The Rebels of Ireland

 

The Rebels of Ireland – by Edward Rutherford

After the first 300 pages of this 900-page novel, I had high hopes.  I thought Mr. Rutherford may have finally seen the light.  I thought maybe he finally overcame some of the obstacles that he encountered in his earlier works that prevented his “really good books” from being “great”.  I was so excited.  Alas, it was not to be.  Once the first 1/3 of the book had been complete, he regressed right back into, what I think, are major hindrances to his work.

Rutherford writes about places.  In this case, Ireland. This was actually the second part of a two book series.  His books span centuries, sometimes millennia, of said location.  We observe the place he is writing about from long ago, and as the book progresses, we advance decades, or even centuries rather quickly.  As we meet new characters, they’re all relatives of the ones in past chapters.  So essentially we have an enormous family (families, actually) tree that must be assimilated while reading.  As his books progress, we don’t just get to read about the characters in his novels, yet the events of the geographical location and how they shaped history, and therefore the characters as well.

After reading several of Rutherford’s books, I’m not really sure this is as great an idea as it seems. Maybe it is, but Rutherford loses focus, and his books tend to become (boring) history lessons as opposed to enchanting stories.  If you do simple math, you can see that it’s no easy task to tell such enthralling tales within such rigid parameters.  Example: Let’s say one of his books covers 1,000 years. The book is, say, 1,000 pages.  If the book is divided into 10 chapters, each lasting 100 years, that comes to 100 years of story crammed into only 100 pages.  When you have five or six families involved, you can see that this can simply be too much.

Well, this book was only about 400 years of history, and after 300 pages, the reader was kept in a relatively smooth time transition.  So we had a chance to know the characters.  We had a chance to feel the characters, study their nuances, and experience their joys and sorrows.  These are the very things that a good novel should do, and Rutherford does an excellent job as long as he doesn’t feel obligated to cram too many centuries in.

Sadly, this is exactly what happens during the last two thirds of this book.  Many of his chapters feel like they’re nothing other than two main characters having a political discussion while sitting at a table.  Do we know and feel the characters?  No, we don’t.  Rutherford loses his focus, and his characters just ramble at each other about the particular historical events of the time.  It’s quite sad and maddening and not predominantly interesting.

For this particular book, the main area of contention is the ongoing fight between Protestants and Catholics. Yes, this is a big part of Ireland’s history, but the particulars of the conflict and how it evolves over centuries simply don’t make for enjoyable reading when one wants to read a novel for…you know… a story.  When we quickly jump forward by decades and centuries with new family members crowding the pages, it’s simply too much.  In fact, I basically gave up by the time I got to the last chapter.  I think I just skimmed the pages. I was so ready to be done with this thing.

Rutherford has written 3 latter books (as of the time of my review) since this one, and I don’t know if they suffer from the same issues as many of his earlier ones, but I would offer the following suggestion to him if he’s out there reading this:   Instead of 5 or 6 families with dozens and dozens of characters related to each other over the span of several hundred years, maybe limited the overall time to maybe a couple hundred years.   Then, have maybe 2, no more than 3 families.  You can have more characters outside of these families, but this is really the limit you should try to achieve.  This seemed to be where this book was going, as I said, early on, and for a while it really was a great story.

Maybe, it’s just me, but I really don’t like having to flip back to the family tree that he included after reading every 20 pages to try to remember who was who.  It doesn’t help my memory at all when he keeps describing the characters over the centuries as having “bright green, emerald eyes” in an attempt to show relations.   Sadly, I can’t remember who had “bright green, emerald eyes” several hundred pages into this thing, so these descriptions that are supposed to somehow make the reader remember who their ancestor was in a preceding chapter does absolutely no good at all.

Rutherford is a fine writer when he focuses on story and characters.  His attempt to stuff his books with mundane history, though, sadly brings his work down several notches.  This has been an issue for most of his books, some worse than others.  I’m hoping his latter books allow the story to breathe a bit better.