IRISH FICTION: Dr Johnson once compared journeying by ship to "being in jail with the chance of being drowned". For the passengers in this novel's eponymous famine ship, the voyage is also a living Hell, with the horrors they have thought to escape continuing to torture them to their journey's end.
More than 450 people are packed aboard the leaky vessel in November 1847, most of them shoved like damned souls into the criminally overcrowded steerage class below decks, the remaining handful pretending a civilised detachment in the state rooms above. Keeping them afloat is the unfortunate Captain Lockwood, a trusting English Quaker whose simple belief in human decency will be pushed to breaking point over 20 days at sea.
Joseph O'Connor has laid out his story like a racy Victorian novel: a murder is promised, chapter headings and illustrations are presented in the style of a penny dreadful and the narrative slips between press clippings, the ship's journal and the jottings of an American newsman and failed novelist, G. Grantley Dixon. A marvellous cast of characters is introduced: the crippled "Monster" Mulvey, put on board to kill David Merridith, foolish aristocrat and Galway landlord; the wild man, Meadowes, a member of the revolutionary "Be Liable" Club; and the sadly beautiful Mary Duane, childhood friend of the bankrupt landlord and nursemaid to his children. Other individuals play more minor parts, including a mysterious Maharajah, given to hilariously inappropriate remarks at moments of crisis.
Yet before this tale has sailed very far, it becomes obvious that so much melodrama masks wide-ranging research and a very modern understanding of the forces involved. Experience of famine is remembered painfully well, both for the sufferer and the better off left standing on the sidelines. Hunger, we are told, has a "trick of letting you think you weren't hungry and then suddenly hammering into you like a wild-eyed, shrieking robber". As each character is explained, blame becomes as difficult to nail at the door of the Big House as on the broken wall of the cabin. Everyone is the product of experience, good as well as evil, wishing only to survive. And unlike antique pictures of cruel landlords and innocent peasants, we are reminded of a class they have behind left in the empty landscape; "It is not the common man of England who is preying like a vulture on the poor people when they have nothing, but the Judas Irish merchant with his greedy eye to whatever mite he can screw out of his wretched countrymen and they so down." As happens today, the wider Irish world was ashamed and retreated into denial: life carried on as usual outside the famine-stricken areas. What made it worse was that it "was not happening in Africa or India but in the wealthiest kingdom on the face of the earth".
The anger is palpable. Yet Joseph O'Connor is clearly not "the kind of radical who is secretly relieved that injustices exist; morality being so easily available by saying you found them outrageous". Nor, despite the book's playfully decorative Victoriana (including a cameo appearance by Charles Dickens himself), has he written a mere historical pastiche.
Instead, he has poured a furious intelligence into the minds of his travellers, questioning everything from the inheritance of guilt to the loss of local memory.
In doing so, he has written his most substantial and impressive novel to date. Sad and funny, Star of the Sea tacks and veers in surprising directions, but follows a subtly plotted course to its final satisfying landfall.
• Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic
Star of the Sea. By Joseph O'Connor. Secker & Warburg, 410pp. £12.99