If you wanted to take a short course in the history of Irish rebellion — a subject as old as a peat bog and as contemporary as today’s news — you could do much worse than to read these three books. The first two are slim volumes, the third a hefty novel. They employ vastly different techniques, but are complementary in their aims. Each of them has gaps which the others fill handily.
The order in which I read them seemed to have some bearing on my enjoyment, although it’s too late now to try a different approach and see if it works just as well. I read Coffey’s book first, then dabbled in Litton’s as a way of taking a break from Llywelyn’s tome, and actually finished them about the same time.
I think my choice of Coffey’s as a starting point was a good one, because it focuses sharply on the 1916 Rising from the point of view of its leaders, and packs a lot of facts into a compact, muscular but eminently readable narrative. But it makes more sense to review starting with Litton’s book.
Helen Litton’s Irish Rebellions 1798 – 1916: An Illustrated History
This is a paperback put out by the Irish American Book Company’s Wolfhound Press of Dublin. From its design and its content I’d guess that it’s aimed at the airport- and tourist-oriented book trade. It has 128 densely packed, slick-paper pages filled with almost as many pictures as text. A good many of the pictures are photos from the 1916 Rising, and since there are none in either of the other books, it’s handy to keep around as a reference while reading the other two.
What text it has is informative, though often rather bare-bones.
Except for the pictures, it’s the most dispensable of this trio. But the fact that it covers Irish rebellions clear back to 1798 provides some interesting and sometimes important background omitted by the other volumes.
In addition to the 1798 affair, Litton covers Robert Emmet’s 1803 rebellion, the Young Ireland uprising of 1848, the Fenian uprising of 1867, and the 1916 Easter Rising that led to the proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1921.
Litton does a good job of illustrating the logical, almost inevitable flow of each of these events into the next. “Each generation left a speech or a watchword or a martyr, which could be passed on down to encourage passion and idealism,” Litton notes in her pithy epilogue. “How much of this passion was wasted, this idealism corrupted by violence and hate?”
As her text makes plain, her answer to that rhetorical question is, “a lot.” Oddly enough though, it was in the 1916 Easter Rising, held against the backdrop of the first modern war of mass destruction, that the passion was least wasted and idealism least corrupted — at least, according to the next two books.
(Wolfhound Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1998)
Thomas M. Coffey’s Agony at Easter: The 1916 Irish Uprising
Thomas M. Coffey’s is a grand little book, a history that reads like a novel.
On Easter Weekend, 1916, several hundred Irish volunteers staged a rebellion in Dublin that lasted six days, resulted in the destruction of much of the city’s core, and led to the formation of the Irish Republic some five years later.
There might have been thousands of Irish men and women rising in armed and coordinated rebellion that weekend, but for factional rivalry and poor communications, and the Republic might have been gained then and there instead of half a decade on.
The rising had been planned in secret by the more radical elements in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers, and when the more moderate leaders finally were told a couple of days before the event, they went about the countryside telling their followers that the “maneuvers” were off.
Even worse, a shipload of arms bought from and supplied by Germany was discovered and scuttled off the coast a few days before the planned action.
The radicals, led by a core of activists, poets, socialists and visionaries, chief among them James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, rescheduled the Rising for Easter Monday, and went with whoever showed up. They did it likely knowing that they would fail and pay with their lives, but in the hopes that their actions would mobilize their countrymen.
Connolly, Pearse and a handful of other self-proclaimed generals and leaders, with 56 fairly well-drilled volunteers, occupied the General Post Office (GPO) on Monday morning and turned it into their headquarters, proclaiming the Irish Republic. Other units attempted to occupy other key points around the city to cut off the anticipated advance of the British into the city center.
Coffey adopts an effective, if difficult, narrative tactic. He tells the story entirely from the point of view of the men in the GPO. We, the readers, know only what they knew, see only what they saw in all its confusion and glory. It’s obvious that Coffey did a prodigious amount of research in his effort to unearth the truth of events that have passed into folklore.
What they did was the stuff of legend indeed. Eventually joined by more volunteers and the remnants of other units around the city, these volunteers held the GPO for six days against hundreds and hundreds of British soldiers with superior training, arms and support. In the end, the British turned artillery and gunboats on the rebels’ positions and reduced the better part of several square blocks to smoldering rubble. Some 2,000 civilians were injured, and about 300 killed, along with about 130 English soldiers and police and about 60 rebels.
Coffey paints a vivid picture of the Rising, its battles and its participants, and gives us a lot of insight into the characters of the rebel leaders through their words and deeds. He liberally employs colorful and often amusing anecdotes that illuminated that hellish week.
At one point in the middle of the night midway through the Rising, a young boy came running into the Post Office in a state of high dudgeon.
‘”Will ye give us some food!” he shouted. “We’ll all be after starvin’ to death if we don’t get some food.” … Connolly smiled at the boy and patted his shoulder. “Who’s been telling you things like that?” he asked. “You shouldn’t be spreading such stories. Food may be a bit scarce, right enough, but nobody’s about to starve. You can go home and tell that to whoever sent you.”‘
Using the techniques of fiction to bring a historic event to life, Coffey has humanized its participants and at the same time shown them to be the true heroes that they have become in legend.
(Penguin, 1971)
Morgan Llywelyn’s 1916: A Novel of the Irish Rebellion
Morgan Llywelyn has taken the opposite tack, the novelization of actual events, in an attempt to arrive at the same goal. Her work succeeds in some ways but not as well as Coffey’s.
The story is told mostly from the point of view of young Edward Joseph “Ned” Halloran, who is about 17 at the time of the rebellion. Through a complex and at times unrealistic chain of events, Ned ends up being chief aide de camp to Patrick Pearse.
But although we see the events mostly througn Ned’s eyes, the story is told in third person by a narrator who knows more than Ned knows. Llywelyn uses this device to fill in a lot more details than Coffey gives in his book.
Overall, this is an interesting and engaging novel. It could hardly be otherwise, given the nature of the story itself. Llywelyn has a deft hand at dialogue. There are times when the speech of one character or another sounds stilted, but I think the effect was deliberate, as the author attempted to capture the formal speech patterns of these post-Victorian characters.
There is one plot device and an entire subplot that I found superfluous and at times distracting.
The book opens with Ned aboard an ocean liner with his parents, going to America for the marriage of his elder sister. We never really meet his parents, seeing them only through brief flashbacks in Ned’s mind, because surprise! The Hallorans are aboard the Titanic, and Ned is the only member of his family to survive.
The disaster also takes the life of a young Irish boy a couple of years older than Ned, whom Ned had befriended even though the Daniel Duffy was from a much poorer family.
I’m not sure why Llywelyn felt it necessary to put Ned aboard the Titanic, except as a way to get rid of his parents and introduce him to Daniel, which leads him to meet Daniel’s sister later on. Maybe I’m just suffering from Titanic overload in the wake of the Oscar-winning film of 1998, which isn’t quite fair because the book was written well before the film was released.
In any event, the Titanic experience developed certain facets of Ned’s personality, but some other event would have worked just as well. As it is, this feels a bit too coincidental, a Forrest Gump-like intrusion into another of history’s big events.
Ned goes on to America aboard a rescue vessel and stays briefly with his sister Kathleen, but returns to Ireland as soon as he physically recovers from the disaster. It’s quite some time before he recovers emotionally from the loss of his parents, of course. But because he is now an orphan, the lord of the manor on which his family has its farm offers to finance Ned’s education, which turns out to be at Patrick Pearse’s school outside of Dublin, and the book’s main chain of events is set in motion.
Llywelyn develops a lengthy and intrusive subplot involving Ned’s sister Kathleen — her increasingly unhappy marriage to a second-generation Irish-American man several years her senior, an affair with a priest and her growing attraction to the cause of the rebellion in her homeland. Her story adds some details about the life of Irish immigrants and the plight of women during the period, but her story is never resolved, and distracts more from the main plot than it adds to it.
But Llywelyn’s description of the final days of the Rising, the heroism and dignity of its leaders and participants, provides a fitting climax to her narrative. She also gives a vivid account of the summary trials and executions of the rebel leaders, which incited such indignation in the populace that they united behind the Republican movement, which led to independence a few years later.
(Forge, 1998)
All three of these authors did a tremendous amount of research, and a good job of refining it down to its essential details. All of them reinforce the importance of the Easter Rising in modern history — not just Ireland’s, but of the United Kingdom, Europe and the Americas. Llywelyn’s 1916 is an enjoyable novel and worth reading. And for those who enjoy reading straight history told in a creative and engaging manner, I can’t recommend Thomas M. Coffey’s Agony at Easter too highly.
