Tales of the Easter Rising
Categories: History , Award Winners , Movies & Books , Local Interest , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Fiction , Gay & Lesbian , Poetry
No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.
O’Neill sketches the events leading to the rebellion in the background of his characters’ lives, until suddenly all become players in the national drama. Ireland’s demand for liberty parallels the quest of young Jim and Doyler, and their older mentor MacMurrough, for the freedom to experience “the love that dare not speak its name,” defined by their countryman Oscar Wilde on his path to hard labor for “indecent [homosexual] acts.”
At Swim, Two Boys is a romantic account of the Rising and an affectionate portrait of Dublin itself, where the rebels held out for a week before British forces overwhelmed them. A Star Called Henry presents a much darker picture from the perspective of a child of Dublin’s horrific slums, fertile ground for growing tough fighters. Although O’Neill’s Doyler lives in the same conditions, he lacks Henry Smart’s ruthlessness and cynicism, expressed in these jibes about a fellow rebel:
“The eejit. I could tell from the back of his head, he was one of the Christian Brothers’ boys, here to die for Ireland, dying to please his betters. With a little rifle that had once belonged to an American Boy Scout, tied to his back with a bit of string. I was ready to die myself – I was banking on it – but I’d still been hoping to get a few quid into my pocket in case the worst came to the worst and I lived.”
Roddy Doyle, whose grandparents “were involved” in the revolution – some were killed – is highly ambivalent about this history. Henry reveals the worst motives in himself and his leaders, but his idealized wife, truly his “better half,” remains a cheerfully devoted rebel to the end, not only of this book, but its sequel, Oh, Play That Thing.
Two other great novelists have written about the Rising from the perspective of Anglo-Irish families: Iris Murdoch in The Red and the Green and Elizabeth Bowen in The Last September, which was made into a film (available at the Library in both DVD and VHS).
Another first-rate film about the revolution and “The Big Man” who so brilliantly led it is Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, starring Liam Neeson, also at the Library in DVD and VHS. A brand-new account is Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley with Cillian Murphy, star of Jordan’s wonderful Breakfast on Pluto (based on the Patrick McCabe novel). This film, which hasn’t been widely released yet, won the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
Other novels about these events includes 1916 by Morgan Llywelyn, Trinity by Leon Uris, and two books by Cincinnati resident Cathal Liam: Consumed in Freedom's Flame: A Novel of Ireland's Struggle for Freedom, 1916-1921 and its sequel, Blood on the Shamrock: A Novel of Ireland's Civil War, 1916-1921.
Among the abundance of historical accounts, a couple of small illustrated books make handy reference companions to the fiction: The Road to Freedom: Photographs and Memorabilia from the 1916 Rising and Afterwards by Michael Kenny and A Walk Through Rebel Dublin, 1916 by Mick O’Farrell.
