Rereading Joseph O’Conner’s excellent “The Star of the Sea”
From The Guardian;
The Star of the Sea is a coffin ship, ploughing from Britain to America with a freight of evicted Irish scarecrows in steerage and a sprinkling of fascinatingly portrayed toffs in first class. The ship gets lighter by the day, as it sloughs off yet another pile of dead peasants. (They are, so the goodhearted English captain reflects, "as remote from our own race as the Hottentot, Watuti, Mohammedan or Chinese".) A roll call of the ship's main passengers reads like a gallery of Irish stereotypes. There is the brutal landlord, the wronged maidservant, the political balladeer, the aspiring young writer. Yet O'Connor's prose redeems these iconic figures from their banality, rather as if one were to turn Jack and the Beanstalk into a gripping realist novel.
In this self-consciously epic work, O'Connor mixes gothic and picaresque, history and biography, thriller and adventure story, to recreate all the sprawling diversity of high-Victorian fiction. As with much Irish writing, there is a telling contrast between the bleakness of the materials and the opulence of the treatment. While other writers content themselves with fine-drawn cameos of suburban adultery, O'Connor ranges from workhouse destitution and grotesque prison violence to storms at sea and delicately sketched love scenes. There is a Dickensian spaciousness here; indeed, the great man himself puts in a brief celebrity appearance.
Star of the Sea is a polyphonic novel, as different voices, social accents and national idioms weave their way in and out of the text. But if its tone is that of sober English realism, its structure is that of Irish literary experiment. The book is a montage of verbal forms: letters, quotation, first-person narrative, Hansard, captain's log, snatches of ballad, advertisements, news-paper clippings, historical documentation.
The ship is a microcosm of Irish society, the place where a number of different narratives converge, as they do in a piece of fiction. But the novel also traces each of these personal histories back to its roots, through love story and rogue's progress, tale of vengeance and big-house drama. There are several novellas tucked inside this well-upholstered text, along with cameos of the East End, snapshots of Victorian Belfast and vignettes of the Irish land-owning aristocracy.
The society that has only its contemporary experience to live by is poor indeed. With this stunningly accomplished novel, Irish fiction, for so long a prisoner of the present, breaks out into a richer, stranger country.
