Book review: A Game of Sorrows

Published on Friday 12 March 2010 18:34

A GAME OF SORROWS BY SHONA MACLEAN Quercus, 352pp, £12.99

AS WOLF HALL, Hilary Mantel's recent winner of the Man Booker prize attests, fiction, brilliantly elucidated, can sometimes be the place to go to understand history.

Irish history, though, is a beast of a different, more complicated kind, and, within it, fathoming the complexities of the history of Ulster (the ultimate bastion of Gaeldom) stands unique in its bloodied and brutalised entanglements.

Shona MacLean, by recounting her story, set in 1628 at the height of the ill-fated Ulster Plantation by James VI, has created a text to which readers may turn for straightforward and entertaining enlightenment of the rudiments of the case.

It combines basic scholarship with a shrewdly imagined, high-energy rendition of the life and times of the often fragmented factions that co-existed in a state of fractious enmity or perilous alliance – the native Irish, the Old English (of Norman origin), New English planters, and the Scots.

They comprised a volatile cocktail into which Alexander Seaton, a young teacher of philosophy at Aberdeen University, one whose hopes in life and love have suffered grave setbacks (read The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, MacLean's debut novel, for the tragic details), is thrown without warning, or much understanding.

The tale begins with the blood-chilling curse of an Irish "poet" at a mixed wedding in County Derry (planter English to native Irish, an O'Neill, of once-royal blood) – "No good will come of it, no fruit, only rotten seed, your line dies with them, Maeve O'Neill."

MacLean leaves us dangling, cutting to Scotland, with Seaton, Maeve O'Neill's grandson, about to depart for Poland as an emissary for the church and university, this on the eve of his declaration of love for Sarah, a feisty servant woman, mother of three-year-old Zander (named after Seaton), the child of a rape.

Seaton's life is a complicated business, and MacLean, mistress of mystery and suspense, adds yet another complication when her devout and respectable hero is accused of bawdy behaviour and all-night bingeing in the drinking dens of the city.

The explanation lies sprawled in Seaton's digs: his cousin, Sean, a proud O'Neill (like Seaton's mother, who fled Ulster before he was born), is Seaton's lookalike, here on pressing family business. Since all of Maeve O'Neill's close family have been cursed, it is only Seaton, unknown to the "poet", who is exempt, and can therefore save them. He must away.

After the briefest of hesitations, stretching the limits of credulity, Seaton departs without excuse or explanation, dropping the vital mission to Poland and the declaration of love to Sarah, called by his blood to a family none of whom he knows, arriving in night-time Carrickfergus, littered with "windowless mounds of clay and thatch ... the habitations not of pigs but of people". Darkest Ulster is in customary ferment.

Thus begins an labyrinthine tale of family betrayals, illicit relationships, fierce political ambitions, sexual jealousies, good and evil. Maeve O'Neill towers in malevolence, a black matriarch, who has kept Seaton's existence from her husband, now on his deathbed.

Ostensibly Seaton must visit the "poet", challenge the curse, and, being immune, ensure its removal. But underlying his perilous journey to Ulster's north coast to fulfil his task are currents of deep religious difference; ancient enmities with England, plans for a rising of the Irish, at the heart of which we find cousin Sean; and a tale of weapons smuggled in through the port of Coleraine by mercenaries – Englishmen with connections to Maeve O'Neill.

But when we learn that Sean has been murdered, another more sinister, more perilous explanation for Seaton's presence amid the mayhem and family shenanigans, is mooted – a fate that may keep him in Ireland forever and seal his death. To add rancour and risk to the whole concoction, Seaton stands accused by the witchy Maeve of having struck the blow that killed Sean. But who the real killer is, their motive, and who paid the poet to lay the curse, become merely a handful of the growing list of questions that tangle the plot lines.

This is a substantial story, well researched, never slackening pace. Seaton's life is charmed – at times unbelievably so – and MacLean leaves enough loose ends to give birth to a sequel. Perhaps set in Poland with Sarah in tow?