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The hook in this remark is that the speaker happens to be an innovative character in a historical novel of a high imaginative order. Flanagan, 64, a professor of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, first demonstrated his gift for evoking the past in the constant shimmer of good fiction eight years ago, when he published The Year of the French. The work received broad acclaim and was the National Book Critics Circle's choice as the best novel of 1979. It is a rich and complex telling of a rebellion on the west coast of Ireland, where in 1798 an army of the French Revolution landed and briefly allied itself with the restless peasantry against their English and Anglo-Irish masters. As one of many preludes to Clonbrony, the episode ended badly when Lord Cornwallis arrived with a superior force. The French were treated as prisoners of war and eventually sent home. The surviving Irish were denounced as traitors to the British crown; many were hanged.
A century later, and the noose is still tight around The Tenants of Time. Absentee landholders and bankers squeeze the squires, who drain the tenant farmers. Eviction, the workhouse and starvation are common fates. The women cling to the church and the men to the bottle, but a growing number, like Edward Nolan, take to the gun. Nolan was a Fenian leader at the time of Clonbrony; later he is hardened in Portland prison and becomes experienced in conspiracy and vengeful murder on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ned Nolan is the remorseless spirit whose actions unify much of the book's cause and effect. He spans the quarter-century of Flanagan's story, from Clonbrony to the decline and fall of the Irish republican hero Charles Stewart Parnell, who is quoted as saying "A passion for history -- an Irish failing." Real figures from the past interact with fictional characters, making 107 in all, alphabetically listed and identified at the end of the book.
The principals -- Terrorist Nolan, Schoolteacher Hugh MacMahon and Politician Robert Delaney -- are all veterans of Clonbrony who pursue different paths to freedom from British rule. Flanagan follows the twists and turns from Kilpeder and Dublin to London and New York City. His settings, from Ardmor Castle to the local pub, are natural and unforced; the language of his characters hints at hidden poetry without breaking into showy lyricism or stage Irish: "Beyond the streaky window, the land opened out before us -- the wide, green fields of the midlands, the hills of Munster, a flashing glimpse of ruined keep, a manor house half hidden by plantation, the battered, roofless nave of a lost friary or monastery."
For all its size and sweep, The Tenants of Time is an intimate book, a narrative that constantly adds personal tones and shadings to "take a moment of history, a week, a month, and know it fully." Patrick Prentiss would envy this grand illusion, the best historical novel to be published in the U.S. since Thomas Flanagan's The Year of the French.