BLAST, BLITZ, PROMOS, REVEALS, & TOURS . . . : TOUR w/GUEST POST - HISTORICAL FICTION

Bittersweet Tapestry

The Derrynane Saga, #3

by Kevin O'Connell

Publication Date: November 1st 2019

Gortcullinane Press eBook & Paperback

Genre: Historical Fiction

MUSINGS ON WRITING OF IRELAND

Perhaps no country in the world has been the subject of as much shameless stereotyping as Ireland.

Ask virtually any American, or Canadian, or Aussie – even, or perhaps it should be especially, those claiming to be “Irish” – of their views or conceptions of this moist, mystical island on the far western reaches of Europe and, sadly, experience has shown that they will be in many ways quite similar:

Ireland is blest with emerald green scenery, everywhere dotted with stark white-washed cottages, many with thatched roofs. Other than Dublin, the country is made up of many small villages in which there are countless country pubs populated by jolly men in flat caps and suspendered pants, many beginning to quaff their pints of Guinness stout sometime in the morning, any number of the same merrily returning home to their cottages late in the evening. Most people are farmers. It is sometimes wittily said that the place is “One factory (the Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate in Dublin) surrounded a big farm”.

Everyone is Catholic, there are many large families. Though the Irish are open, friendly and welcoming, they drink too much and everyone eats potatoes.

There was a Famine.

There was a Rising in 1916 that everyone supported – and they drove the British out of Ireland.

There are many Irish poets and authors – but most non-Irish – and many who claim to be Irish – do not know their names and have never read any of their work.

“Danny Boy” is the most popular Irish song.

Gaelic used to be spoken – but it is no longer, it is as dead a language as Latin.

The list could – sadly – go on . . . and on . . . and . . . .

Even as I was beginning to write the Derrynane Saga it was in some quarters viewed as being “totally fictitious” – many people had never heard of a “Gaelic Aristocracy” or the Irish Brigade of France – nor the substantial Irish presence – both officers and other-ranks – in the armies of Maria Theresa, of the King of Spain – even in service to the Russian Czar. People were (are) largely unaware of the torrents of violence unleashed on Ireland by the armies of Queen Elizabeth I or Oliver Cromwell. They did not know about what was said to be “the hidden Ireland” – of big houses, such as the O’Connells’ Derrynane where the “ould ways” of Irish poetry and music, the tradition of the bards continued to live on, albeit in reduced circumstances.

Similarly, though not the primary focus of my stories, the plight of the Roman Catholic 90% of the population was, outside of chronicles of the Famine, rarely touched on, save in scholarly works.

Whilst I did not set out to purposely “right any of these wrongs” it has proven both enlightening and satisfying to experience the “wide-eyed wonder” of any number of people as they learn of an Ireland they did not know existed.

Admittedly, this is highly personal to me . . . I feel fortunate to have grown up in a family conscious of the past – of Ireland, especially in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, being aware of some of its least-known people, of where and how they lived, and what they did to survive – and, in some cases, thrive, knowing at least to some extent who was who back a number of generations. The downside (it seems there is always a downside to things Irish!) of this – truth be told – is that more than a few of the O’Connells were and are snobs, at times rightly-characterised as being “West Brits” – not to mention being, stubborn, arrogant and prideful.

In the horrific aftermath of Oliver Cromwell's brutal invasion of Ireland in 1649 a series of statutes, collectively referred as the "Penal Laws" - which Edmund Burke characterised as being "a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” – were enacted, as further “plantation” (the transfer of Catholic holdings to Protestant immigrants being brought into Ireland from Scotland and England to bolster the minute Protestant population) was underway.

Though by the years covered in the Derrynane Saga the laws were being unevenly, in many instances arbitrarily, applied and enforced, they remained nevertheless cruel, the sole purpose of them being the continued suppression and disenfranchisement of the native Irish Catholic population who by the mid-Eighteenth Century controlled but 10% of Ireland's land – the rest being in the hands of "planters" and the descendants of planters.

Indeed, by the period related in Bittersweet Tapestry it could be said that the occupiers' goals of pacifying a tumultuous people, whom most referred to as the "mere Irish" had been largely achieved, the vast majority of the Irish people by then being landless, impoverished and illiterate.

The nexus of the histories of Ireland and Catholic Europe, especially France and Austria, which play a significant role in the story, as well as Russia and Spain, lies in that Catholics were prohibited from learning to read and write, so the fortunate “hidden Irish” families – such as the O’Connells – dispatched their sons to Salamanca in Spain, the Irish College in Paris or Louvain in the Austrian Netherlands. More than a few young men, once thus and there educated, took advantage of the opportunities afforded them to serve as commissioned officers in the armies of these Catholic monarchs.

As I read what I have just written it strikes me that it all sounds rather more than a wee bit elitist – especially as in these three books I am writing of a time – the Eighteenth Century – when much, indeed most of Catholic Ireland had been reduced to a condition of ignorance, penury, landlessness and hopelessness – indeed, a definitive history, Ian McBride’s Eighteenth Century Ireland is fittingly subtitled “Island of Slaves”. Though the stories related in Bittersweet Tapestry, indeed in the Saga as a whole, are of a group of people – themselves well-reduced from the way many of their ancestors had lived – the facts of tenantry, landlessness and general harsh-living, whilst not being wholly ignored, have perhaps not been treated with the detail they warrant. Indeed, one will now know that there were tenants around the sanctuary that was Derrynane – more than a few of the families being named “O’Connell”!

As grim as the times were, the fact of the matter is that there were any number of miracles along the hedgerows of Ireland, which sheltered forbidden schools:

We hear of tenants living in humble cottages, shared with their few animals, who nevertheless knew Shakespeare well or spoke Latin, or even Greek, with near-fluency. The “oral tradition” that was bardic Ireland still lived in many places, despite the miseries and deprivation wrought by plantation and subjugation. Whilst by this time many could no longer read, they told the stories – of ancient Ireland and William Shakespeare, and, in their own way kept the flame of hope, howsoever flickering, no matter how dim they had become, alive – generation after generation, until – at the hands of Lady Augusta Gregory, William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge and others – almost to a man – and woman! – Anglo-Irish Protestants – it burst forth in the Celtic Revival of the early Twentieth Century.

One hope in writing this “saga” has been that it might awaken a curiosity amongst as many readers as possible – one designed to send them to many other books – non-fiction histories, Yeats’ poems, the tales collected by Lady Gregory and re-told and built upon by John Millington Synge and others in plays at the Abby Theatre in Dublin – so that they and eventually the reading public as a whole may become aware of an Ireland beyond its stereotypes – the fun and amusing good ones, and those not so good sad ones.

Now . . . having said all of this, and admitting that I have sounded at times rather like the classic curmudgeon, I happily admit that young attractive congressional aides, green plastic derbies perched atop their well-coifed heads, queued up in a seemingly-endless line in front of The Dubliner, Washington’s venerably-quintessential pub, on any given St. Patrick’s Day – they very much do elicit a warm smile from this “ould fellow” – despite that they are singing “Danny Boy” as they wait their turn to join the annual festivities!

The Book Junkie Reads . . . Review of . . . BITTERSWEET TAPESTRY (The Derrynane Saga, #3) . . . Just to make it simple for now. This is a saga that will be very much enjoyed and beloved by historical fiction lovers all over the world. This third installment in the Derrynane Saga was just full of life, family, drama, intrigue, a true step in to the past and the lives of those caught within the lines of varying divides France, Vienna, Ireland. Each new chapter gave you more to see and more to look forward to as each page was turned.

BLURB
A dramatic decade has passed since sixteen-year-old Eileen O’Connell first departed her family’s sanctuary at remote Derrynane on the Kerry coast to become the wife of one of the wealthiest men in Ireland and the mistress of John O’Connor’s Ballyhar – only to have her elderly husband die within months of the marriage. Unhappily returned to Derrynane, within a year, under the auspices of their uncle, a general in the armies of Maria Theresa, Eileen and her sister, Abigail departed for Vienna and a life neither could have ever imagined – one at the dizzying heights of the Hapsburg empire and court, where Abigail ultimately became principal lady-in-waiting to the Empress herself, whilst Eileen, for nine momentous years, served as governess to the Empress’s youngest daughter – during which time Maria Antonia, whom Eileen still calls ‘my wee little archduchess’, has become Marie Antoinette, dauphine of France, though she continues to refer to her beloved governess as “Mama”. As Bittersweet Tapestry opens, it is the High Summer of 1770. Having escorted the future Queen of France from Vienna to her new life, Eileen and her husband, Captain Arthur O’Leary of the Hungarian Hussars, along with their little boy and Eileen’s treasured friend (and former servant) Anna Pfeffer are establishing themselves in Ireland. Their ties to Catholic Europe remain close and strong; in addition to Abigail and her O’Sullivan family and General O’Connell, his wife and young daughter in Vienna, their brother Daniel is an officer in the Irish Brigade of the armies of Louis XV, whilst their youngest brother, Hugh, is studying at École Militaire in Paris, his path to a commission in the Dillons’ Regiment of the Brigade. His gentle Austrian friendship with Maria Antonia having inevitably waned, Hugh’s relationship with the strikingly-beautiful young widowed Princess Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy is blossoming. Though happily ensconced at Rathleigh House, the O’Leary family estate in County Cork, being prominent amongst those families which are the remnants of the old Gaelic order in the area, Eileen and Art find that the dark cloud of the Protestant Ascendancy hovers heavily, at times threateningly, over them. Bittersweet Tapestry is a tale of stark contrasts – between Hugh’s life of increasing prominence amidst the glitter and intrigue of the French court and Art and Eileen’s in English-occupied Ireland – especially as the latter progresses into a dark, violent and bloody tale . . . ultimately involving an epic tragedy, which along with the events leading up to it and those occurring in its dramatic wake, will permanently impact the O’Learys, the O’Connells – and their far-flung circle of family and friends in Ireland and across Europe. With his uniquely-descriptive prose, Kevin O'Connell again deftly weaves threads of historical fact and fancy to create a colourful fabric affording unique insights into the courts of eighteenth-century Catholic Europe as well as English-ruled Ireland. As the classic story unfolds amongst the O’Learys, the O'Connells, their friends and enemies, the tumultuously-dangerous worlds in which they dwell will continue to gradually – but inexorably – become even more so. Bittersweet Tapestry joins O’Connell’s well-received Beyond Derrynane and Two Journeys Home as The Derrynane Saga continues – an enthralling epic, presenting a sweeping chronicle, set against the larger drama of Europe in the early stages of significant – and, in the case of France – violent change.

Available on Amazon

The Derrynane Saga

Author Info
Kevin O'Connell is a native of New York City and a descendant of a young officer of what had—from 1690 to 1792—been the Irish Brigade of the French army, believed to have arrived in French Canada following the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette in October of 1793. At least one grandson subsequently returned to Ireland and Mr. O'Connell's own grandparents came to New York in the early twentieth century. He holds both Irish and American citizenship. He is a graduate of Providence College and Georgetown University Law Centre. For much of his four decades-long legal career, O'Connell has practiced international business transactional law, primarily involving direct-investment matters, throughout Asia (principally China), Europe, and the Middle East. The father of five children and grandfather of ten, he and his wife, Laurette, live with their golden retriever, Katie, near Annapolis, Maryland.