fiction
Cassandra Pybus
Christopher Koch
Out of Ireland
Doubleday $39.95hb, 706pp,
1 864710 38 1
Christopher Koch
CHRISTOPHER KOCH'S new novel forms a diptych with his Highways to a War, but can be read for itself alone, which is just as well, since I never finished reading the earlier novel. I have read much of the historical source material Koch has cannibalised for Out of Ireland. Therein lies my problem with this novel.
Apart from the fact that it hurt my wrists to hold the book open to read -- it is a walloping 700 pages of heavy paper -- this book is not my cup of tea. It is presented as the journal of the Irish exile Robert Devereux, accounting for his time as a political prisoner, first in Bermuda hulks in 1848, and then in Van Diemen's Land between the summer of 1849 till his escape to America in July 1851. The journals have been hidden by the Langford family, who are descendants of Devereux's illegitimate son, but are now presented to us, with some very minor editing by Raymond Barton, the amateur historian who compiled the life of Mike Langford hero of Highways to a War. Barton had been given the diaries by Langford.
What Koch gives us is not a journal at all. Apart from date entries the book is written like a rather pedestrian Victorian novel. The ploy is even more puzzling when you consider that the primary source material for his novel is a journal: John Mitchel's Jail Journal. Indeed, Koch's fictional Robert Devereux, a member of the Irish Ascendancy and leader of the Young Ireland movement, is modelled so closely on the historical character John Mitchel that he is barely distinguishable from him. Likewise the experiences of Devereux and his Young Ireland compatriots conforms so completely to their own accounts of themselves and to the historical interpretation of their lives and times, that one cannot help but ask: what is the point of rendering this history as fiction? The answer, it seems to me, is that Koch wants to tell the story of the Young Ireland exiles and is happy to use their historical experience as the basis for his narrative, but the historical fact does not in every instance suit his purpose.
Koch tweaks the historical record to make the aristocratic Devereux fall in love with a young Catholic convict girl, Kathleen, who has already given birth to a child after being raped by a fellow convict. Not only that but her assailant is also made to be an Irish political activist, a Ribbonman, a man of the people, in contrast to the aristocratic Devereux. This wild Irishman becomes a feared bushranger whom Devereux manages to kill in a fight over the Irish girl both men want to possess. He goes shares in a farm and lives with Kathleen, intending to marry once they escape, but she dies from complications after giving birth to their son. Finally Devereux is able to escape the island, leaving his illegitimate baby son behind in the care of his partner, James Langford.
I found this piece of imaginative invention utterly implausible in the context of the historically accurate world Koch has drawn. If Devereux had killed a bushranger he would have been given a free pardon, as would have Kathleen for her assistance in the act, thereby nullifying the problems which stood in the way of their marriage. Their reward may well have included paid passage out of the colony which would have rendered unnecessary all the intrigue which leads to his escape. But it is simply beyond belief that one of the Protestant Irish Ascendancy would intend to marry, or even form a liaison with, a Catholic convict girl from the west of Ireland who had already given birth to an illegitimate child. Certainly, one of the Young Ireland exiles, Thomas Meagher, did marry an Irish girl in Tasmania -- to the horror of his friends -- and it is also true that she died following the birth of their child, leaving him free to pursue his political career in America with a more suitable wife. Meagher was not one of the Irish Ascendancy; he was from a Catholic Mercantile family, and his bride, though considered unsuitable, was at least a free woman, a governess.