The Year of the French

In 1798 a small French force under General Humbert lands at Killala on the coast of County Mayo. The French expect to be the advance guard for Wolfe Tone and a larger expedition; the Irish who flock to them, Catholic tenants ground down by Protestant landlords and already organized in secret as Whiteboys, expect the year of their deliverance. Owen MacCarthy, a schoolmaster and poet, writes, at the Whiteboys' asking, the threatening letter to a landlord that they sign as the Whiteboys of Killala. For a few weeks the rebels win. Then Cornwallis brings the army west, the rising is broken at Ballinamuck, Killala is retaken, and the reckoning falls on the countryside, and on MacCarthy, who ends on the gallows.

Flanagan tells it through five narrators drawn from the factions of the day, with an omniscient author moving between them. Kirkus admired the infinite layering of motives this produces and the way minor figures get scenes of their own, and singled out MacCarthy as one of the few poets in novels who convinces as a poet. The action is compressed into a few months, which keeps a book of more than 500 pages from feeling grandiose, and the prose is rich in rhetoric and in landscape.

What reading it is like: demanding at first, because five voices must each establish themselves, then absorbing, and finally very bleak. Louis Menand in The New Yorker wrote that Flanagan's method is to plunge the reader into a strange, wild, poetic, cruel and finally hopeless world, and The Times of London called it a stark warning against romanticizing torrid times, which is right; nobody here is a hero for long. Best for readers of serious historical fiction who want Ireland's 1798 without the ballads, and who are prepared to give it the weeks it asks for.