Ireland Unfree Will Never Be At Peace

Star of the Sea
by Joseph O'Connor
p. 2002

“And yet, could there be silence? What did silence mean? Could you allow yourself to say nothing at all to such things? To remain silent, in fact, was to say something powerful: that it never happened: that these people did not matter. They were not rich. They were not cultivated. They spoke no lines of elegant dialogue; many, in fact, did not speak at all. They died very quietly. They died in the dark. And the materials of fiction – bequests of fortunes, grand tours in Italy, balls at the palace – these people would not even know what those were. They had paid their betters’ accounts with the sweat of their servitude but that was the point where their purpose had ended. Their lives, their courtships, their families, their struggles; even their deaths, their terrible deaths – none of it mattered in even the tiniest way. They deserved no place in printed pages, in finely wrought novels intended for the civilised. They were simply not worth saying anything about.”

Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea became an overnight hit when it was published a little over a decade ago, a sprawling melodrama set against the backdrop of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. I included the above passage because it is the one that stood out to me most amidst the 400 pages O’Connor has provided for digestion. Though that is probably an inappropriate choice of words for a book primarily preoccupied with the topic of starvation, I think it’s nonetheless a fitting one, since there is an awful lot of material here to break down.

Star of the Sea took me awhile to get into, and—I have to admit—even at the height of its mystery I still couldn’t find myself enthralled or unable to put the book down. Period-driven melodrama isn’t exactly my forte, no matter how finely wrought the language is, and I found there to be a lot of filler in O’Connor’s story, probably to enshroud the mystery at the center of this novel—the murder of one of its central protagonists at the hands of another central character.

The entire history of each main protagonist is covered in extensive flashbacks, but half of the novel takes place in the present, aboard a ‘famine ship’ (the Star of the Sea), a passenger ship sailing for America carrying a great many poor and starving Irish who have given up everything they own for the passage, in the hopes of eking out a living in a new, potentially more promising landscape. The story is told from the point of view of an American author on board the Star, many years after the voyage, so we are allowed the full range of perspective—we know the hardships leading up to the voyage, the suffering aboard the ship, the many who never made it, and the disappointment felt by those who did make it, only to discover their coveted new life may not have been as forgiving as they’d hoped.

No character in Star of the Sea is entirely innocent, nor are they all thoroughly despicable. Even the most ‘villainous’ character has a well-drawn out history that makes you feel somewhat for his plight. My second favorite passage in the book comes from a chapter focused on a murderer and thief:

“The lexicon of crime became his favorite contemplation. The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt. With rigour, with precision, and most of all with poetry, they had categorised the language of thievery into sub-species, like fossilised old deacons baptising butterflies. Every kind of robbery had a verb of its own. Breeds of embezzlement he never knew existed came to him first as beautiful words. Beak-hunting; bit-faking; blagging; bonneting; broading; bug-hunting; buttoning; buzzing; capering; playing the crooked cross; dipping; dragging; fawney-dropping; fine-wiring; flimping; flying the blue pigeon; gammoning; grifting; half-inching; hoisting; doing the kinchen-lay; legging; lifting; lurking; macing; minning; mizzling; mug-hunting; nailing; outsidering; palming; prigging; rollering; screwing; sharping; shuffling; smatter-hauling; sniding; toolering; vamping; yack-snatching and doing the ream flash pull. Stealing in London sounded like dancing and Mulvey danced his way through the town like a duke.”

The book has a preoccupation with the multivocality of words and of silences. Although a murder and the torrid past love affairs and tragic deaths that led up to it seem to guide the novel’s events, it is really the starvation—the pain of hunger and a slow, agonizing death—and the division of classes that possess O’Connor’s novel. The privileged British aristocracy rather expect to find desolation and hunger in third world countries. That it was happening in their own proverbial backyard was unthinkable, and so many of the rich simply turned a blind eye to the Irish famine. This story is an attempt to give a voice to those whom society deems invisible; and this is a universal phenomenon, something every society has experience with at one time or another.

Like many things wholly ‘Irish,’ Star of the Sea is quite heavy and a bit depressing, but never without a touch of wit to break the tension. I’ll wrap up this review by including my favorite quip here: “Lord Kingscourt said he would need a short time to discuss it with his wife. (His Ladyship, it appears, is the wearer of the britches.)"

"Ireland unfree will never be at peace."

I couldn't stop thinking about my study abroad program in Ireland the entire time I was reading Star of the Sea. Probably this was because many of the characters hail from parts of Connemara, including Tully, the city my peers and I lived in for four months, and the descriptions still felt so familiar to me that I could understand the yearning the characters felt upon leaving. I had purchased O'Connor's novel while I lived there, but I held on to it, unread until recently. The above picture is one I took in Derry in 2004.