The Sunken Road: An unflinching look at the brutality of Irish history

It is November 1915 and two farm boys from Co Fermanagh, the Catholic turned atheist Francie Leonard and his Protestant best friend Archie Johnston join the Ulster 36th Division. They leave behind them Annie, Archie’s sister and Francie’s love.  In a few months they will face the terrors of the Somme, where lives will be irrevocably changed.

Seven years later, Francie is now an anti-Treaty IRA gunman on the run in May 1922, at the tail end of the Irish War of Independence. As he risks everything to come back for Annie, he is ruthlessly pursued by his former British army sergeant, Peter Crozier, a one-armed loyalist bigot and inspector in “the Specials”, the notoriously sectarian quasi-military police force established in Northern Ireland in 1920. For Crozier, who harbours a deep hatred of Francie that dates back to the war, the capture is personal.

Together Francie and Annie make a desperate dash for the Border and to safety – either in the nascent Irish Free State that Francie opposes or to the United States, where he does not want to go. Along the way they are intermittently helped by an elderly Irish-speaking bachelor farmer, cunning Catholic priests who may or may not be sympathetic to their cause, and Seán Molloy, a charismatic Irish-American who was Francie’s former IRA comrade before siding with the Free State.

Ciarán McMenamin’s excellent, gripping second novel, The Sunken Road, is a frequently brutal war story, a fictional recreation of the last important battle in the Irish struggle for independence, a powerful reflection on complex Irish loyalties, divisions and identities, a romantic drama, and a page-turning thriller. The action switches chapter by chapter between earlier scenes of Francie, Archie and their comrades in the trenches, fields and towns of France in 1915-1916, and Francie and Annie’s later escape from Crozier over the countryside before they enter a fierce gunfight between Irish and British forces on the disputed Donegal-Fermanagh border.

This continuous back and forth between two specific periods of time has a dual function: it provides for the exploration of the evolving relationships between religions, nationalities and loyalties in this complicated and over-militarised period, as well as keeping the action moving quickly.

Unceasing violence

The situation of a large portion of the action during what became known as the Battle of Pettigo and Belleek in May and June of 1922 is just one of the many compelling historical reconstructions in the novel. In what is widely considered to be the final significant military conflict of the Irish War of Independence, a small group of anti-Treaty IRA men joined forces with pro-Treaty Free State soldiers to defend their occupation of those two towns on either side of the newly created Border.

Francie represents one of many of the anti-Treaty IRA men who have been driven north out of Munster but are willing to fight against a common enemy as part of Michael Collins’s surreptitious post-Treaty northern offensive, which was intended to galvanise the increasingly fractured IRA, destabilise Northern Ireland and provide a counter-reaction to loyalist pogroms against Northern nationalists. By the end of June 1922, the Irish Civil War will break out.

The violence in The Sunken Road is unceasing. McMenamin does not spare the reader from gore: in particular, the superb scenes of the fighting in France are as unsparing in bloody detail as they are absorbing in the depiction. If Francie appears to be at times a sadistic and nihilistic killer, it is because he has been desensitised by years of industrialised and guerrilla warfare. At one point we learn that he shot a pregnant woman who got in the way of an intended target during the War of Independence.

Annie, who is unconditionally devoted to him, can only catch glimpses of the boy she fell in love with, and she wonders how many men he has killed. Crozier too, Francie’s nemesis, has a psychopathic hatred of almost all people. Archie turns in upon himself as he grapples with shellshock and self-loathing.

As with all good war stories, there are heroes and villains in McMenamin’s tale, though it is not always clear who is who. In this, The Sunken Road spares the reader of any sentimental glorification of the British army or the IRA. For all the adrenaline-pumped action adventure of the story, McMenamin skilfully maintains the reader’s focus on the personal cost of war.

After all the bullets and bombs, we come to rest on the tragic, unkillable tenderness between Archie and Francie, two boyhood friends from different backgrounds caught up in the horror of history.

Eoghan Smith is the author of The Failing Heart (Dedalus 2018). His second novel, A Provincial Death, will be published by Dedalus in 2021