The Tenants of Time:
Long, J V
BOOKS The world of Clonbrony Wood Thomas Flanagan's reputation as an important historical novelist was established with the publication, ten years ago, of The Year of the French. His second novel,...
...They move beyond the schoolmaster's purview into the world of the local gentry, to Dublin and London, and on to the Continent, yet remain inextricably linked to a handful of people in an obscure market town that once, however ineffectively, nourished sedition...
...It is pointless to be alarmed at our imperma-nence, our tenancy...
...Furthermore, his memory is informed by the confidence that seems concomitant with his honesty about himself...
...History is in the air we breathe, but our feet, to get from one place to another, must stay on the ground...
...convincing as history (I went looking for pictures of Robert Delaney in books about Parnell and checked more than one map to see if I could locate Kilpeder) and compelling as fiction...
...His second novel, The Tenants of Time, is the story, as remembered and recounted to an ambitious young historian several years after the facts, of a group of friends and acquaintances who had lived through the social and political uncertainties of late nineteenth-century Ireland...
...J. V. Long varieties of tone and subtleties of voice that the real storytellers-the people who participated in the historical events here fictionalized-are able to display throughout the book...
...He chooses as the focus of his professional research the unsuccessful Fenian uprising of 1868, and more particularly a single skirmish between the rebels and the British at a place called Clonbrony Wood near Kilpeder, a provincial market town in southwestern Ireland...
...During the days following the constant re-broadcast of IRA "mourners" murdering the two British soldiers who foolishly penetrated a funeral procession, I read this description in The Tenants of Time of "a kind of primitive, tribal rage which ascribes to the masters of the land an absolute power in the most intimate as well as the most public parts of our lives, and for which none save the most primitive of retributions will suffice...
...Prentiss, the compiler, realizes that "history . . . was a stitching of tattered legends...
...McMahon understands that "historians are hostile as though upon instinct towards quietude, silence, seasons, the stars...
...creating their own histories...
...His voice is modulated by affection for his friends, understanding for their choices, and sympathy for their suffering...
...The Tenants of Time is, simply, a remarkable book...
...The relationship these lives, as they are lived, describe between themselves and the earth they walk on gives the book an almost mystical density...
...The historian, however, is an unobtrusive presence in the novel, and is skillful enough in Mr...
...But the story itself, I think, undermines its history...
...Perhaps we might learn from fiction what we seem unable to learn from history...
...There is no shortage of politicians, including Delaney, willing to manipulate the disadvantages of the poor against the British interests...
...Flanagan's novel is enormously long and unfalteringly rich in its delineation of the sometimes thorny connections between the public associations and private needs and loyalties of people who live energetically, and even recklessly, through times of political turbulence...
...Even deeper than these characterizations, and others throughout the book, is the palpable sense the author conveys of the country, the land itself as a perduring Force...
...Vincent Tully, scion of the town's newly prosperous merchant, is disposed more to pleasure than to duty but is blessed with charm and abundant good will...
...For them the League, the boy cot-tings, Parnell's coming into command, the land acts, the final explosion into bitterness and division, the melancholy aftermath-such concerns are the stuff of history...
...Against such a background, the politics of the land, the issues of tenancy, of landlords' rights and greed, of homesteaders as expendable and (for political purposes) pliable victims are seen in incredibly sharp relief...
...In my own day, the famine was never spoken of among the peasantry, a communal shame, but the land itself remembered...
...And Edward Nolan, back from military service with the Union Army in America, bearing the Fenian Organization's orders for the early stages of the rebellion, suffering for years in a British prison on account of his part in it, emerges from that darkness into another, as a professional murderer employed to exact the Organization's vengeance for political treachery...
...It is fellows like myself, perhaps, quiet men who have made no covenants with history, who live most fully within it, and it is the quiet times, the silent decades, that we savor: the growth of children, the entanglements year by year of our outspreading memories, unpruned...
...Flanagan's hands not to intrude upon the THE TENANTS OF TIME Thomas Flanagan E. P. Dutton, $21.95, 824 pp...
...And Mr...
...With this new book the author's reputation is unassailable...
...It would appear that the conflicts are about self-determination and ownership: Who owns the land...
...And his engagement with his subject, and subjects, as he becomes incorporated into their stories affects his own sensibility as he is shaped (as any thoughtful, young Irishman in the early years of this century might have been) by the history he intended merely to tell...
...providing information that he'd withheld, or not known...
...Flanagan's imagination...
...The world, however, is broader than McMahon's imagination, as he would admit, and many of Mr...
...Some of his collaborators were destined to remain more visible, and McMahon supplies the lineaments of their stories...
...But I was to drift into history, and then drift out of it again, a man shaped for obscurity as others are shaped for great enterprises...
...After his youthful foray into rebellion at Clonbrony Wood and the relatively brief jail term which resulted from it, he is content to settle, half-hidden but not complacent, into the ordinariness of provincial life...
...The events of the eighties," one character recalls in conversation with Prentiss, "are long distant, of course, but here memories cling to the soil itself, almost, and the very rocks and trees remember...
...Prentiss becomes a recorder of what we have learned to call oral history...
...The historian-chronicler, Patrick Prentiss, is the son of a prominent Dublin barrister and an Oxford graduate on the first rungs of an academic career...
...Who owns Ireland...
...Flanagan's book, through its elaborateness and by means of its concreteness and astonishing writing, offers narrative grounded in the ordinary exchanges of life-friendship, loyalty, disapproval, scandal, reconciliation-as an antidote to legend and as the undergirding of history...
...Thus, we can own our memories, and precious little else...
...Premiss's most reliable and engaging witness to the '68 uprising, as well as to subsequent political dilemmas-the Land of the 1880s and Pamell's rise and fall-which sustained tensions between Great Britain and Ireland during the last quarter of the last century, is the Kilpeder schoolmaster, Hugh McMahon...
...McMahon's closest friend, Robert Delaney, shrewd and able, establishes himself as a political force for a time through his involvement with the Land League (a successful effort to organize tenants against landlords) and by his loyalty to Parnell...
...What is important is not what we own, but rather what we share, whom we love, and what we are able, together, to remember...
...McMahon's life remains moored, happily, to his domestic and professional responsibilities...
...Flanagan's characters speak for themselves, supplying different perspectives on McMahon's point of view...
...Furthermore, and sadly, current events substantiate the accuracy and range of Mr...
Vol. 115 • June 1988 • No. 11
