IN her Children of the Famine series, Marita Conlon McKenna has all the promise and possibility of being an Irish Laura Ingals Wilder or L.M.Montgomery.
Like her American and Canadian counterparts, she has created a family of characters whom the reader would quite happily follow book after book not only through childhood and adulthood but on into the next generation. Yet Fields of Home is described forbiddingly as "the final book" of a trilogy, and perhaps herein lies the reason why it is the weakest of the set.
The first of the series, Under the Hawthorn Tree, was a watershed in the recent renaissance of Irish children's literature. Though a first novel, its huge commercial success, both at home and abroad, coupled with international literary recognition, placed it in the same ranks as the leading English and American titles.
Not since Patricia Lynch has an Irish writer for children been so popular and so praised. This moving and harrowing story of three children surviving the Famine was a hard act to follow, but its sequel, Wildflower Girl, was even better written, indicating a maturing of the author's style.
The second book tells of the emigration of the youngest girl Peggy, and the hardships and heartaches of domestic servitude in Boston. Neither of the books pulls any punches, whether it is children dying of starvation in Ireland or being worked like slaves in America.
Alas, Fields of Home does not match up to its predecessors, principally because it attempts to plait three unconnected stories into one book, weakening the impetus and impact of each strand. As this is the last of the series (one can only wonder why), the author seems driven to wrap up the lives of her three main characters.
Eily is now married with her own small child and faces eviction from her cottage. Michael loses his job as groom at the Big House when his landlord is "burnt out". Peggy, in an otherwise feeble plot line, finally decides to forsake her job and travel west.
This is not a novel but a continuing soap opera set in Irish history. It lacks the emphasis of a central plot, rising action, hero/ heroine development, and continuity of conflict reaching resolution. The latter is present in two of the story lines Eily's and Michael's but the excitement is dissipated by the chopping and changing of plots.
Since both these strands deal with agrarian unrest, the book itself seems to imply that this is the way it should have gone, minus Peggy's story, which is surprisingly passive and uninteresting.
All the fire has gone out of her struggle with the spoiled daughter of the house, which so held one's interest in Wildflower Girl. Now Roxanne's racialism "stupid Brigid skivvies from the bog" is washed away by the wearing of a pretty wedding dress. At the same time, Peggy's final decision to go west with her true love in a wagon train now, there's a story is a tantalising angle for a whole new book.
This is not to say that there aren't wonderful moments in Fields of Home. Conlon McKenna is a gifted story teller even when not at her best. The "gift of whispering" to horses, given by the old groom to Michael, engenders some particularly beautiful and poetic writing "Morning Boy, born as the moon dipped and the sun rose warm from earth..."
The storming of Eily's home by the landlord's agent is rich with suspense and emotion. Anyone who was captured by the power of the first two books will find enough in this one to keep his or her interest. But, sadly, this is proof of the chief flaw in the book. Unlike the two before it, it cannot stand alone as a fine novel in its own right.
