A Negro in Leinster House

Review: The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small by Neil Jordan

The Enlightenment. Probably my favourite period in History. Sometimes I think I’d love to have been there to observe it and participate, to be enflamed by the new ideas doing the rounds (in pamphlets that had to be concealed), to fight heroically for The Rights of Man. And then I realise that it would have been just a frightful time to live, unless you were born on the right side of the tracks, and had the wherewithal and the education to indulge in this intellectual experiment. And then, of course, I wonder, if you were born on the right side of the tracks, why would you give up all your privileges? It would be like turkeys voting for Christmas. And you start to understand that even those heroic thinkers who set Enlightenment rolling had no conception of how far it would have to roll before anything resembling liberté, égalité or fraternité would materialise or indeed if it ever would.

Neil Jordan’s fabulous book has my head spinning again. It is not heavy and moralistic; rather it is poetic, but it is about Enlightenment. Lord Edward (FitzGerald) is clearly a man ahead of his time, ready to absorb new ideas. It can’t have been easy but you start to understand that a man like him might feel that he had less to lose than, say, his brother who was Duke of Leinster and the sole inheritor (among his 18 siblings) of the estate. The ante was somewhat lower. It seems he got that wrong; he had lots to lose!

Well it’s true that reading this book raised so many emotions in me. But its also true to say that this book is a little gem and Neil Jordan can be easily forgiven for casting it in such a poetic and rose-tinted light. I couldn’t put it down. This is not a biography of Lord Edward, more a glimpse from the wings through the eyes of his negro man-servant Tony Small, whose own story, it turns out, is as extraordinary as his “master’s”. Jordan gets right inside Tony’s skin and even if it’s likely that Tony did not always see his circumstances in such a tolerant light, it is likely that he knew he had been saved from a much more cruel existence by Lord Edward (“call me Ned”) who has many characteristics to be praised when held up against the light of the times.

It’s written by accomplished cinema director Neil Jordan so I was not surprised to discover that the tone and style were very cinematic; short chapter which felt very much like scenes. Jordan writes poetically, with a light touch which made the book very easy to read. I galloped through it.

The Lord Edward he describes is heroic but flawed, full of contradictions. Clearly a modern thinker unfettered by classist views, I was troubled by his constant whoring, using girls from the lower classes while holding up his female peers as untouchables. All in all, the Irish gentry, as portrayed (and I realise I’m reading a novel), come across as a tolerant bunch of people who chat away cordially with their exotic servant while they dress him up as some kind of marionette (see picture), and have him sleep in the stable and travel on the roof of the coach or the open deck of the ship in all weather. Their arrogance in wishing to be address as “My Lord” or “My Lady” and their belief that nobility is a birthright and not a assessment of character make my blood boil. If I have any criticism it is that Jordan raced through the United Irishmen years when Edward had finally risen above those conceits.

The book left me wanting more. As luck would have it, lightning often strikes twice and another novelist took on the same theme at the same time as Jordan, so I will begin reading Words to Shape My Name by Laura McKenna next week. Stand by for a comparative review.

Guilt and Redemption

Review: Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

This is the kind of book you think you must have read already. Everyone has heard about it and it seems to have always been there. My friends agree that it “must have” been on the curriculum when we were finishing school back in the early 1970’s.

Actually, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I didn’t recognise the story. The writing was heavy going and yet admirable. Conrad, writing in his third language is a wordsmith of the highest order. I found it flowery at times, never easy but … unputdownable.

I’m sure that the modern reader will find much to criticise in a book written in and about colonial times. It is very important to remember, however, that Conrad was very much a man ahead of his times but using the language of the times. He was a humanist and his Heart of Darkness did much to shed light on the abuses of colonialism so I can easily forgive him the vocabulary he uses.

It is, I think, a story about guilt and redemption. Jim, unable to forgive himself for failing to act as he would have wanted to act during an emergency, flees the “civilised” world becomes “Lord” over a forgotten tribe. The structure of the book is very unusual, nearly all of it being in the form of reported speech as the narrator, Marlowe, who in some manner became Jim’s mentor, relates Jim’s story over dinner to a group of gentlemen. As he is rarely present at the events he describes, much of the book is hearsay and was somewhat contrived in my eyes. Nevertheless, it gets a big thumbs up from me as a book deserving of its classic status.