ALTHOUGH as I've grown older the past has become more and more my happy land, history was never one of my favourite school subjects. However, I was always intrigued by Silken Thomas, by his impetuous and doomed revolt and by the manner of his leave taking: hanged, drawn and quartered. And here, in her very fine historical novel, The Geraldine Conspiracy (Marino, £16.99), Anne Chambers appends a Prologue in which the very gent, along with his five uncles, is ritualistically dismembered on the gallows field at Tyburn.
The bulk of the narrative is taken up with the effort to preserve and save the last remaining member of the Geraldine dynasty, 11 year old Gerald FitzGerald, from the clutches of Henry VIII, who wishes to wipe out all trace of the formerly all-powerful Anglo Norman family. For 400 years this one clan had held centre stage in the convoluted history of Ireland, from their arrival in the van of the Norman conquerors in the 12th century to the destruction of the Gaelic world of their adoption by the Tudor monarchs in the 16th. But now, because of Silken Thomas's folly, they have become almost extinct, with only the child to act as figurehead.
When we first meet him, he is near death from smallpox, watched over only by his English tutor, Thomas Leverous. But this man, taken into the family by Gerald's father and educated both at home and abroad, is determined to protect the boy and thereby sow the seeds for a reawakening of the family's fortunes Helped and abetted by the child's aunt, the lovely Eleanor, they seek the protection of the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman chiefs, but they are so riven by hate and jealousy that they have time only for their own concerns.
The story becomes a tale of flight, with fact and fiction carefully blended to stir the reader's interest and curiosity. Ms Chambers obviously knows her history, but the book is no stodgy collection of facts and figures and events. Rather, it is a colourful and dashing chronicle, rich in its set-pieces, highly emotive in its depiction of relationships, and finely detailed in its descriptive passages. And, yes, beneath the pageantry, a love story blooms as a counterpoint to the resounding fall of great events.
FROM the past to the present: one thing that could surely be said about Vincent McDonnell's Imagination of the Heart (Brandon Press, £7.95) is that it is up to date. Explicit sex, child molestation and murder, incest, they're all here, and as topical as today's headlines.
The story begins with Willie Leitch returning to Castleford, the town on the west coast of Ireland where he was born and brought up. It is November, and Willie's quest is as bleak as the weather. Sent to the town by his newspaper editor to investigate the mysterious disappearances of two little girls, Willie, in the role of prodigal son, soon finds old ghosts resurfacing, with some of them having no little bearing on the case in hand.
Vincent McDonnell writes a breathless, over ripe prose that eminently suits the content and themes of his book. These are dark deeds that he is describing, and humour, even of the black variety, plays little part. The characters, except for an aged acquaintance who befriends Willie, are uniformly nasty, and even the protagonist himself elicits very little sympathy. However, as an essay on the darker side of the human condition, Imagination of the Heart is a powerful and stunning achievement and one that the reader will not easily forget.
THE late Liam Lynch - he died in 1989 - is not as well known as he should be, and a bow must be made in the direction of Wolfhound Press for publishing his third and final novel, The Pale Moon of Morning (£6.99). Again, it is a stark and shadow-dimmed tale, set in 1930s rural Ireland where 14-year-old Timothy is sent when his parents are accidentally killed.
The Phippses - only distant relatives of Timothy's - are a mixed Protestant and Catholic family who live in a big house in Munster. There is butch Veronica her mad sister Philippa, Flannery a shell-shocked painter and his debauched companions Bobo and Skipper, and the tall and beautiful German student, Alexander, with whom Timothy falls passionately in love.
A gothic tale then unfolds, with much couplings and sunderings violence and mad recriminations. From a slow start, the narrative whirls off and becomes a tornado but by the dying fall of the ending the storm has blown itself out and a kind of calm descends. What a scattering of dead and dying lives it leaves behind, though.