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Book Review: Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga

History and the F-word.

by A. Reinsch | 2004.06.13

The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga.
Edward Rutherfurd.
Doubleday 2004. 776 pages.

In a New York Times piece published last spring (Bill Goldstein‘s “As a Novel Rises Quickly, Book Industry Takes Note” April 21, 2003), Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of the Doubleday/Broadway publishing group offered the following statement on Dan Brown’s best-selling The Da Vinci Code up for public consumption: “John Grisham teaches you about torts, Tom Clancy teaches you about military technology. Dan Brown gives you a crash course in art history and the Catholic Church”. My review is not specifically interested in Mr. Rubin’s defense of Mr. Brown’s vile, dishonest work, though I suppose I’ve just made it abundantly clear where I stand on that. Rather, I hope to concern myself with the broader implications of Mr. Rubin’s statement - that a work of fiction could have something edifying to offer the student of history.

For readers unfamiliar with Edward Rutherfurd’s previous work, since his first novel Sarum, Mr. Rutherfurd has been following the tradition of James Michener and trying to feel out the precise contribution that works of fiction can make to history-telling. The cliché “sprawling epic” seems appropriate enough here, so I wont pretend to originality and will settle for calling Rutherfurd’s novels “sprawling epics” that cover the thousands of years of stories embedded in various European settings. Princes, apparently the first of what will be an unprecedented two volume piece on Dublin for Mr. Rutherfurd, traces the interactions of seven different Irish families through nine different historical eras concluding this initial volume in the sixteenth century with a good old fashioned relic-burning in 1538 co-sponsored by Dublin’s Archbishop Browne and Henry VIII.

I haven’t sought out any of Mr. Rutherfurd’s thoughts on the place of his work in any historical dialogue. My own opinion is that fiction like his offers students of history, particularly newer (though not necessarily younger) ones, a unique understanding of the task of social history when that task is simply and broadly understood as an examination of people living. His novels attempt to recreate very plausible lives in specific historic circumstances and furthermore, Mr. Rutherfurd is perfectly thorough in his accounting of his sources and the areas where he felt comfortable taking artistic license either due to a lack of historical data or for the simple management of a coherent plot. His keen understanding of his own responsibility manifests itself in pronunciation guides, maps and a detailed preface and afterword.

While his sense of scholarly accountability may be impeccable, Princes resurrects old techniques in a less satisfying manner than in his best work, Sarum. Physical traits and character quirks are passed down through the generations and serve as useful genetic markers for his families. As we might guess in a piece this lengthy, sometimes this is done well: The Fergusa and the O’Byrne eyes are developed minimally, and work as a result. Sometimes the device is ham fisted as is the case with a different set of eyes in the MacGowan family. Mr. Rutherfurd deserves credit for navigating these potentially problematic distinguishing characteristics away from anything that too closely resembles a weird and inappropriate familial determinism. The shrewdness of the MacGowans plays differently in different ages. The powerful Doyles are alternatively benevolent and menacing before settling into a well written grey area.

A large-scale movement away from motivational clarity, however, is not quite as evident in Princes as a whole, and Mr. Rutherfurd’s assistance to the task of history-writing becomes questionable. In each of his novels, and I don’t believe Princes is an exception, a reader can discern a decidedly Enlightenment-friendly agenda as history progresses and the behavior of Mr. Rutherfurd’s families modifies accordingly. In the earlier historical stages of Princes, the motivations that force our players into life-altering action bend heavily towards what twenty-first century readers would see as irrationality. Pagan superstitions and prophecies lead towards a brutal death in Mr. Rutherfurd’s fifth century Ireland. A tenth-century monk chooses a very vaguely described and very vaguely followed religious calling over an obvious and comfortable love that Mr. Rutherfurd has established with a six hundred year precedent. As the reader moves towards modernity, however, we can see reasoning shift. Characters still navigate a tension around potentially irrational motivations, but more easily romanticized irrationalities like loyalty and honor replace the unfriendly minefield of religion. Economic concerns and class boundaries weigh more heavily on our familiar protagonists as we near the eruptive climax: the sixteenth century. Embodiments of unsentimental reason and blinding devotion to Popish shenanigans are opposed in the explosive marriage of Henry Tidy and Cecily Baker, and this opposition is mirrored and magnified in the closing sections of Princes as the inevitability of Henry VIII’s schism becomes the reasonable choice for the families we’ve known for more than seven-hundred pages.

My reading is, at the moment, less than charitable here and I should note that devout defenders of Roman Catholicism like Cecily Baker Tidy are treated with nothing but loving respect by Mr. Rutherfurd. However, his movement towards reason and away from what will come off as silly superstition when his families are threatened with death have the potential to become dangerous ground in the second volume. The Earl of Pembroke’s twelfth century takeover of Dublin might not be a fresh wound in the history of British/Irish antagonism, but a British author telling a history of Ireland should be very wary of any subtext that understands any Irish fondness towards an older, Catholic order as something necessarily irrational. Mr. Rutherfurd has clearly accepted the responsibility inherent in writing a piece that blurs the line between fiction and history-telling and an ongoing, honest and thorough self-investigation will be even more necessary for a successful second volume to Princes of Ireland.

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