The Irish are well renowned as great story tellers and this author certainly carries on that legacy. I have loved past novels of his - Let the Great World Spin and especially This Side of Brightness - with rich characters, unusual situations, both set in New York City, one taking place above the ground with its central character a tightrope walker, and the other taking place below ground during the construction of the underground tunnel network below the Hudson River.
This book also has many similar qualities with its interesting and diverse characters, the significant incidents in their lives, its story telling, but for me, it just didn't seem to have the same impact as the previous two novels. Maybe because there is too much going on, as the chapters move between places and times - Newfoundland in Canada in the early 1900s, Northern Ireland during the Troubles and late 1990s, Southern Ireland in the famine of the 1840s, the American Civil War of the 1860s. These places and times are all held together by the movement of the characters backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, each of which forms a short story that makes up the novel as a whole. I found the links between the characters and events tenuous to say the least, and really felt that each of the chapters was worthy of its own novel.
At the core of the book are four generations of women, beginning with Lily who finds the courage to leave famine plagued Ireland in 1845, her daughter Emily, then Lottie, and finally Hannah. These women have varying levels of importance in the course of the book; it is their interactions with the men who have greater roles to play in the book that holds the whole thing together.
As in his other books the author takes some actual events to help tell his story - the first trans Atlantic flight in 1919, the visit to Ireland in 1845 by a self educated black American slave, Frederick Douglass who was brought to Ireland to be the face of abolition, and the accomplishment of US Senator George Mitchell in brokering a peace deal between the Catholics and Protestants in Belfast in 1998.
As you can see there is a lot going on in 300 pages and it takes a very skilful writer to hold it all together. Which to a certain extent he does. The writing, as you would expect, is sublime. He paints beautiful pictures of his characters, his descriptions of the Irish landscape, the cold and desolation of Newfoundland and the awfulness of war are stunning. I especially liked the two sections featuring Dougalss and Mitchell, strangers brought to a land to help rewrite history. Well worth the read, but don't expect to blown away by a fantastic plot.
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