Three historical novels.

Strumpet City, Across The Bitter Sea, and Fallen.

I’ve been reading historical fiction since I was about 12, but as an academic historian I’ve become a bit of a spoilsport about it. I nearly didn’t persist with a really good novel recently because somebody in it was using black plastic bin bags in the 1960s.  I’m trying to get over this.

The three novels I’m looking at in this post are all set in Ireland between 1851 and 1916 (part of the period on which I’ve researched and written)and all three books have formed or modified or enriched my historical understanding. James Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969) which I first read at around 12, gave me an understanding of the Dublin Lock-Out that hasn’t ever really changed.    Lia Mills’  Fallen (2014) made me consider the 1916 insurgents as irrelevant disruptors, hurtful to the nationalists who had lost menfolk in the Great War. (I always knew this was a point of view, I just never felt it until I read Mills’ book). As for Eilis Dillon’s Across The Bitter Sea (1973), I’m sorry I didn’t re-read it before teaching successive generations of students about the land and politics of 1850-1916, because of its vivid portrayal of the often complex personal relationships between landlords and tenants.

Another reason why I like these three books is because even though real people from history – James Larkin, Isaac Butt, Mary Hayden – have stroll-on parts in them, the main characters are fictional, and I find made-up characters more credible in historical fiction. Real historical personages can be bent into any shape the novelist wants; several historians have objected to Hilary Mantel’s portrayals of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More in her award-winning trilogy. My teenage reading of another trilogy, Jean Plaidy’s books set in 16^th-century France (see titles at end) gave me sympathy for the murderous Catherine de Medici and a crush on the pragmatic and ruthless Henry IV.  That said, they also gave me a never-forgotten familiarity with the feuding factions in the French wars of religion. Historical novels are a great fact fixative, because, whatever about language and characters’ motivations, novelists rarely get the big-picture facts wrong.

Strumpet City by James Plunkett (1920-2003) was made into an excellent RTE TV series in 1980 (one of the best things RTE ever did, it hasn’t ‘dated’ at all). It traces the stories of a variety of Dublin people of all classes, from 1907, when James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) is beginning to make waves,  to  the famous Dublin Lockout of ITGWU members from many Dublin workplaces in 1913-14.  At the beginning of the novel Mary is domestic servant to the Bradshaws in Kingstown (Dun Laoghaire). She has already met Bob Fitzpatrick, (‘Fitz’), a stoker in a foundry, and eventually they marry and go to live in two upstairs rooms (a ‘two-pair-back’) in a tenement house in Dublin’s inner city. It was just about possible, with ceaseless housework and a regular income, to live respectably (though not healthily) under these conditions; one-third of Dublin’s population attempted it. Fitz’s friend Pat Bannister is in love with a prostitute, Lily Maxwell,  who works the streets independently of the notorious Monto brothels; after getting medical attention for a sexually transmitted disease, she gives up the life. Lily’s happy ending might not be realistic  – independent sex workers risked violence as well as disease with every customer –  but maybe Plunkett, writing in a liberalising Ireland in the late 1960s, was showing that there could be redemption after sexual transgression. There are many other memorable characters too numerous to mention, but Rashers Tierney, the courageous and cheerful  musician/pedlar who rents a basement where he lives with his faithful dog Rusty, is the heart of the book. His upstairs neighbour Mrs Bartley brings him the hot water for his tea every morning – not the tea itself, but the hot water for it. It is a telling detail.  This ‘poor-helping-the-poor’ system, which has kept many people alive down through the ages, breaks down when the slightly-less-poor fall on hard times themselves. There is no happy ending for Rashers.

Across The Bitter Sea by Eilís Dillon (1920-1994) is set almost entirely in that part  of Galway between Lough Corrib and the sea  – Moycullen, Spiddal, Oughterard, Cappagh, Barna, the Claddagh, and the city, and its first revelation, to me, living in (but not native to) Galway, was geographical; before the artificial divisions of roads and suburbanisation, all these places were one broad locality honeycombed with associations and connections. The story begins in 1851 when Alice MacDonagh, from a farming family near Cappagh,  marries the much older Samuel Flaherty, a landlord  from Moycullen. Ties between the two families make this unlikely alliance possible. Alice, however, is consistently unfaithful to the very loving Samuel with her former neighbour Morgan Connolly, and she marries Morgan when Samuel dies.   Their love story takes place against the background of landlord-tenant relationships and branching Irish nationalisms.  There are several memorable minor characters  – Master Fahy, the hedge-schoolmaster and James, his upwardly-mobile son, Jerome Burke, a rapacious landlord, and Mary MacDonagh, with her unsettling back-story as ‘tallywoman’ (mistress) to old George Flaherty. The novel  is scrupulously accurate on places and dates and incidents like the Battle of Carraroe during the Land War 1879-81, and it accurately describes conditions in the grim, reformed prisons of nineteenth-century England, where Morgan does time. It does not demonize landlords – Samuel is a good landlord but his father, George, was not, and both, unusually but not impossibly, are Catholic.  Morgan is a Fenian, but constitutional nationalism is given its due, and characters holding opposing nationalist views continue to talk to one another right up to 1914  – which was what happened.

Lia Mills, born in 1957, published Fallen in 2014.  Set in Dublin from 1914 to 1916, two-thirds of it during Easter Week, it is narrated by a young middle-class woman, Katie Crilly. At the start of the novel, her mother has made her turn down the offer by Professor Mary Hayden of a postgraduate fellowship in history in the National University, and her twin Liam has just joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers to fight in the Great War.  Soon after this, she gets a job as research assistant to two ladies who are writing a book about Dublin monuments, and this expands her social world. Liam is killed in action in April 1915 and his anniversary Mass takes place on the fateful Easter Monday of 1916.  The story from then on revolves around Katie, assorted others and Hubie Wilson,  nephew to one of the ladies she is working for, invalided out of the British army, during Easter Week. The Rising, experienced initially as rumour and noise and the action of the story takes place literally around it and behind it, until it spills over into the city as a whole. The soldiers whose experiences form the major focus of this novel are in the Great War rather than in the Rising. Over 200,000 Irishmen served in the war, and at least 35,000 died, and many of these were, like Liam and Hubie in the novel, supporters of John Redmond’s Home Rule party. It was the majority nationalist experience, but it is not in any way idealized.  Hubie tells terrible stories of what it was like to be in a ‘show’ (battle.

Strumpet City and Across The Bitter Sea field a multiplicity of characters on broad canvases, but personal growth is  the theme of Fallen. Although Mills is well aware of early twentieth-century Irish feminism, she does not make the mistake of portraying Katie entirely as a female wanting to break free. Her disappointment at not being able to take up postgraduate research is nothing when compared to the heartbreak of losing her brother. Her personal life, like that of most women of any era, is crowded and demanding,but the extraordinary events of Easter Week form the setting for her growing maturity and self-realization.

All three novels contain vivid details of everyday life. In Fallen, Katie suffers constantly under the weight of her clothes and hair, a fact mentioned by many writers born after 1880  – Vera Brittain, Annie M.P.Smithson, and many more. Dillon’s descriptions of houses (of the rich and the poor, not so much the middling) and clothes and scenery are multi-layered and evocative  and make reading the novel a delightful experience. In Strumpet City, Mary sinks comfortably into the leather upholstery of a mourning coach to follow a hearse to the cemetery. Funerals were the only occasions when Dublin tenement-dwellers experienced luxury.

Strumpet City was nearly spoiled for my father, a railway enthusiast, when the train Yearling took from Dublin to Galway departed from Westland Row station instead of from the Broadstone depot, which was where Galway-bound trains departed from at that time. If there are factual errors of this kind in Dillon’s or Mills’ novels, I haven’t found them, but there probably are.  Historical novelists have to forge ahead with the story and get the big picture right, and this is where they  trip up occasionally on minor points. History, as the late great Raphael Samuel said, is an absorbing activity that takes in everything from looking at family photo albums to re-enactments of battles, and nearly everybody ‘does’ it in one way or another. So of course there are going to be mistakes. But academic historians can get things wrong too, picking and choosing evidence to ‘prove’, e.g., that parents only began to love their children in the late 18th century, or that Ireland was an endemically-disordered country in the early 19th century, and other similar rubbish.

James Plunkett, Strumpet City (London: Hutchinson 1969).

Eilís Dillon, Across The Bitter Sea (London: Hodder & Stoughton 1973).

Lia Mills, Fallen (Dublin: Penguin Ireland 2014).

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: past and present in contemporary culture (London: Verso 1994).

Jean Plaidy, Queen Serpent (1951); The Italian Woman (1952) and Queen Jezebel (1953) – all reissued by Pan (London) 1968-73

ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS.

Every week I share with readers of this blog books I’ve enjoyed and I explain why I have enjoyed and continue to enjoy them.

RECENT READ:

Alice McDermott, Absolution (London: Bloomsbury 2023). While we’re on the subject of historical fiction, most of Absolution is set among the American expatriate community in Saigon in the early 1960s and it seems spot-on. There are vivid descriptions of everything from the way people held cigarettes to the way men routinely and good-humouredly disparaged their wives all the time. And the clothes! The girdles, the sheath dresses with dress preservers held in place with tiny golden safety-pins under the arms.The optimism of early 1960s American Catholicism is vividly conveyed- Kennedy in the White House,Pope John XXIII in the Vatican and communism (it seemed) in retreat. The war, the Americans all believe, will be over next year, and it barely affects them in Saigon anyway. Patricia, blissfully newly-married to naval engineer (actually intelligence officer) Peter, has been to college and has (almost) participated in civil rights agitation in the South with her radical-Catholic friend Stella, and she’s quite happy now to have given up her teaching job to be the wife at home, though a bit nonplussed at the enforced idleness of a house with servants. One of the other wives, the ultra-confident and scary Charlene – McDermott is very good on female power – takes Patricia under her wing and then all kinds of interesting things happen. The book’s theme is the meaning of ‘goodness’ and the harm that people can do through trying to do good, but it is very forgiving, too. I love all McDermott’s books but this is possibly her best and bravest(although it would be hard to beat Charming Billy). It’s certainly the best newly-published book I’ve read over the past decade.