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Summary
Summary
In the bitter winter of 1847, from an Ireland torn by famine and injustice, the Star of the Sea sets sail for New York. On board are hundreds of refugees, some optimistic, many more are desperate. Among them are a maid with a devastating secret, the bankrupt Lord Merridith and his wife and children, and a killer is stalking the decks, hungry for the vengeance that will bring absolution.
This journey will see many lives end, others begin anew. Passionate loves are tenderly recalled, shirked responsibilities regretted too late, and profound relationships are shockingly discovered. In this spellbinding tale of tragedy and mercy, love and healing, the farther the ship sails toward the Promised Land, the more her passengers seem moored to a past that will never let them go.
As urgently contemporary as it is historical, this gripping and compassionate novel builds with the pace of a thriller to a stunning conclusion.
Author Notes
Joseph O'Connor is the author of several widely acclaimed novels, including Cowboys & Indians, Desperadoes, and The Salesman. He has also written criticism, plays, and screenplays, and edited Yeats Is Dead! He lives in Dublin.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
First published in the U.K. and shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, this brooding new historical fiction by novelist, playwright and critic O'Connor (Cowboys and Indians) chronicles the mayhem aboard Star of the Sea, a leaky old sailing ship crossing from Ireland to New York during the bitter winter of 1847, its steerage crammed to the bulkheads with diseased and starving refugees from the Irish potato famine. The novel takes the form of a personal account written by passenger G. Grantley Dixon, a New York Times reporter who intersperses his narrative with reportage and interviews as he describes the intrigue that unfolds during the 26-day journey. There's Pius Mulvey, "a sticklike limping man from Connemara" known to the passengers as "the monster" or "the ghost," who shuffles menacingly around the ship and is the subject of many a rumor. There's Earl David Merridith of Kingscourt, one of the few passengers in first class, who has evicted thousands of his tenants for nonpayment of rent, dooming them and their families to almost certain death by starvation. Also aboard is the young widow, Mary Duane, a nanny for the Kingscourt children who shares a history of intimacies with both Kingscourt and Mulvey. And there is, of course, Kingscourt's wife, with whom Dixon is having an ill-advised affair. One of these passengers is on a mission to commit murder, and another is the fated victim. Through flashbacks, the complicated narrative paints a vivid picture of the rigors of life in Ireland in the mid-19th century. The engrossing, well-structured tale will hold historical fiction fans rapt. 4-city author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
O'Connor's luscious book brews the suspense of a thriller with the scope and passion of a Victorian novel--seasoned in authentic historical detail and served up in language that is equal parts lyrical and gritty. A voyage from Ireland to New York in 1847 brings together people whose lives--past and present--twist around each other in ways that threaten to strangle. While some have more personal reasons for making the crossing, they're also emigrating from a country scorched by famine, oppression, and the violence erupting from a desperate underclass. The author loads the ship with compelling characters, and the most intriguing is the vengeful and cunningly manipulative Pius Mulvey. In this passage, he kills a prison guard who had abused him: "He sank to his hunkers, said an Act of Contrition in his dying rapist's ear and bashed in what was left of his face with the rock." Mulvey deserves a place among the classic villains of literature, just as his creator, a Dublin-based novelist, is earning his spot in the ranks of great Irish storytellers. --Karen Holt
Guardian Review
The Irish famine of the 1840s was the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe, yet inspired surprisingly little imaginative writing. There is a powerful novel by Liam O'Flaherty and a starkly moving drama by the contemporary playwright Tom Murphy. But in both Yeats and Joyce it is no more than a dim resonance. It is as though African-Americans were to maintain an embarrassed silence about the slave trade. Shame and trauma may have played a part in this reticence. In recent years, however, there has been a political motive as well. Brooding on the one million dead and the one million who fled the famine is hardly much in vogue in an Ireland keen to play down its colonial past and flaunt its new-found modernity. With Ireland and the UK now cheek by jowl in the EU, it is not exactly politic to recall the bungled British relief effort, which sped a good many of the dead to their graves. Or to recall that quite a few eminent Britons, including the man in charge of the relief project, regarded the famine as God's way of punishing the feckless Micks for their congenital indolence. Moving in his usual mysterious way, the Almighty had chosen potato blight as a means of converting Connemara peasants into Boston politicians. Commemorating the famine today, so it is whispered in some Irish circles, gives comfort to militant republicanism, which is one reason why the famine memorial industry tends to provoke the hard- boiled sons and daughters of the Celtic Tiger into a spot of well- bred sneering. The sheer kitschiness of some of it is a rather more honest reason. Talk in middle-class Dublin harps masochistically on the way some of the Irish themselves profited from the disaster. It also betrays an overcharitable eagerness to let the British government off the hook, even though there was easily enough food in Victorian Britain (of which Ireland was then part) to feed the Irish several times over. There are, it should be said, those who have spoken out against this shiftiness, including Joseph O'Connor's sister, Sinead. Whitewashing one's past, however, is merely the flipside of wallowing in it. The neurotic, Freud remarked, is someone afflicted by reminiscences; but those who disavow their past are just as sick. Only when you can reclaim the past without either shame or nostalgia are you really free of it, which is one reason why Star of the Sea is to be acclaimed. Another reason is that O'Connor's supple, richly textured, faintly archaic prose, which draws on an Irish tradition of scrupulous verbal craftsmanship, puts to shame the colourless, drably functional language of so many of his English counterparts. 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. Terry Eagleton's memoir, The Gatekeeper , is published by Penguin. To order Star of the Sea for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-eagle.1 Commemorating the famine today, so it is whispered in some Irish circles, gives comfort to militant republicanism, which is one reason why the famine memorial industry tends to provoke the hard- boiled sons and daughters of the Celtic Tiger into a spot of well- bred sneering. The sheer kitschiness of some of it is a rather more honest reason. Talk in middle-class Dublin harps masochistically on the way some of the Irish themselves profited from the disaster. It also betrays an overcharitable eagerness to let the British government off the hook, even though there was easily enough food in Victorian Britain (of which Ireland was then part) to feed the Irish several times over. There are, it should be said, those who have spoken out against this shiftiness, including [Joseph O'Connor]'s sister, Sinead. 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. - Terry Eagleton.
Kirkus Review
A bumptious epic about a New World-bound ship Star of the Sea, full of raging immigrants, conflicted aristocrats, and a flint-eyed murderer. It's the tumultuous year of 1847 when O'Connor's gallimaufry of characters board a "coffin ship" bound from Ireland to New York. Hundreds of famine refugees huddle in steerage, while just above them a handful of first-class passengers reside in splendor, though they're rent with hidden intrigues--and all hear the thudding gait of the loner with the bad leg who wanders the ship at night. At center are two men in particular: the aristocrat David Merridith and the limping loner, Pius Mulvey. Merridith is a self-loathing scion of a British family that had long owned a large chunk of Ireland. When the estate's fortunes crashed, at the height of the famine, most of the tenant families were put off the land--while corpses littered the countryside. Now on his way to New York with wife and children, Merridith has many secrets, most concerning their servant, Mary Duane. Pius is of a different stripe, though he hates himself just as much: having abandoned a pregnant girlfriend and his slightly mad brother in Ireland, Pius made himself into a high-living thief in London's East End, one night even giving great inspiration to Charles Dickens, who was slumming for material. Later come to ruin, Pius has been embarked on a mission by some Hibernian thugs who won't take no for an answer: kill the English scum David Merridith. Told mostly in flashbacks, and mostly through the highly arched voice of first-class passenger and journalist Grantley Dixon, this is the sort of gloriously overstuffed story that could be told in hushed breath over fifteen or so lengthy installments on late-night radio. Irish author O'Connor (Yeats Is Dead!, 2001; etc.) pulls out all the melodramatic stops for a thrilling tale without once losing his eye for the right detail or his ear for the perfect phrase. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A ship sets forth from 1840s Ireland with a killer on board. From an acclaimed Irish author (Desperadoes and The Salesman). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER IThe Leave-TakingThe FIRST of our TWENTY-SIX days at Sea: in which Our Protector records some essential Particulars, and the Circumstances attending our setting-out.VIII NOV. MDCCCXLVIIMONDAY THE EIGHTH DAY OF NOVEMBER, EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-SEVEN TWENTY-FIVE DAYS AT SEA REMAINING.The following is the only register of Josias Tuke Lockwood, Master of Vessel, signed and written in his own hand; and I attest it on my solemn honour a compleat and true account of the voyage, and neither has any matter pertinent been omitted.LONG: 1016.7'W. LAT: 5135.5'N. ACTUAL GREENWICH STANDARD TIME: 8.17 P.M. WIND DIR. SPEED: S.S.W. Force 4. BUFFETING SEAS: rough. HEADING: W.N.W. 282.7. PRECIPITATION. REMARKS: Mild mist all the day but very cold and clear night. Upper riggings encrusted with ice. Dursey Island to starboard. Tearagh Isld visible at 524.5'N, 1039.7'W, most westerly point of Ireland and therefore of the United Kingdom. (Property of the Earl of Cork.)NAME OF VESSEL: The Star of the Sea (formerly the Golden Lady).BUILDER: John Wood, Port Glasgow (prop. engines by M. Brunel).OWNER: Silver Star Shipping Line Co.PREVIOUS VOYAGE: Dublin Port (South Docks) - Liverpool - Dublin Kingstown.PORT OF EMBARKATION: Queenstown (or The Cove). 5151'N; 00818'W.PORT OF DESTINATION: New York. 40.42'N; 74.02'W.DISTANCE: 2,768 nautical miles direct: to be factorised for tacking into westerlies.FIRST MATE: Thos. Leeson.ROYAL MAIL AGENT: George Wellesley Esq. (accompnd. by a servant, Briggs).WEIGHT OF VESSEL: 1,154 gross tons.LENGTH OF VESSEL: 207 ft beam 34 ft.GENERAL: clipper bows, one funnel, three square-rig masts (rigged for sail), oaken hull (copperfastened), three decks, a poop and topgallant forecastle, side-paddle wheel propulsion, full speed 9 knots. All seaworthy though substantial repairs required; also damage to interior fittings cetera. Bad leaking through overhead and bulkheads of steerage. Hull to be audited in dry dock at New York and caulked if required.CARGO: 5,000 lbs of mercury for Alabama Mining Co. The Royal Mail (forty bags). Sunderland coal for fuel. (Poor quality the supply, dirty and slaggy.) Luggage of passengers. Spare slop in stores. One grand piano for John J. Astor Esq. at New York.PROVISIONS: sufficient of freshwater, ale, brandy, claret, rum, pork, cocks, mutton, biscuit, preserved milk cetera. Also oatmeal, cutlings, molasses, potatoes, salt or hung beef, pork, bacon and hams, salted veal, fowl in pickle, coffee, tea, cyder, spices, pepper, ginger, flour, eggs, good port wine and porter-beer, pickled colewort, split peas for soup; and lastly, vinegar, butter, and potted herrings. Live beasts (caged) to be butchered on board: pigs, chickens, lambs and geese.One passenger, a certain Meadowes, is lodged in the lock-up for drunkenness and fighting. (A hopeless out-and-outer: he shall have to be watched.) Suspected case of Typhus Fever moved to the hold for isolation.Be it recorded Excerpted from Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor, Joseph O'Connor All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
