embittered Irish against their English overlords. Elsewhere in the country, in gibbet-strewn Wexford and in bloodstained Ulster, rebellions have already been crushed. Any remaining hope hinges on the rising in Mayo, and there, in the euphoria of the French landing, the cause catches fire. In centuries hence, the Irish will sing of the glorious Men of the West and the humiliation of the British at Castlebar. This is all history, and so is the piteous climax, as Lord Cornwallis sweeps in with his troops against the rebels, determined not to endure another Yorktown. In his prodigious first novel, Thomas Flanagan grants this historic episode a new and panoramic life.

Flanagan's forte is his cast--some of them historical characters, others fictive--each invested with a complex, fascinating personality. Here is the reluctant scribe of rebellion, Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, a vagabond poet who scrounges a living by running an outlaw school, reciting his Gaelic verses in the houses of the rich and pursuing neutral grain spirits and colleens with unflagging energy. Here, in the cool rationality of Moore Hall, is MacCarthy's fellow Catholic and countryman George Moore, historian of the French Revolution and Cassandra of its Irish offspring, dreading that "the spirit of Rousseau is in the very air these days, like dandelion puffballs." Recording the contagion, as one of the novel's several narrators, is the Rev. Arthur Vincent Broome, M.A. (Oxon.), dispatched from England to shepherd a Protestant flock in distant Killala but soon questioning whether he is merely a "priest to a military cult."

Novelist Flanagan, 56, is a longtime English professor (University of California, State University of New York) who has spent much of his spare time over the past two decades in Ireland. He is an unabashed Mayo chauvinist, and his lyric affection for the land and the people animates his characters. Even the Rev. Mr. Broome drops his scholarly tone to write how Irish music "would come to us with the sadness of a lost world, each note a messenger sent wandering among the Waterford goblets." Yet the author is too honest a historian to let sympathy alter circumstances. The first taste of revolution is a heady draft, but the dregs of doom lie at the bottom of the glass. "It was all poetry," observes one survivor wistfully at the end. This thoughtful, graceful elegy is no less.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.