Here we are in the mid-19th century in the ghastliness of the Irish potato famine. Anyone and everyone would have wanted to escape and some of them are on the ship ‘Star of the Sea’ heading for New York. Ireland is sometimes called the first British colony and the appalling treatment that landowners dealt out to the indigenous Irish people is as egregious as that used anywhere in African and Indian territories, including the slave trade.
Joseph O’Connor is Irish through to his bones. I don’t know his politics but any reader could make a very good guess. His historical research is meticulous and his knowledge vast. I learnt a lot even though he was writing fiction.
This ship with its lamentable passengers, both English in first class and Irish in steerage, treated worse than livestock, are desperate. This might be desperation about imminent bankruptcy and social disgrace or as basic as finding a way to feed themselves and their family. O’Connor’s description of how hunger and starvation actually affect a human body is visceral. I could clearly imagine the pain.
I don’t think I chose the right moment to read this book, coming very quickly after I had been immersed in Land by Maggie O’Farrell. I was reading so much pain around the Irish potato famine that, being English, I started to feel the blame. The attitude of the English landowners was that of Marie Antoinette, but instead of let them cake ( if they have no bread) this was: well let them eat something else, if there are no potatoes. All this was 175 years ago but it is still totally responsible for the problems of Ireland that continue to reverberate today.
I have read and loved the first 2 books in the Roman Escape trilogy by this writer: My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome. I am waiting for the last story which is due in January. Until then I will leave all that is Irish for a while and maybe head off to Greece with Victoria Hislop’s latest offering: The Wine Dark Sea.