Authors: Thomas Keneally, Siobhan Adcock
ISBN-13: 9780385720267, ISBN-10: 0385720262
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: September 2000
Edition: Reprint
Thomas Keneally is one of Australia's leading literary figures. He has won international acclaim for his novels, including Schindler's List, the basis for the Steven Spielberg film and winner of the Booker Prize; and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. He lives in Sydney, Australia.
In The Great Shame, Thomas Keneallythe bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Listcombines the authority of a brilliant historian and the narrative grace of a great novelist to present a gripping account of the Irish diaspora.
The nineteenth century saw Ireland lose half of its population to famine, emigration, or deportation to penal colonies in Australiaoften for infractions as common as stealing food. Among the victims of this tragedy were Thomas Keneally's own forebearers, and they were his inspiration to tell the story of the Irish who struggled and ultimately triumphed in Australia and North America. Relying on rare primary sourcesincluding personal letters, court transcripts, ship manifests, and military documentsKeneally offers new and important insights into the impact of the Irish in exile. The result is a vivid saga of heroes and villains, from Great Famine protesters to American Civil War generals to great orators and politicians.
Europe in the 19th century was a good place to be -- a heady world of scientific and artistic achievement, a land of abundance and enlightenment. Unless, of course, you happened to live in Ireland. Eroded by poverty and political strife, the island found itself wracked by a three-pronged wave of destruction -- famine, mass emigration and penal expulsions -- that decimated its population and nearly destroyed its culture and its spirit.
Let a master like Thomas Keneally take on this dramatic and poignant chapter in history and it becomes something vivid and heartbreaking and very much alive. Keneally knows a thing or two about the power that comes from combining history with storytelling, as anyone who has read The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith or Schindler's List can testify. Here he whittles the large events that shaped the fate of a nation down to the personal tragedies and victories of individuals, from politicians to petty criminals (a few of them culled from the Keneally family tree).
Part of what makes The Great Shame so compelling is the smoothness with which the author moves around the globe. Observing both the rooted and the scattered, he shows not just how the outside world affected the Irish but also how the Irish changed the world. He follows the fate of male and female prisoners exiled to Australia (his own native land) for political rebellion and the flimsiest misdemeanors. He peers into ships filled with immigrants waiting in quarantine at the harbors of the United States and Canada. He swoops back to ground zero to describe the famine that started as an unfortunate potato blight and became devastatingly exacerbated by governmental ineptitude and apathy. And he explains how these tragedies spurred the Irish to far-reaching change.
But Keneally's greatest gift isn't in his passionate devotion to detail (though that's unquestionably evident in his meticulous sleuthing through ship's logs, court papers and personal correspondence); it's in his flair for molding real events into memorable narratives, in the smart turns of phrase that draw the reader into the action. When he quotes a traveler who sees the sorrow of shipboard disease in a boy wearing his dead father's coat, it's an exemplary use of historical materials. When he comments on how "bacteriologically uninformed" the traveler's observation is, pointing to the fate of those who cling to epidemic-tainted mementos, it makes the passage mournful in a whole new way.
The Irish all but lost their mother tongue under English repression. And yet they learned to sing their songs and to write their most famous stories and manifestos in a language adopted from their conquerors. So, too, they learned in their adopted lands to wield the political and social clout they couldn't on their own soil. Thus, for a book with such a tragedy-laden title, The Great Shame is a work of remarkable optimism: a story that reminds us how often human achievement is measured not in conquest or in riches but in simple survival against the odds.
List of Illustrations | ||
Preface | ||
Note on the Text | ||
Maps | ||
1 | Hugh Larkin's Ireland | 3 |
2 | The Shipping of Ireland, and the Exile of Chains | 25 |
3 | Assigning Ireland | 36 |
4 | The Limits of Location | 53 |
5 | Ireland and the Whitby Women | 59 |
6 | The Lass from the Female Factory | 67 |
7 | Ireland Young and Old | 88 |
8 | A Fond Farewell to the White Potatoes | 102 |
9 | A Thousand Farewells to You, Island of St. Patrick | 123 |
10 | Fiasco and Noble Gesture: The Rebellion of Young Ireland | 141 |
11 | Young Ireland on Trial | 167 |
12 | Shipping Young Ireland | 184 |
13 | By Order of Great Denison | 203 |
14 | Young Ireland and the Profane Colonists | 224 |
15 | Locked within the Pyramid | 247 |
16 | The Skeleton at the Feast | 267 |
17 | Young Ireland and the Isms of Yankeedom | 293 |
18 | Ireland and the Bloody Arena | 316 |
19 | Faugh-a-Ballagh | 332 |
20 | The Chickahominy Steeplechase | 342 |
21 | Woefully Cut Up | 355 |
22 | Let Me Have Idaho | 377 |
23 | Glorio, Glorio, to the Bold Fenian Men | 403 |
24 | Re-Making Montana; Violating Canada | 429 |
25 | Fenians Transported | 459 |
26 | The Fenians of the Desert Coast | 471 |
27 | Fenians at Large | 492 |
28 | Home Rule and Dynamite | 511 |
29 | The Fenian Whaler | 530 |
30 | Perth Regatta Day | 550 |
31 | Republican Christ | 572 |
Acknowledgements | 607 | |
Notes | 611 | |
Bibliography | 667 | |
Index | 679 |