In 1793, 22-year-old Mary Ann McCracken came round from a near-fatal bout of fever regretting that she had missed so many Stars. This was the Northern Star, a radical newspaper founded the year before in Belfast and required reading for all of the enlightened North during the four or five years of its existence. Its proprietor, Samuel Neilson, and his employees were in the thick of every momentous event of the day.
One of these employees, a clerk in the paper’s High Street office, was William Kean. Not much trace remains of the historical Kean beyond this fact, and the facts of his membership in the United Irish Society, his imprisonment in Kilmainham Gaol along with Henry Joy McCracken and others, his release in 1797, his part in the Battle of Ballynahinch, and his subsequent capture and dramatic evasion of the hangman.
Not much trace – but it was enough to set Conor O'Clery's imagination going. The Star Man is a beautifully realised historical novel, with the fictional Willie Kean in the title role as protagonist and narrator.
Kean, in this version, is a close associate of all the leading activists in the impending insurrection. Born in Moira, the son of a gardener, he is taken up, on a whim, by Lord Moira’s heir, Baron Francis Rawdon, and sent to study at the Belfast Academy.
Here he forms a friendship with his fellow boarder George Gray (note the name), from Gransha, Co Down; reads Wolfe Tone's An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland and Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man; and gets himself expelled after two years following his involvement in a school barring-out. His consequent notoriety does him no harm.
Willie Kean's education in Enlightenment principles continues apace, and his story is plainly and deftly told. Once installed in the Star office he is taken under the wing of Neilson, who becomes his friend and mentor. He is sent on investigative missions into the Ulster countryside to collect subscriptions and drum up support for the paper, officially, as well as to gauge the extent of "United Irish" support in various parts of Antrim and Down.
Kean becomes a well-known figure on his plodding white mare; hence his sobriquet, and the novel’s title. “Watch you don’t fall to earth now, ha, ha,” he is cautioned at one point by a sarcastic passer-by.
We know, indeed, that his, and the country’s, aspirations will not end well; but in the meantime, fired up by topical excitements and clandestine preoccupations, the young Presbyterian radical exudes high spirits.
Belfast in the early 1790s was the place to indulge them, what with its fashionable occasions, dangers, steadfastness, risk-taking, outrage and determination, its drinking clubs and opportunities for sexual adventure. No wholly invented character gets into O’Clery’s novel, but all those familiar from historical and biographical accounts gain an added vitality through the power of fiction.
Thomas Russell, for example, becomes a friend of the narrator’s, and the two engage in nocturnal escapades. Noting Martha McTier’s and Mary Ann McCracken’s admiration for the Corkman, with his “manly beauty” and impeccable morals, Kean reflects: “Those virtuous women never saw Thomas Russell in the wee hours.”
Henry Joy McCracken soon appears, and Kean is invited to call him Harry. (In reality, McCracken’s sole reference to Kean, in a letter to his sister, has him down as “W Kane”, which doesn’t betoken intimacy. The novelist, of course, is not constrained by any literal facts.) By the same token William Putnam McCabe becomes Putnam (and is shown to be as adept at disguising himself as Sherlock Holmes). And many others – Wolfe Tone, Dr William Drennan, John and Thomas Storey, Charles Teeling, treacherous Belle Martin, the informer Newell, the Rev James Porter, Henry Munro – all come into the orbit of Willie Kean.
Kean is a resident witness to prodigious undertakings, dramas, atrocities and betrayals. And because of his relative obscurity in historical terms he makes a suitable hero for a work of fiction: much can be imagined. For example, his story is fused with that of the real George Gray, his sister Betsy and Betsy’s childhood sweetheart William Boal: the trio were slaughtered by yeomen after the Battle of Ballynhinch, and Betsy became, and remains, a local heroine.
An 1888 novel, Betsy Gray, or, Hearts of Down, set the tone. It's not a bad novel, but its author, WG Lyttle, has not avoided putting ludicrous words into the mouth of his heroine. "Oh for my trusty blade now, that I might avenge the death of my poor Willie!" she exclaims seconds before a diabolical yeoman shoots her in the eye.
Fortunately, no touch of Lyttle fustian gets into The Star Man. O'Clery's Betsy is merely an exceptional young woman by the standards of the day, and no cipher. She is also the object of Willie Kean's deepest longings. But as she is already spoken for he has to make do with her friend Eliza Bryson, who provides some sexual gratification if little else (in defiance of the mores of Presbyterian Ulster).
The exhilaration of an era when reason and justice were the watchwords, and the auspices seemed fair, was quickly eroded by darkness and apprehension. All forms of oppression were intensified throughout the country, and scourges proliferated. Soldiers on the rampage, smashing, burning, firing on civilians; half-hangings, pitch-cappings, floggings: these were the order of the day.
The Society of United Irishmen was riddled with informers and spies; the achievement of Catholic Emancipation was not at the forefront of all its (Presbyterian) members’ agendas; it was bedevilled by dissension and procrastination. The Rising, when it happened, was mistimed. No French fleet sailed in to help the insurgents. “The cause was lost again.”
The cause was lost, and with it the hopes of Willie Kean and his fellow radicals. The Star Man, an impressive blend of scholarship and inspiration by the former Irish Times journalist, enumerates the causes of disruption and disaffection while keeping its tone lively and its narrative engaging.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her most recent book is Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (2015)
