Author: Anne Emery
Publisher: ECW Press
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This is a prequel to the Collins-Burke mystery series. I don't do series unless they're especially enticing and they rarely are, so this was a good one for me to review since it's not in the middle of anything and can be viewed as a kind of stand-alone. My conclusion having read 33% of it is that I'm definitely not interested in following this series. It's a bit frustrating, because I've had good success with at least one other volume from Entertainment Culture Writing Press.
The story is set in 1989, and starts out rather dramatically with father Brennan Burke, in New York City, receiving a call from his sister Molly, who's in jail in London. She's accused of being a member of a terrorist organization. He gets onto the first flight he can, and miraculously (he is a priest!) manages to get into the prison to see her first thing the next morning. She's soon sprung from jail. Her crime, evidently, was her obsessive-compulsive disorder vis-à-vis Oliver Cromwell. I kid you not. In short, this was all a stinking huge red herring which I actually didn't appreciate.
So right from the off, this novel made little sense. There's no reason a woman would be connected to terrorist organization just because she delivered a lecture complaining about Cromwell's behavior half a millennium before, in Eire. A police detective was also shot in his car that day, too, but although this is mentioned several times, the author never makes any attempt to show how this could possibly be connected with what happened to Molly (not in the portion of this book I read, at any rate. In short, it’s another red herring, and I have no idea why the author chose to juxtapose these two events.
The impression I got from the first few chapters of the novel, in fact, was that of some heavy-duty Brit-bashing going on, although this seemed to assuage after a while. It was weird to read it, especially since those events - the era of IRA terrorism in Ireland, and in cities like Birmingham and London in England - are now history. Maybe in some people's minds, they're still current?
I didn't get all this obsession with Cromwell. There is no doubt that he was a brutal man, but no more so than your average military commander in similar circumstances in what was a brutal era. The invasion led by Cromwell was preceded by the Irish rebellion of 1641, where the Catholics did the same things which Cromwell did, but to English and Scots protestants. The Irish Catholics and royalists also launched another attack right before Cromwell arrived. It's not like Cromwell & co just randomly decided to wander over there and Kilkenny.
Wexford was a different matter. Against Cromwell's wishes (he was trying to negotiate a surrender), his troops let loose of their own accord. Even then, the majority of those who died were military troops. Prior to these events there was, no doubt, something done to the Protestants by the Catholics, and prior to that, something done vice-versa, and so on ad infinitum.
Ultimately, this has nothing whatsoever to do with Cromwell or the English, or the Irish per se, as history has shown. I don't know why those who continue their pointless feud with Cromwell's dead body don't have the same antagonism towards Charles the Second, who betrayed his Irish Catholic allies by discarding the alliance in favor of a new one with the Scots Covenanters. It wasn't royalism, it was business!
The truth is that it was an ongoing religious war and even though, thankfully, the bloody violence is over for now, the religious war has not gone away nor will it, as long as there are religion-blinded factions which ignore their own Bible's injunction to turn the other cheek. In the end it had far less to do with Cromwell and royalists than it did with the Catholicism which Henry the Eighth rejected, and the Protestantism which was sucked into the vacuum that was left, because religion abhors a vacuum.
That said, the biggest issue I had in the first few chapters was in the chronic stereotyping of the Irish characters, making it look like all they were interested in was guzzling alcohol. It was like a page wouldn't pass by without one or other of them referencing alcohol, or planning on going to a pub, or drinking something alcoholic, even if it was only communion wine. Of course, that wasn't alcohol, it was blood. Seriously, this made me pity the characters, and view them with some disdain rather than identify with them. Is this what the author wanted?
The story was really rambling, too, like the author was so proud of the notes she'd compiled on character, plot, and location that she was really loathe to leave anything out. Based on the part I read, this novel could, without losing a single thing, have been edited down from almost four-hundred pages to two or three hundred and lost nothing in the process. In the end, what it did lose was my interest because of the tediously slow pace. I made it to the end of chapter 11, about one third the way through, and decided it was not for me. I'd started skimming paragraphs here and there even before that, because the ironically sober detail was leaving my glass more than half empty. Quite literally nothing was happening other than repeated visits to bars.
The main thrust of the story wasn't Molly's arrest, but her cousin Conn's arrest, and that didn't happen until almost a third of the way in. The novel could have actually begun there, but even when that event happened, nothing changed! I'd hoped at that point that things would finally start moving, but the pace did not pick up! The writing did not become more taut or exciting, and nothing significant transpired! A aged family member expired, but that was it. The entire story continued to plod on in the same old way, but I refused to plod with it. Life is too short, especially when there are huddled masses of potentially exciting novels invading my shore, clamoring to be heard.
