“What will Home Rule do for the woman begging in the streets?”
An extended Anglo-Irish family living in the vicinity of Dublin on the eve of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 reflects the attitudes and pressures that lead eventually to the cataclysmic events at the Dublin Post Office. Andrew Chase-White, a young officer in the British Cavalry, has been assigned to Dublin, where he has often spent holidays and where he has an almost-fiancee. His idolized cousin Patrick Dumay, “the iron man,” is secretly a member of the Irish Volunteers and an admirer of Padraig Pearse. His teenaged cousin, hot-headed Cathal, supports the Citizen’s Army under James Connolly.
As the action unfolds throughout the week leading to the uprising, the family interacts on several levels, revealing their mores, their dreams for the future of Ireland, their occasional tendency to look for religious significance in political destiny, and their personal hopes and failings.
The story of Andrew’s chaste courtship of Frances is thrown into sharp relief through the character of Millicent Kinnard, his aunt, a flamboyant and overtly sexual woman. Millie has tempted one relative into abandoning his priestly calling, persuaded another to propose marriage to her as a way out of her financial problems, and worked her wiles on her chaste young nephews, a generation or more younger than she is. Since she has a peripheral role in the rebellion, Millie connects the older and younger generations both socially and politically, acting as a linchpin of the action, though she is not the main character.
Murdoch’s stunning ability to choose precisely the right word or phrase leads to memorable descriptions which enliven the story and bring the large cast of characters to life. Andrew, for example, possesses “plodding conscientiousness,” in place of courage. An elderly man’s legs are like “solidified paste, rigidly tubular yet without significant shape or color.” Physical love is regarded by one person as “the triumph of his will over his fastidious mind.”
Easter Rising at the Dublin Post Office
Murdoch’s eccentric characters combine with her sense of irony to create absurdities that are filled with dark humor, and in one memorable scene, the procession in and out of Millie’s boudoir (which also serves as a shooting gallery) resembles a slapstick film. Less philosophical, perhaps, than some of Murdoch’s later novels, this is the only one which uses Murdoch’s native Ireland as the setting.
Notes: The photo of the author is from http://www.grandpacifictours.com
The photo of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Post Office is from http://www.bbc.co.uk
In “A Deep Experience,” a memorable short story from this new, complete collection of South African writer Alan Paton’s short fiction, Paton introduces Edith Rheinallt Jones, an elderly white woman from Johannesburg who, though told she had a heart problem for which there was then no cure, continued to do the work she believed in for more than ten years. Her efforts on behalf of the Wayfarers (a Girl Guide organization for non-white children, the Helping Hand Club (a hostel for African girls in Johannesburg), and many other activities in the 1940s, inspired fierce love and unwavering loyalty among the people she visited. A big supporter of the programs that Paton himself was instituting at the Diepkloof Reformatory for African Boys (where Paton was Principal from 1935 – 1948), Edith sometimes needed help on weekends visiting the Wayfarer troops in remote villages, and she asked Paton to drive her to them. On one of these trips, shortly before Edith succumbed to her heart ailments, Paton’s life was changed irrevocably by the warm and honest interactions he saw between Edith and the local people. “I was seeing a vision,” he says, “which was never to leave me, illuminating the darkness of the days through which we live now.”
The exclusion theme, pervasive throughout South Africa at the time, continues into the “white” stories. In “Debbie Go Home,” he shows a family in which a mother wants her black daughter to attend the black debutante ball, perhaps the only time in her life in which she can be a “princess’ who is received by the Administrator and his wife. Her husband and son object, believing they should not “lick the hand that whips us.” In “The Magistrate’s Daughter,” a young white boy, the village school’s hero, the son of a blacksmith, is attracted to the pale daughter of the magistrate, who, with her friends goes to a private school. Befriending the son in the magistrate’s family, Archie plays cricket and tennis with him all summer, until it comes time for a summer dance, a turning point for him. In “Life for a Life,” the harshest of the stories, an innocent man pays for the murder of “the master of Kroon,” and as the story unfolds, Paton gives new meaning to the term “helpless.” Other stories reflect the desperate moves made by white administrators to prevent even the mildest rebellion, moves which simply make the determination to rebel and revolt stronger. “Injustice” takes on new meanings in these stories.
comic novel by one of England’s most under-recognized novelists depicts the life of its main character so poignantly that readers will find themselves as close to tears as they may be to chuckles. Mildred Lathbury, at thirty-one, already regards herself as a spinster, a woman who has completely repressed her inner self so that she can lead an “excellent” life. Working for the Society for the Care for Aged Gentlewomen during the day, she also helps Fr. Julian Malory and his sister Winifred at the rectory and in church during her spare time. Except for these activities and a few outings with similarly “excellent” single women, she has no social life, except for her once-a-year dinner date with a male friend.
ault’s great Greek novel of early Greek history/mythology begins when Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens is a young man in Troizen, a well-bred youth who has never known his father’s identity. When, with the help of the gods, he succeeds in lifting a stone to reclaim his father’s sword, Theseus discovers that he is the son of Aigeus, King of Athens. On his way to Athens to meet him, Theseus arrives in Eleusis, where after wrestling the king in a fight to the death, he finds himself, unexpectedly, the King of Eleusis. Later, in Athens, when fourteen young men and women are chosen by lot to become bull-dancers in Crete, fulfilling a tribute demanded by the King of Crete, Theseus listens to his god and joins the group, never knowing if he will survive to return to his father.
Whether Theseus was a real man whose strength and reputation grew to mythical proportions, as Renault illustrates, or whether he was, in fact, a mythical character whom she places in a realistic context in ancient Greece is less important than the fact that she creates a plausible life for this monumental character. Few, if any, other authors are so successful in recreating an entire era, its people, its beliefs, and its culture.
This is a masterpiece to be savored, celebrated, and shared. Straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, The Radetzky March uniquely combines the color, pomp, pageantry, and military maneuvering of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the more modern political and psychological insights of the twentieth century, giving this short book a panoramic geographical and historical scope with fully rounded characters you can truly feel for.
