Deirdre, druids, Danes and D4

Irish History: Anyone who remembers the misinformation which Leon Uris's Trinity spread amongst wide-eyed backpackers and Irish…

Irish History: Anyone who remembers the misinformation which Leon Uris's Trinity spread amongst wide-eyed backpackers and Irish-American fundraisers may blanch at the sight of this vast tome. Yet despite its size and blockbuster writing style, there are signs of some considerable historical research, writes Aisling Foster of Edward Rutherford's Dublin: Foundation.

Not that it needs much serious criticism. As the message on its jacket confidently predicts, Dublin: Foundation is "the epic new bestseller", yet another big read in Edward Rutherfurd's line-up of historico-fictional accounts centred on Russia, London, Salisbury (and the New Forest).

This time, the author has turned his imagination to the first 1,000 years of Dublin's life, from its evolution in pre-Christian times to the sacking of the monasteries in the 16th century. Through those times we follow the shifting fortunes of a few fictional Irish families, as their adventures in love, war and idealism whirl each generation into history and mix their genes with a colourful cast of blow-ins.

The story begins with the doomed love affair of Deirdre and Conall. Meeting at the festival of Lughnasa in AD430, their boy-meets-girl attraction and idyllic sexual relationship read like standard blockbuster romance - especially when described against a Monty Python landscape of scheming druids, an impotent High King and nipple-sucking chiefs. But despite their early demise, the lovers' beauty and talents will set the style of future relationships. Thus the inheritors of Deirdre's bright hair and green eyes are reborn to catch the fancy of monks, Vikings, Normans, rootless merchants and mercenaries; those beauties inherit her seduction technique, too, a sudden old-fashioned striptease proving irresistible to men in every century. In this strictly gendered model, skills with cattle and horses descend through the male line, as does the courtly Conall's reluctance to take advantage of hapless women, his superb love-making technique, when pushed, and a philosophical turn of mind which proves useful as the country grows more attracted to all things spiritual.

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Despite the formulaic structure of his saga, Rutherfurd avoids the tendency to divide his characters into goodies and baddies. Pragmatism rules. Some Irish readers may miss the arresting images of long-ago schoolbooks (and wistfully remember how, when Strongbow married Aoife, "the streets ran red with blood"?) but his explanations of human behaviour bring a more nuanced take on events such as the power struggles of chiefs and High King, the tensions between Danes and Norwegians, the separate interests of coastal ports and the interior, and the difficult relationship between the Irish Church and Rome.

Yet thanks to its limited locale, there is little information about the wider landscape outside Leinster. The view of Dublin as "other" remains unrevised: Dublin 4 liberalism asserts itself early on, in its inhabitants' relaxed attitudes to religion and intermarriage, as well as in their cosmopolitan view of other cultures across the sea. (More curiously, a very English kind of class snobbery sets in early, a tendency which does not seem to have lasted the pace).

As for the remaining three provinces, occasional references to yet another power struggle between chieftains and an occasional cattle raid give a misleading sense of stasis in areas engaged with their own dynamic histories.

While archaeologists and historians might argue about simplifications and an unevenness of pace and focus, Dublin: Foundation does put forward a balanced argument, whether in explaining the tricky manoeuvrings by Pope Adrian through the Council of Cashel or in the choices which inhabitants of the city must make with every turn of the political screw. By 1534, with hopes of a Spanish force, Silken Thomas issues a proclamation that "the English are no longer wanted in Ireland. They must get out". Asked who the English are, Fitzgerald declares: "Anyone who was not born here."

Compared to the bright red and green verities of Uris and his ilk, this essay in Irish pop history opts finally for realpolitik.

Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic

Dublin: Foundation. By Edward Rutherfurd, Century, 765pp. £17.99