I started the book the other day and am at the whopping page of 66. I have to honestly say that without the work I did in Ireland to understand some of the whos/whats/wheres and whens of the various uprisings. That plus when Carol Ann (Sheila's aunt) visited, she brought a book about the famine that really brought it all together. You can't really get the Irish's problem with the English without the lens of the famine and what the English did in response.
I thought I'd start with a few reactions to chapters 1-8 because at chapter 9 Uris begins to give us some background through the narration of a story teller, so the book shifts at that point from present to past.
So* Trinity is a novel (fiction) set in 1885 in a small village of "Ballyutogue" (fictional) which means "place of troubles." The narrator is a "lad" of 11 and best friend to Conor Larkin ("Now Conor Larkin was twelve, my closest friend and my idol").
The reader finds themselves at Connor's "Grandfar", Kilty Larkin's deathbed.
Here is Uris' description of their surprise at Kilty's death:
"Oh, it was a terrible moment of revelation for me. All of us kids thought old Kilty had the magic of fairies and would live forever, a tale fortified by the fact that he was the oldest survivor of the great famine, to say nothing of being a hero of the Fenian Rising of '67 who had been jailed and fearfully tortured for his efforts."
Uris' name "Larkin" could be a reference to "Big Jim" Larkin (1846-1947), an Irish trade union organizer that would later help to organize the 1913 Dublin Lockout (subject of last year's "One City One Book" book, Strumpet City). Here is a photo of him that was made into a statue that now stands on O'Connell Street in Dublin.
The book expertly intertwines the old Irish traditions with the politics of the time beginning with rituals around death:
"The house has been surrounded by fairies just waiting to pounce and your weeping will encourage them to break in and snatch his soul from us."
There is a map of Ireland at the start of the book and a map of the little village. Uris carefully delineates the Catholic farms in the village and the Protestant farms in the little picture and here is a description of the village (I will put links to things that are real and have references):
"Our village started at an elevation of three hundred feet above Lough Foyle and our fields crept up into the hills for another five hundred feet, all sliced into wee parcels of a rundale. Some of the plots were hardly larger than our best room and very few people could really tell what exactly belonged to whom. Each plot was walled off, making a spider web of stone over the mountainside. ... From where we stood we could see it all . . . all the stolen lands that belonged to Arthur Hubble, the Earl of Foyle.** The vista this day sparkled so we could make it out all the way over Lough Foyle to County Derry and up and down the coast from Muff to Moville. Directly below us at loughside was the Township and on either end of it the long, perfectly proportioned rectangular symmetry of lush green Protestant fields, each holding a finely built stone farmhouse of two stories and a slate roof.
... The Upper Village where we Catholics lived was "in the heather" with its crazy patch-quilt labrinth of stone walls creeping up the savage hills."
Later in this introduction Uris will give us some political history on the land -- essentially sharecropping, the changes in the laws, the peat mining, the farming and how the plots got divvied up into nearly nothing, leading to the famine.
That's all for now. We're having a party tonight for all blog readers (and others too). Stop by for a beer!
*I have not read the reviews of Trinity yet, and, as said, have barely started the book, so this is written not in retrospect but forward looking.
**This guy is a fictional representation of English local gentry as far as I can tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment