This is a family history, not a novel, not a memoir. The author, Joseph O'Neill, attempts to reconstruct the history of his grandfathers, Turkish on the maternal side, Irish on the paternal side. His Turkish grandfather, Joseph Dakad, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine from 1942 to 1945 and his Irish grandfather, Jim O'Neill, by de Valera's government from 1940 to 1944.
Dakad was apparently an innocent businessman who, out of the craving to be regarded as an important man, may have given the impression that he was a spy for the Axis powers; O'Neill was a republican who had joined the movement somewhere between 1930 and 1932 and had been active in the campaign of 1936-39. Both grandfathers were embittered, even broken, by their internment. Dakad was illtreated, and his family life and business were irreparably damaged. O'Neill was disillusioned by the conduct of some of his fellow-inmates at the Curragh Camp and by the thought that he might have been the victim of an informer. This did not prevent him (or his sons) supporting the later IRA campaigns of 1956-1962 and then the longer campaign that began in 1970.
Both grandfathers, in O'Neill's words, "lived in extraordinarily hateful and hazardous places and times, in which men with powerful egos were especially exposed." The initial hostility he felt for them leads him further to worry "if I hadn't been driven by a desire to lock them up in words as a punishment for the hurt silence, which, I rightly or wrongly sensed, they'd bequeathed my parents".
This catches something of the book's conscientious tone, its frequently-confessed wish to be just and a less-frequently admitted anger that seems to prowl after various prey. This would include a certain revenge taken on behalf of his parents at his grandparents; this feels suspect at times. There is also a recurrent excoriation of himself as a comfortable, cosmopolitan professional far removed from the intense and confining political nationalisms and horizons of Ireland and Turkey, especially in the period from 1920-70. (The author himself was born in Cork in 1964). How can he presume to judge, he asks? Yet this is what he does.
The search (and the research) is impressive in its resolve. This is what makes it read like a history. But the aims - to understand "the ethical structure " of republican thinking, to understand the conflicting loyalties of a Syrian pro-French and pro-German businessman and hotelier who nevertheless regarded himself as a committed Turkish citizen, to understand the paranoia of these men who lived in a world of secrets - make it read like a novel, precisely because they are not realised and maybe because they are surrogates for a deeper desire. That might include knowing himself and understanding and blaming his failure to do so on the secrets and betrayals of others, the members of his family, especially the two key figures who, when imprisoned in jail and within themselves, seemed to lose definition. In trying to restore it to them, he is trying to restore it to himself.
This is one of the elements that make the book extraordinary. Along with the conscientious and anxious tone of address, there is the warmer, more enchanted tone of evocation and remembrance, of his own past and of the appropriated pasts of others. The Toros Hotel in the coastal town of Mersin in Turkey, fronted by the Mediterranean, backed by the Taurus Mountains, was the place to be in 1940. Turkish, French, Arabic and other languages were spoken in this ethnically diverse and sunlit cosmopolis, as far removed as could be imagined from the Cork of the same era.
Yet it too, the west Cork countryside in particular, is vividly registered; the excitement of poaching salmon on the banks of the Bandon river, the nude valley of Kilbrittain, places from the legendary family landscape that provide the hinterland to the writer's pursuit of the family shadows. O'Neill's phrasings and tempos are a delight; these lyric passages counterpoint beautifully with the political and ethical dicussions into which they are imbricated. The reader, though, has to be careful. Two grandfathers, their two worlds, the author's world, a wide span of 20-century history, various retrospects provided by diverse documentary sources and a great deal of deft switching back and forth in chronology and geography make for a complex narrative fabric in which the subtlest and most fleeting patterns are the ground for all else. But the book rewards the patient reader.
In Guy Debord's words, "just as some chemical agents only reveal their hidden properties when they are combined with others", so too with O'Neill's immersion of his grandfathers' lives in the history of their times. The O'Neill family had its secrets and its shibboleths; even things publicly known were not talked about; they remained "subject to our internal hush". Among the deeper secrets was the killing of the Protestant Admiral Somerville in Co Cork in 1936, by three people, one of whom was Tadgh Lynch, the author's great-uncle.
This killing was a signal that the IRA was still there, active again, after years of inertia. And behind his death, in 1922, there was the killing of 10 Protestants in April 1922 in the Bandon valley, an event that had (unlike the Somerville murder) been met with silence.
On a much vaster scale, the Syrian-Turkish grandfather, like so many others who wished to acclimatise themselves to the Turkish state, must as a boy have seen and known of the massacres of the Armenians. But he never spoke of this. As now, that particular act of genocide could not be fully admitted or commemorated. To Joseph O'Neill, it seems almost intolerable that men, like his grandfathers, essentially civilised and ethical beings, should have been, however vaguely, involved in and tainted by atrocities. The atrocities of the British and the Ottoman empires, and of the groups or nations that fought against them, would make a long list indeed, but the underlying hope or plea in this book would seem to be for a liberation from such darknesses. O'Neill knows "that families and nations have self-serving editions of their pasts"; but he had never known that in his family's case he would have to admit that "only the strategic consequences of violence were internalised. The human consequences . . . were externalised into a moral outer space."
The book certainly has worked hard to earn the reconciliation it finally imagines. It is too honest to get what it hopes for; too uncertain to know for sure what it is that has to be reconciled or forgiven. In its very unease, it is a remarkable work.
Seamus Deane teaches at the University of Notre Dame.