As one of Ireland's most distinguished and versatile journalists, Seamus Martin is renowned for his inimitable attention to minute detail, his ability to get beneath the skin of a people and a place, and for his self-effacing humour. Few readers of The Irish Times can shake that particularly poignant image of Martin thundering around Moscow in a clapped-out Lada when he was covering the fall of the Soviet Union. Martin almost magically, in a few deft taps at the keyboard, endowed that infamously lousy motor car with a symbolic significance that no bad joke will ever unhinge.

In Duggan's Destiny, his "first serious venture into fiction", Martin successfully commutes his journalistic voice into fiction, a rare enough accomplishment for a journalist. Using Daniel O'Connell's trusted manservant, Duggan, as his narrator, Martin employs (indeed, even exploits) all his characteristic skills in the telling of the indignities and the ambivalences which accompanied the Liberator on his final journeys, first to Genoa where he died on May 15th, 1847, and then to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin where the internal demons of O'Connell's last years were finally silenced.

Inspired jointly by the sparse journal kept by Duggan on their journey to Genoa and by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in his Labyrinth, Martin illustrates in Duggan's Destiny the veracity of Mme Cornuel's pithy comment and one of the epigraphs of the book: "No man is a hero to his valet."

Indeed, although the famine-gripped population of Ireland continued to embrace O'Connell as their iconic hero - "they loved him to the extent that their adulation created a world of myth and mystery around his person" - Duggan has far too intimate a knowledge of his master, in good health and in bad, to idolise him.

Certainly, Duggan serves O'Connell and serves him faithfully, but only because servitude is his reluctant station in life: "I hungered to be out of servitude," confesses Duggan. "It was my great ambition to be a man of my own, and at least once Mr O'Connell promised me real assistance in achieving my aims. But Mr O'Connell was a politician; promises to him were like the down of dandelions blown on the wind." While he was seen as the Great Liberator to the populace at large, O'Connell is no liberator to poor Duggan.

Duggan's wish to be freed of servitude is at once the central conflict of the novel, the impetus for everything that Duggan does and does not do en route to Genoa, and his defining characteristic. In the novel, his ambivalence about O'Connell, coupled with his ambivalence about his station in life, diminishes the image of the Liberator himself, that "giant of a man, physically and mentally if not, as many would argue, morally".

Duggan's Destiny is circular in structure. It begins and ends with Duggan as a porter in the ghastly South Dublin Union workhouse from which his only relief is his nightly stations on a Liffey bridge and his reminiscences of his intimate period of servitude with O'Connell. Being witness to his master's incontinence and spells of incoherence, Duggan is hypersensitive to his own sanity and thwarted ambitions.

Duggan, as a character and narrator, like Martin as a journalist, demonstrates an astute attention to detail, an astounding perception with regard to people and place and an alluring self-effacing humour.

On the whole, the novel was difficult to put down and just as difficult to write about, because it lingers in the head like the brandy used to quell O'Connell's frequent nastiness at the end of his life. Duggan is compelling as a character, his ambivalent relationship with O'Connell is fascinating, and the period language used throughout the novel is frequently poetic.

The only complaint - and there has to be at least one - is that the interjections of testimony from O'Connell's mistresses and political foes tend to distract from Duggan's otherwise complete and flawless narrative. Through this, his first venture into fiction, Seamus Martin will deservedly find a following every bit as faithful as the readers of his journalistic columns.

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