A novel set in the Irish war in 1798, with a
character named Thomas Treacy and his daughter Ellen,
of Bridge-end House on the Ballycastle road, within
the Killala and Kilcummin boundries County Mayo.
A band of determined, romantic Irishmen rise up in County Mayo against their English rulers. The French, secure in the success of their own revolution, decide to come to the aid of the Irish, less
for the sake of an ideal than to harass the English. Three shiploads of troops, under the brilliant General Humbert, set
sail from France. Their arrival in Kilcummin Bay is the signal for the war of
liberation to begin. In the
blaze of summer, in the first flurry of surprise attacks and easy victories, it seems that the dream of a free Ireland may be realized.
But by fall, disappointed in
their hope for more troops from France and confronted
by vastly superior forces under Lord Cornwallis, the Irish are doomed. The uprising leads to heroism, butchery, the bloody end of a dream that refuses to die.
Out of a minor historical
episode, Thomas Flanagan has forged an
epic. Scores of characters are
brought to life in his teeming pages: the poet Owen MacCarthy, taking
up arms in spite of himself; Lord
Cornwallis, his fame tarnished in
America, suavely regaining his stature as he moves
in for the kill; Judith Elliott, too romantic to
understand why the husband she loves must be branded a criminal; the aristocratic George Moore, holding aloof, watching his hotheaded younger
brother go to almost certain death, then
setting out to save him.... Here, too, is their Ireland, of the great
Palladian houses and peasant cottages,
of primitive villages and handsome
Georgian towns, and the brooding, empty
landscape between. The panorama unfolds
to show us a distant world in all its squalor
and splendor, its barbarousness
and gallantry.
Flanagan, Thomas (1979) The
Year of the French. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, NY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP1ni7u6BdE
Last update: 28
September 2015