This historical novel is concerned less with the events which led to the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798 than with the spirit of the times. Suffused with mist and semi-light, Warnock's book portrays the period's fervent nationalism, its prevalent fear of betrayal from both without and within; she shows the population's blind need for heroes and mirrors the complexity of the nation's hopes and fears through a few poignantly intimate relationships.
At the centre of these relationships is Anton Paradis, a silk weaver of "unparalleled excellence" whose only true solace is found at his loom where he experiences "the caress of silk". Though he is secure in his own employment, imported silks and cottons threaten his fellow weavers who, in turn, pressurise the unwitting Anton into betraying his employer and friend and fellow United Irishman, Danno McKenna.
The consequent torture suffered by Anton upon his arrest is horrific and guaranteed to make even readers with not a nerve in their bodies wince. Ironically, his inability to reveal names under torture is misinterpreted by the revolutionaries who, for a short time, find in Anton the hero they so desperately require for their cause.
"The blood of Anton Paradis might be French, but his soul Irish," claims the doctor who rebreaks Anton's fingers, originally crushed by Order of the Crown. Yet Anton's soul is not inherently revolutionary; he would willingly be a martyr to his art, but not to the nation.
Like his first cousin and wife (in name only), the Master Weaver Charlotte Paradis, Anton's pa rents were among the 60 Huguenot families brought to Innishannon by Thomas Adderley in 1765. The silkworms brought to Innishannon with the families curled up and died as a result of the damp. (I lived for many years in a cottage on Colony Hill, Innishannon, and it is no small wonder to me that the Huguenots themselves did not also curl up and die of the damp.)
Nonetheless, Charlotte is unlike Anton in that she is venomous to the core. She pirates Anton's designs for mediocre imitations and openly cuckolds him with Malachi Delaney, "a truly treacherous man". However, Charlotte's business acumen is admirable; in contemporary parlance, she would be nothing short of a mighty (albeit dangerous) woman.
Most of Warnock's female characters are mighty women who find agency in a period when women had little. The remarkable "turning worm" and supreme survivor, Letitia Sweetman (young wife of hateful Marvin Sweetman and lover of Danno McKenna) in lieu of any other role model uses as her constant frame of reference and moral measure Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a book dismissed by Marvin Sweetman as the demonic work of "another spoiled governess . . . straight from the ranks of the disappointed. Only a woman unbalanced by envy could have written such a book."
Letitia's step-daughter, Caroline, might also have had a fighting chance had it not been for the warped misogyny of Marvin. But "she was her father's creature. Her father's mutilated creature". Caroline's demise and the events leading up to it are every bit as gruesome as the tortures suffered by Anton and, in relaying both, Warnock exercises consummate control.
The treachery which permeates the primary relationships in Warnock's novel is made all the more compelling by the occasional interjection of consistently misinformed letters by a self-seeking, anonymous informer to the Castle. From start to finish, The Silk Weaver moves at a gallop through dimly lit streets and complex lives of revolutionary Dublin in the late 18th century. Warnock's is an outstanding intelligence and a fictional talent that has yet to be fully acknowledged.
Ellen Beardsley is a writer and critic and a tutor of English at UCC
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