Joseph O'Connor's Star of the Sea is a good read. It kept me engrossed for most of its length (nearly 400 pages). At its centre is a murder mystery and didn't figure out the culprit before the final reveal--literally the last page of the novel. It's characters were broadly sympathetic while still being complex and moments of self-indulgence were few. The period colour was fascinating and mostly convincing.
But let's talk about some of the problems.
One is the frame story. The conceit is that a reporter from Louisiana, who is a character in the novel, has stitched together a narrative from a combination of his own recollections, interviews with other principles, a ships log, letters, and the like. I'm not sure who died and made this pomo notion popular with the current litfic crowd, but I've only really seen it done convincingly once (Peter Carey's True history of the Kelly Gang). Most of the time, their are enough inconsistencies and unlikely survivals that the fourth wall crumples under the weight of them. To prevent that, I did my best to ignore it and simply read this fiction for what it was. For the most part, I was successful (barring one particularly glaring failure when O'Connor unexpectedly and for only a moment reverts to first-person).
Another is the focus. Ultimately, it's on two of the characters: the aristocrat and the man sent to murder him. Makes for a good taut structure and all, but it's disappointing how he neglects the women. There are two strong women who are prominent in the narrative, but one only speaks to us in a very brief letter and the other not at all while five other male characters all get to narrate significant segments. The other issue is that he's using Black '47 as the background, and writing quite wrenchingly about the suffering of the common folk. That comes across as a little insincere when he's chosen to spend most of his time with a marquis and a master criminal.
Really, O'Connor has three different novels--one of a murder mystery at sea, one of a rogue's outrageous exploits, and one a somewhat tragic aristocratic romance--that he's rolled into one. It makes for a richer experience overall, and he interweaves them deftly enough that I can't say I ever had the problem that I sometimes do in similar works, where I'm racing through a less gripping storyline to get back to the one I really care about. But it does make the work feel overstuffed at times, particularly when he drops in some somewhat self-indulgent coincidences and cameos. (Dickens is a recurring minor character for no really good reason I can see.)
His prose is solid and he genuinely moved me at times. At others, particularly in the more sensuous sequences, I found the sensibilities of his characters suspiciously modern for Victorians, let alone Connemarans of 150 years ago. (The romance with a sexually liberated Catholic peasant girl in particular is dangerously close to wish fulfillment.) But he's inventive and generally respectful of his material, so all in all a solid B.
Now, for a view of the events from a more bog-level perspective, I've moved on to Liam O'Flaherty's Famine. So far it's almost eyerollingly clichéd in its depiction of honest Irish poverty. It literally begins with a bone-chilling deluge and pigs squealing on the hearth, so the smirking spirit of Myles na gCopaleen is never far from my consciousness. He's got about 200 pages to show me that he can transcend that, and he may need every one of them.
