The very first page of this very long novel about Ireland contains a reference to an unspecified night in June 1904, when "Patrick Prentiss came for the first time to Kilpeder and booked a room at the Arms." The time may be of little consequence to most readers, but some will not be able to ignore that, by coincidence or design, the author begins his plunge into Irish history with a suggestion of the most famous date in modern literature. That would be Bloomsday (June 16, 1904), the day of James Joyce's Ulysses.
The tweedy Prentiss does not make as splashy an entrance as Joyce's stately, plump Buck Mulligan in his yellow dressing gown, "bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." Yet there is a strained relationship. Buck begins Joyce's stream of subversive epiphanies with a mockery of religious ritual, and Pat launches Thomas Flanagan's The Tenants of Time with a polite spoof on the rituals of orthodox history. Prentiss is a young Irish pedant, fresh out of New College, Oxford, and itching to write a book about a failed nationalist uprising in 1867. The final skirmish, known as the Battle of Clonbrony Wood, has become exaggerated in story and barroom ditty: "Let all true Irishmen be good,/ And fight for what they hold./ Like all those heroes brave and bold,/ Who held Clonbrony Wood."
Blarney. Clonbrony was a fiasco that began when a band of poorly organized and inadequately armed Fenian nationalists tried to take the local police barracks, and ended with the attackers scattered into the trees and hunted down one by one. Blood was drawn but no honor satisfied. The participants became public heroes and martyrs, but privately their failure bred resentment, which thrived on blame, which in turn sought enemies within. They were not in short supply, given the tangle of feudal alliances and tribal betrayals that confounded the ideals of nationhood. The wounds of Clonbrony festered and spread violence and discord for decades.
Prentiss's book never gets written, not because he lacks vision ("If . . . one could take a moment of history, a week, a month, and know it fully, perfectly, turn it in one's fingers until all the lights had played upon its surfaces . . .) but because the facts and mysteries he encounters exceed his intentions. Or so he claims. When a friend suggests that history is a form of narrative fiction, Prentiss replies a little too glibly that "a taste for fiction has always seemed to me the unfailing mark of an imaginative deficiency."