history
Peter Pierce
Thomas Keneally
The Great Shame
Random House $45hb, 732pp, 0 091 837367 7
IN THE FOREGROUND of Thomas Keneally's grand narrative, The Great
Shame, are the struggle for Irish nationalism, the Great Hunger
and the mass emigration that followed it. There are tales of
Irish exiles, political prisoners both famous and obscure. Among
the former are John Mitchel and Thomas Meagher, Kevin O'Doherty
and John Martin, together with the other Young Irelanders who
were transported to Van Diemen's Land. Coming nearly two decades
later was John Boyle O'Reilly, who was sent to and escaped from
Western Australia. Yet The Great Shame also relates the stories
of humbler champions of Irish nationalism: the Ribbonman Hugh
Larkin, from whom Keneally's wife is descended and the Fenian
John Kenealy, who began the American branch of the author's
family and who had preceded O'Reilly to Fremantle.
These private resonances are an essential element of a story that
comprehends a huge and tragic historical movement, in which
millions of Irish people were forced to the new worlds of
Australia and North America. The Great Shame is not a novel,
although Keneally freely and often takes the imaginative licence of surmising the motives and reactions of his many characters, and of entering into their thoughts. If, in 1982, the Booker Prize judges could deem Schindler's Ark a novel, then The Great Shame might similarly be classified. To do so, however, is besides the point. Here Keneally has fashioned his most complex narrative, one with a more didactic purpose than in his fictions. He has always been the most prodigal of story-tellers, yet he has said of The Great Shame that no book has given him more travail; that he was 'almost overwhelmed' by the stories that he chose to retell and refashion.
Not till the last pages of the book does Keneally turn explicitly to its title. The Great Shame has multiple, layered, even contradictory suggestions. Thus it is a matter for shame for the British that Ireland in 1922 had barely half the population of 1841, before the onset of the potato famine. He laments the misgovernment of Ireland under British rule and the continuing disrimination against Northern Ireland Catholics after the Treaty. Yet he also detects among Irish in the nineteenth century a 'survival shame' analogous to that felt by the Jews who did not perish in the Holocaust. Nor is Keneally prepared to ignore the failures of all the principals in this tale to produce by agitations, constitutional or otherwise, a successful nineteenth-century state in a Europe where many other states were emergent. Ireland itself, deprived of so many venturesome spirits, saw them enliven the political and cultural life of the United States, Canada and Australia instead. Finally, Keneally explains, his title might stand for a redolence of the shame of transportation itself, without which, of course, we would have been deprived of the piquant blood, and potent ghosts, of the characters to who we now bid goodbye. The Great Shame, then, takes its place in Keneally's long attempt to dramatise the role played by the Irish in the peopling of Australia.