Book review: Fierce history overwhelms human story

The title will be familiar from Yeats’s much-quoted lines — ‘Great hatred, little room/maimed us from the start/I carry from my mother’s womb/A fanatic heart’ — and refers to the novel’s hero, John Mitchel, lawyer, journalist, and political activist in the Young Ireland movement of the mid-19th century.

Australian Thomas Keneally is veteran author of 35 other novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s Ark, and some 20 non-fiction books. The novel is a lightly-fictionalised account of Mitchel’s life, set mainly in Tasmania and New York.

Born in Newry in 1815, the son of a Presbyterian minister, as a lawyer Mitchel was known for defending small Catholic farmers against their landlords, unusual for an ‘Orangeman’. 

His work often took him to Dublin, where he met a circle of like-minded contemporaries, including Charles Gavan Duffy and Thomas Davis, Thomas Francis Meagher (the son of Waterford’s first Catholic mayor), and Jane Elgee, known as the poet, Speranza. Mitchel became a valued contributor to the The Nation, the Young Irelanders’ hugely successful publication.

Mitchel married Jenny Verner, an illegitimate daughter of the Churchills of Armagh. She proved an exceptional wife, sharing his passion for ideas, bearing him five children and following him, literally, to the ends of the earth.

A turning point of the radicalisation of Mitchel was the famine of 1847, when, according to this account, corpses were to be found lying by the side of the road on the outskirts of Dublin, while food grown in Ireland by the same starving labourers was being exported to England, one of the richest countries in the world.

Compelled by rage at this injustice, and impatient with the peaceful tactics of Daniel O’Connell, Mitchel and his companions vowed to fight for the starved and the destitute, inspired by the 1848 uprisings in Europe. 

But the situation in Ireland was very different from that in Italy or France. When Mitchel was arrested, he waited in vain for his colleagues to mount an armed rescue and was transported to Bermuda as a felon.

Keneally’s detailed account of the transportation and subsequent shipboard imprisonment is fascinating. As an asthmatic, Bermuda’s tropical climate nearly killed Mitchel. 

After a year at sea, he eventually landed in Van Diemen’s Land. There, although technically a felon, once he gave his word, or parole, that he would not attempt to escape, he was allowed to live a normal life.

The lovingly detailed descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna of Tasmania are the most enjoyable part of this novel. Mitchel sent for Jenny and the children, but scarcely had they settled in, when he decided his future lay in New York. 

Having withdrawn his ‘parole’ at the last minute, he escaped by sea to San Francisco, then across the ‘land-bridge’ of Nicaragua to New York, where he was welcomed by a parade and militia bands.

His journalism made him a wealthy man, and he and Jenny lived in great style. But he no longer fit in with the increasingly Catholic profile of the Irish community. 

By 1854 up to 11,000 Irish a week were arriving in New York. He made matters worse by coming out as pro-slavery when most Catholics were Abolitionists. 

He missed the rural idyll he had enjoyed in Tasmania, and the novel ends with Mitchel and Jenny retiring with their brood to a remote farmhouse in Tennessee.

While the research and descriptive writing are first rate, the ‘fanatic heart’ that should propel the story, and bring John and Jenny alive, fails to perform. It becomes a tiresome chore to absorb page after page of arguments and description, which are heavy on history and light on human interest.