Irish Language Fiction: There is no other novelist in Irish today who writes with the same care, precision, and clarity, says Alan Titley of Liam Mac Cóil.
One of the greatest problems for the writer of historical fiction is authenticity. There is, in the first instance, the tricky business of verisimilitude, and after that the creation of atmosphere, and yet again the fact that we know more now than they did then.
Liam Mac Cóil faces down all of these problems with courage and with conviction. A novel with the ringing title of Fontenoy immediately calls up heroic battles and the daring deeds of our "wild geese", and we certainly get our taste of this. But anyone conversant with the novels of Mac Cóil can expect something altogether more exciting and more challenging.
The Irish Brigade in the service of France played a decisive role in the Battle of Fontenoy, and much of this story is told in the words of an Irish captain, Seán Ó Raghallaigh, who left the proofs of a book he wrote on the events in the library of Chartres. Or so we are given to believe. It is, of course, our own true author inventing the story as it would have been told. This is a masterly piece of authorial audacity, not for its idea but for the manner in which he has carried it off. It is reconstructed in 18th-century Irish complete with differing orthography and rhetorical flourishes. The recreation of the world of the Irish soldiers of 250 years ago in their own language is a work of verbal artistry of the first order.
But we also see Ó Raghallaigh telling his story to a French amanuensis, while both of them reflect on the course of the conflict and the nature of what is remembered. While this discussion proceeds, we are simultaneously invited to interrogate story, and history and truth itself.
If this sounds like another postmodern game, it is not, for Mac Cóil never loses the narrative thread, which rattles along with sufficient blood and gore for those who prefer their historical fiction like that. There is a large cast of hardened characters out of Ireland who speak with passion and with humour. They are the universal soldiers thrown up out of the Irish story.
This is a novel that is multilayered with significances within a tale which is essentially simple. It can move swiftly from the battlefield to penetrative recollection. There is great windy bombast on the eve of action, and then its subtle deflation. The fighting is very "real", but maybe some ancient heroic tale runs through it? The King of France has a walk-on part, but he is really a nobody.
The events are there to prod us into some grappling with meaning, while meaning is always subverted by words.
This is because Mac Cóil's concern is always style. Style for what it can, and what it cannot, do. Style for what is says and what it shows. There is no other novelist in Irish today who writes with the same care, precision, and clarity. This novel is a pleasure to read, and a work of art.
Alan Titley is a writer and academic. His new collection of stories, Parabolas, will shortly be published by Lagan Press
Fontenoy. By Liam Mac Cóil, Leabhar Breac, 194pp. €21.90