Out of Ireland
By Christopher Koch
Doubleday, 1999, 706pp., $39.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
During the Great Famine in Ireland from 1847-51, one and a half million Irish people starved to death while millions of pounds worth of food was exported, under the protection of English troops, because the landowners would not sell the food below the market price.
This slaughter provoked a rebellion by the Irish people against the tyranny of the British. Young Ireland was the main organisation which tried to organise insurrection in 1848. The fate of the Young Ireland leaders, transported to political exile in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), is the subject of Tasmanian author Christopher Koch's new novel, Out of Ireland.
Koch's fictional Young Ireland leaders are loosely based on the real leaders of 1848. The main character, Robert Devereux, is modelled on John Mitchel, the best of the orators and writers of Young Ireland, who was sentenced to 14 years' transportation after his republican paper, The United Irishman, called for insurrection.
Devereux advocates the tearing up of railway lines and the arming of the peasants in an uprising against Ireland's oppressors. Devereux is sent to a prison ship in Bermuda where his life is threatened by asthma. Keen to avoid the political backlash from a dead martyr, the English government sends Devereux to what they hope is political oblivion in Van Diemen's Land.
It almost works. Devereux finds his "comparative freedom" as a "ticket-of-leave" convict bearable and is able to surreptitiously meet with the other Young Ireland political exiles. He finds "contentment in a pastoral retreat from the world" as a hop farmer.
But the governor, Sir William Denison, is an implacable enemy of Irish freedom fighters and has his spies on the lookout for any excuse to do harm to Devereux and his comrades. Devereux's temporarily suppressed urge to escape his island prison is fanned as Denison and his spies circle for the kill.
Koch adds flesh to the bones of the plot with some very attractive writing. He evokes character and atmosphere with accomplished ease, and subtly extracts the dramatic tension of the political conflicts between Irish prisoner and English jailer, the class psychology of the government spy (the colonial surgeon) who comes to respect his target and social peer (Devereux), and the treachery of the Irish spy who has learned to love the empire.
Koch also offers profound insights into the conflict of political ideas amongst the Irish exiles. Devereux, the advocate of armed insurrection, is opposed to the non-violent strategy championed by a rival faction of Young Ireland.
Class, however, unites both factions in opposition to socialism, which had spread throughout Europe in the "revolutionary epidemic" of 1848. Nearly all Young Ireland's leaders came from the wealthy gentry. Their rising failed not only because of poor organisation and a belief that righteousness, spontaneity and enthusiasm were enough, but because the peasants who rallied to their support, pikes in hand, were actively discouraged from attacking property and seizing land.
The landowner conservatism of Young Ireland's leaders kept the struggle for national freedom aloof from and counterposed to the class struggle. As peasant morale ebbed away, the uprising petered out and Young Ireland collapsed.
Devereux and the other fictional "gentlemen prisoners" of Young Ireland, like their real-life counterparts, wore their class status on their sleeve. They were accepted by the colonial elite as social equals of the right breeding who had regrettably strayed from the path of empire but still made good dinner guests.
Whatever the class contradictions that were the undoing of Young Ireland, their leaders were English imperialism's victims, deprived of liberty and their country. Their history is turned exceptionally well into a novel by Koch, despite a tendency for the dramatic focus to drift in the middle few hundred pages.
Ireland's tragedy is that such a small country should have suffered so disproportionately from the evil of imperialism. Ireland's proud inspiration is that its people have never ceased the fight for national independence. Young Ireland was part of that fight. Koch's novel honours them with sympathy, honesty and top-shelf artistry.