An
Irish History of Civilization, Vol. 1: An astonishingly
comprehensive and extremely idiosyncratic combination
of anecdotes shared through fiction, fact, and faction--in
more than one sense of that last word. The title
is misleading, of course. "How the Irish Saved
Civilisation" this is not. In an 800+ page
work starting with S/Paul of Tarsus and ending as
the Great Famine looms, this collects, in the fashion
of the Uruguayan storyteller Eduardo Galeano's three-volume
History of Fire did so well two decades ago
for Latin America: Akenson displays a collage of
people, events, and situations that span roughly
18 centuries. This first volume assembling two "books"
through smaller regionally-centered chapters that
alternate and appear as the chronology spreads the
Irish across the globe, stops before the Great Famine;
the second volume will continue the story, of not
only the Irish, up to us.
Why
start so far back? First, Christianity and its separation
from Rabbinic Judaism establishes the missionary
momentum that impels the gospel towards Hibernia--well
before St. Patrick. Second, Akenson is not only
an historian of Ireland but of Judaism at this time,
and he seeks to give us a talmudic take on not only
all things Irish, but how the Irish diaspora--as
with that of the Jews--swirled over nearly all of
the planet as colonisation, technology, and ambition
all drove the Irish into every corner of the Commonwealth,
and far beyond even its ever-expanding domains.
Third, what worked for Paul worked for Pat: they
both knew how to lay on the shame and then offer
their hearers the remedy--baptism. Akenson links
Patrick's nagging mistrust of the body--based on
an intelligent if inevitably speculative interpretation
of his crucial letter admitting a secret sin--with
a culturally Irish desire to save face. This union
of shame with its antidote resulted in his success,
legendary or historical--since Christianity quickly
spread. How? Patrick knew how to manipulate the
pride and the status of those nobles listening to
Patrick's exhortations, and once these influential
Irish leaders capitulated, their followers with
little resistance humbly and inevitably followed
suit.
Akenson
emphasizes a few key points among thousands of equally
thoughtful, if less consistently repeating but historically
inspired situations that speckle his vivid vignettes.
First, the Irish, until the Famine, were as much
characterised by Protestant as by Catholic emigres.
Next, many of these same Irish contrary to the lore
of Orange lodges and parochial catechisms alike,
hopped back and forth over the supposed sectarian
divide much more nimbly and often for less than
sanctified reasons--usually relating to marriage,
wealth, survival, pragmatism, and/or ambition. Also,
these claim-jumpers complicate any descendent's
assertion that one's Irish ancestors were forever
faithful to the true Faith, whichever one that may
have been. Not to overlook that many Irish found
Canada--with its legacy from the French of comparatively
greater religious toleration and a more congenial
cultural climate than that of the United States--a
more appealing destination that until the Famine
rivalled or bested the U.S. in its Irish contingents.
Finally,
also contrary to custom, the Irish were not "black
slaves in white skin." Akenson rejects a lazy
Marxist superstructure thrust upon the quicksands
of historical certainty. Nearly every tale he tells
challenges 'fact'. Barbados may have been unpleasant,
but freedom awaited those even if convicted or indentured,
which was more than their African and Indian counterparts
could expect. Akenson never lets us escape the uncomfortable
legacy of the Irish throughout worlds, New perhaps
more often than Old: they were happily as much victimisers
as they were victims on behalf of British Civilisation
as We Know It. Montserrat--where briefly an Irish-dominated
'republic' showed no less mercy towards its darker
inhabitants from its sunburned social climbers--and
the other slave-dominated Caribbean islands provide
a particularly rueful surfeit of plenty to back
up this claim. Republicans, throughout these pages,
often turn coats rapidly, and more often than not
find England a convenient refuge after their activism
ceases. More than one family tree hides both those
judged heroes as well as those who later generations
would call traitors. Akenson insists that no Irish
truism as to loyalty on either side of the divides
long built can remain impervious to the steady nudge
of the historian's trowel beneath these sectarian
and ideological facades. Religion and ideology prove
more flags of convenience than banners for processions
when genealogies are scrutinised. The Irish had
the comparative luxury in those harsh early modern
centuries of a choice to leave their island hell
for an island less romanticised but more profitable
for many gamblers and chancers--those willing to
manipulate the slave economy, rig the sugar or pirate
trades, and spin its imperialist wheels and capitalist
roulette to their advantage.
That
is, the Irish may have been driven to emigrate through
undoubted hard times and few prospects, but few
went unwillingly, and far more left with little
regret as they sailed as close as Liverpool or as
far away as the antipodes. Even the convicts shipped
off for political reasons, Akenson argues, constituted
only about 1.5% of those transported to Australia;
the ODC's, moreover, were far more often indecent
if all too ordinary: careerist criminals the norm
rather than doe-eyed innocents trussed and tossed
for stealing a loaf of bread.
If
this was all, it could have been expressed in far
fewer pages. This book took me about 10 nights of
quite a lot of free time to finish; and I admit
I did read quickly. The pace, luckily, prevents
you from nodding off, and the bite-size slices of
his history encourage nibbling. Akenson has a like
it or leave it narrative style. The book did not
weary me except in propping up its considerable
bulk. I can't, however, award this less than a rare
five stars. This quirky compilation creates rhythms
that invade my reveries.
Happily,
no mean feat in these days of expensive productions
from university presses, this (Montreal/Kingston-printed
McGill-Queen's UP/London, Granta Books) offering
provides great value for the money. Yes, perhaps
if I was editor I might dare to excise a couple
of hundred pages. But, as I am sure Akenson himself
asserted, which pages to be cut would be debated
and deflected eloquently by their creator.
In
its abundance, its rationalism, and its attitude,
the result's reminiscent of the Enlightenment writers
who cultivated a loftier distance from the fools
that we mortals be, but not without a soft spot
for the dreams, comforts, and illusions even the
best educated and most rational share with the rest
of us less benighted proles. Harvard and Yale taught
him; he has written dozens of books and won prizes
and earned richly endowed (undoubtably) chairs at
prestigious universities. But, he still has the
common touch--if that touch bears scorn perhaps
a bit more often than sentiment. Akenson's more
akin to Voltaire rather than Rousseau.
Consider,
if you're wondering if this book's for you, these
sorts of descriptions. 'Spenser, like Raleigh, was
a man whose hard and instinctive brutality was constantly
being overlimed with a wash of chivalry; and that
wash then was enhued into a mural, one so graceful
that the viewer forgot that the artist had used
a pigment whose fixative was blood.' (161) This
shows characteristically Akenson's choice of the
arresting metaphor, the slightly erudite (and sometimes
overly recondite, as he is wont to use archaic verbs
that echo long-discarded Hiberno-anglicisms) word
selection, and the graceful balance of his demotic
but persistently graceful clauses.
He
compares one memorable figure, the Jewish George
Benjamin who led Canada's Orange Lodges (this is
not a misprint), in his own horse-mounted posture
to 'a sphere upon a pine table.' (778) He can be
funny. He can be dramatic. Tairoa, a Cook Islander
in 1801, looks back at a British ship from which
he, in his grab for fame, speared a 'pale angel':
he is confounded when 'a long bamboo stick was pointed
at him from the foreigner's vessel. He saw a light
and heard a noise only a decasecond before his world
exploded into searing pain, blinding sunshine, and
a roaring of reef-shredded breakers. He fell dead
in the bottom of his canoe.' (532-3)
Rewardingly,
Akenson can be wise. He compares the labors of Robert
Maunsell to translate the Bible into Maori to the
far less laborious efforts over exactly the same
number of years of Darwin, and wonders why we only
praise the latter scholar. Perhaps, as he contemplates
when conjuring up Emain Macha in 200 CE, Akenson
through craft, cunning, and compassion, rescues
history for the rest of us, who too are minor unsung
figures in the long march to and from and through
civilisation, here and there intersected by the
Irish, however dimly recalled as our ancestors,
conspirators, conquerors, or companions. Why, as
Saul wonders in an opening scene, recite so much
seemingly useless information, not only the praises
of those famed like Darwin but those otherwise forgotten
such as Maunsell? 'Professional remembers counted
a lot. One cannot have a world run by aristocrats
unless someone remembers who is a ruler and who
a commoner or slave.' (61)
Akenson
returns his story of the Irish and so many others
to those of us who come from not only aristocrats
and commoners and slaves--and, in these pages, the
frequent frictions and couplings among and between
all three factions. While many of the latter two
categories remain nameless, and many others mere
mentions in testimonies or ledgers, all--not only
the first class usually granted that dubious honor--find
their voices here. The noble and the servant, the
Catholic, Protestant, a few Jews, and one Irishman
deigned a Sikh deity (the inconclusive, almost Borgesian
account of John Nicholson) all jostle for position.
I will have to wait for the reading of the second
volume, I suppose, to find out if there is more
about this Anglo-Irish Sikh god. One of hundreds
of characters here.
This
surprisingly affordable and handsomely designed
volume, the first "two books" comprising
the first installment of two volumes, preserves
these voices from Asia Minor to the ends of the
earth as of 1845, where there always, as Akenson
imagines it, can be found an Irish man or woman
or someone who once was one, or once was engendered
by, or once was owned by, or once knew one!
