Big, forbidding bronzes of mounted military types. For all their chunky, brooding presence they are virtually invisible in the modern world: we give them a casual glance as we hurry past, not knowing who they commemorate - not, mostly, caring. But Ronan Sheehan has looked long and hard; and the works of Queen Victoria's favourite sculptor, John Henry Foley, have served him as a jumping-off point for a series of moving tableaux inspired by the lives of some of Foley's principal subjects, a series of Foyle College old boys from Derry who ended up as soldier-administrators in northern India.
Foley himself was born in modest circumstances in Dublin in 1818, the son of a glass-blower from Winchester who had settled down to run a grocer's shop in what is now Sean MacDermott Street. Both he and his elder brother, Edward, were sent to London to study sculpture and, making his way through the ranks of mainstream artists, John Henry carved out for himself the sort of fame which ensured he was given commissions by all the right people. He cast the enormous figure of Prince Albert which forms the centrepiece of the Hyde Park Memorial - the "archetypal icon of the Victorian age", Sheehan calls it - and also the group of figures at its base which represents the continent of Asia and which, since none of the figures relates to each other, never mind to Albert, their supposed superior in the Victorian establishment, Sheehan regards as an act of sculptural subversion. Hence the title of the book.
All of which may strike you as the most tedious subject imaginable - an array of stiff upper lips from a discredited period of history. In fact, from his unpromisingly weighty material Sheehan has crafted a gossamer text which strays from history to biography to memoir (his interest in the topic was sparked, originally, when his mother used to tell him vivid tales from her own childhood in India while she was doing the ironing), to art criticism as it examines, without ever stooping to moralise, the issue of colonial experience as it affects both India and, by implication, Ireland.
Sometimes, in fact, the thread of the narrative threatens to blow away altogether. Much is hinted at, little is explained; chronology is stretched to breaking point; characters waving guns rush on and off stage (or, sometimes, are carried off) with scant regard for the sensibilities of the reader for whom the story of Irish involvement in the history of the Raj is strange, spicy territory. The book even wanders briefly into the realms of fiction as a strikingly insouciant narrative "I" describes a number of apparently innocent outings which end in violence; the bombing of the statue of Field-Marshal Hugh Viscount Gough in the Phoenix Park in Dublin; a bank robbery; and, on the final page, the picnic which will, we understand, end with the death of the author's grandfather in an explosion on a road outside Calcutta.
There is a good deal of institutionalised violence, too, as the battling Britishers put down insurrection after insurrection with merciless savagery and the empire, undaunted - "At the mouth of the Khyber Pass, some distance from the line of the march, a body lies on a rock, naked and white. The fringe of fair hair is matted with blood" - strikes back. The fictionalised episodes, with their sunshine, accidental meetings and careless laughter, are presumably intended to represent ordinary life as it is lived in the present, its cheerful, untidy vulgarity as opposed to the artificial neatness of history, the hit-and-miss action of the rebel as opposed to the implacable momentum of the establishment. It's a risky narrative strategy, and the unabashed gear-changes will undoubtedly cause some readers to grind their teeth - a small price to pay, frankly, for the delight of being whisked to an unexpected and, hitherto, almost unexplored world.
One thing is certain: if you read Foley's Asia you'll never again pass one of those men on horseback without at least a second glance. Here is Sheehan on Foley's portrait of Sir James Outram: "It's not the face of an aristocrat, a Wellesey, an Ellenborough, a Dalhousie or a Canning. It's the face of your everyday, middle-class man, a grafter, a man of immense practical experience. What's noble in Outram is his gaze: calm, penetrating, fearless. The shoulders are slightly hunched, the head is slightly bent . . . " It might serve equally as a description of this odd, offbeat, engaging little book.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
