The Great Shame: And Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, by Thomas Keneally
Three Stars
very much wanted to love this book because I hoped it would be what Keneally describes in his preface as his hope as well: an Irish version of his masterwork, Schindler’s List, focusing on the 19th century diaspora of the Irish to Australia and the Americas. But in Schindler, Keneally went micro — telling the story of the Holocaust through the life of one man the 1,300 men, women, and children he rescued from the gas chamber — while in Shame, Keneally goes macro — telling a century’s worth of stories about dozens of men and women spread around the globe. In his acknowledgements, Keneally compares the writing of this book to being locked in a cupboard with a T Rex, but for me, the reading of this book resembled being stuck in in the mud: I found it an interminable slog. As a frequent reader on Ireland, I’ve found that slog is a good way to describe many books dealing with Irish history and politics. Let’s face it — Ireland has produced far more than its fair share of fascinating characters and figuring out which ones to leave out is a problem for any writer. The heart of Keneally’s book is the stories of two groups of Irish revolutionaries — the Young Irelanders transported in 1848 and the Fenians transported in 1867. Keneally details their pre-revolutionary lives; their failed activism; their arrests, trials and imprisonments; their journeys to Australia; their lives as convicts; their escapes from Australia; their new lives in countries around the globe; their continuing interest in and work for Ireland’s freedom; and their deaths. And he fleshes out each chapter of the lives of these dozen or so men with a huge cast of characters — parents, siblings, friends, wives, children, lovers, cops, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, ships captains, ships doctors, other convicts, etc. I found it difficult to keep everyone straight, and while there was much in the book that was interesting, there was far too much that was repetitive because it basically tells the same story over and over: an Irish freedom fighter’s rise, capture, transportation to Australia and escape. However, two things really stood out for me. First, these 19th century folks did A LOT of traveling — back and forth across oceans, back and forth across the U. S. via the isthmus of Panama or the Missouri river, back and forth across Australia, and back and forth across Europe. Talk about globetrotting — despite the hardship, expense and time involved in travel in the 19th century, people traveled a lot more than I ever imagined. Second, a group of American Fenians outfitted a New Bedford whaler for a bogus whaling trip whose actual goal was to free Fenians imprisoned in Australia. The story of that successful caper is fascinating.