Connoisseurs Of Lost Causes THE TENANTS OF TIME

By R.Z. Sheppard

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."

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.