O'Connor Looks to Past to Capture Readers in Star of the Sea

By Peter Schmidtke

A disfigured shape stares at his crooked shadow on the worn deck of a creaky schooner bound for America in 1847. With a moldy bible and a face contorted with affliction, Pius Mulvey paces back and forth, bow to stern, stern to bow. All that separates the Connemara peasant and 416 other escapees of Ireland's Great Famine from reaching New York Harbor is a month aboard the rickety Star of the Sea. 

But Pius Mulvey is far more than a downtrodden farmer. How this limping Galwayman with a gift for verse acquires the ugly moniker of "The Monster" is just one secret that Dublin-born Irish author Joseph O'Connor unleashes in his fifth and latest novel, Star of the Sea.

O'Connor in Star of the Sea blends different fiction genres to produce a work that is equal parts historical novel, epic, Victorian epic, and mystery. O'Connor's, whom the Sunday Independent dubbed Ireland's "most brilliant storyteller," chronicles in detail the fateful coming-together of a handful of fictional men and women impacted by the devastation of a famine that killed over two million Irish in 1847 alone. The disaster caused a mass exodus that resulted in three million Irish living in America by the end of the century— 39 % of all those alive who had been born in Ireland. 

Told in a multiplicity of voices including letters, diaries, newspaper articles, third person narrative, and ship captain's notes, the central drama of the Star of the Sea involves a Dickens-like intersection of Connemara figures from both upper and lower crusts of society, each of whom has been impacted to some degree by famine. 

The solitary deck-dweller, Pius Mulvey, is introduced to the reader as a man with a shadowy past and an even more cloudy present. Lord David Merridith is a landlord who can't pay his bills and was given the cold shoulder by his tenants for stern measures forced upon them by his late father. Mary Duane, Merridith's servant, is portrayed at first only as a woman who will not acknowledge her master and wants to reveal nothing of herself.

And watching it all unfold is G. Grantley Dixon, a Louisiana journalist who spent four years in London and despises slavery and the injustices of Ireland. He unceasingly hounds Merridith for his high place in society. 

Each of these characters bears the label of protagonist as the point-of-view shifts from one narrative device to another. As the result of a guilt-laden letter Mulvey writes to a woman he abandoned long ago, the reader reluctantly develops a fondness for this rough character who is loathed by so many of the ship's steerage passengers. 

The journalist Dixon, who comes across as troublesome and petty in the captain's log and diary, is cast in an altogether different light when his new travel book is rejected by one London publisher after another and he is forced to question his future as a writer. 

Likewise both Merridith and Duane are brought to the forefront in different chapters when O'Connor describes the landlord's earlier difficulties with his emotionally-rigid father and Duane's former troubles eking out a life in famine-wracked Connemara.

The decision to intermittently shift narration was conscious, O'Connor said "To me the reason for doing that was the nature of the famine itself— which is at the heart of the book," he explained. "In the same way that the ship is packed with people and stories, the book should have that same feel— a suitcase with the top kind of forced up, the stories trying to get out." 

While O'Connor said that he did take stock characters or "archetypes" of the trickster, the broken-hearted servant's girl, and the cruel landlord, he said he did try to write about them as though they were real people. 

"Hopefully in some ways they are like traditional characters with hopefully the extra dimension of being real."

Voices for lesser characters are provided by O'Connor as well, including the ship's doctor, who treats Merridith and the general passengers in steerage of illnesses like typhoid fever that were common to cramped seagoing vessels, and Capt. Josias Tuke Lockwood, a helmsman who balances his need to keep order with his displeasure at the meager food supplies rationed out to the poorer passengers in steerage.

O'Connor as Historical Storyteller
The obvious challenge of writing about such a central event in the history of Ireland was a task that the author did not take lightly.

"At some level, a novel is just about creating a story, and you must always be aware that these are real people who died, usually in terrible circumstances," O'Connor said regarding the countless Irish upon whom his characters are based. "And it mightn't be much consolation to them that they formed the twists and turns of a novel."

O'Connor nevertheless read contemporary 19th century accounts of the famine and first-person diaries from tenant farmers and landlords to grain background knowledge. In his voluminous acknowledgment at the end of the novel, the author cites the importance for his research of The Irish Journals of Elizabeth Smith 1840-1850, a set of diaries written by the daughter of a landlord which is one of the most complete first-person documents from the era of the Famine. 

"And on the other side I guess is the ballad tradition which is a source for information of what people thought of the landlord," O'Connor pointed out. "Not a lot, usually." 

The author said he discovered commonalities between contemporary accounts of the famine.

"A phrase that I found coming up again and again was people saying 'The words don't exist to describe this,' People had never seen anything like this." 

This is precisely the journalist Dixon's reaction when in the novel he investigates an Irish workhouse and witnesses mothers silent mourning over their dead children and husbands as a constable leads him through the dilapidated grounds. 

"I sympathize with Dixon at that point because that's a problem that I had or that anyone would have at trying to approach this subject," O'Connor stressed. "In a way silence seems the only response, but as Dixon reflects, silence is denial. So you have to work through it."

In his six years of intermittent research, O'Connor said he discovered both cowardly and uplifting reactions to the famine. He cites the actions of Mary Wheeler and her husband James Ellis, Quakers from England who moved to northern Galway in 1849 "simply because they believed that it was their duty to do that." 

Although the two had never been to Ireland and did not know anyone in Galway, O'Connor related how they gave up a successful milling business back home in England and set up shop in Ireland where they employed the locals and treated them with respect and improved the life of the community by building schools and roads. 

Their village, Letterfrack, is still exists, but O'Connor believes that the history of Letterfrack is largely unknown because the Ellis' were English.

"And so there are surprising stories from people who said, "I won't accept this, and I will do the little bit that I can do to keep this from happening." 

For all the background detail that he uncovered, O'Connor was quick to point out that his novel is just that— a novel. 

"You know, the research is really there to make the background as correct as possible, which I think is a very important thing to do in its own right, but it isn't a textbook. It's about imagined characters." 

Although The Star of the Sea is his first historical novel, O'Connor said he is considering writing another specifically about the Irish involvement in the American civil war. More than 100,000 Irish fought in the Civil War, mostly on the Union side.

"Of the one and a half million immigrants who came here, it's only logical that many of them would have ended up on one side or the other in the conflict." 

A Modern Day Dickens
The great British novelist and social critic Charles Dickens makes several cameo appearances in O'Connor's novel, meeting both Mulvey and Dixon and appearing at a number of literary functions at Merridith's estate and around London.

And it is a well-placed homage considering that O'Connor's latest novel includes stylistic devices borrowed from the earlier writer's work.

"Kind of an interesting thing— when I studied English literature at university in Dublin, I didn't like the 19th century great English novelists," O' Connor admitted. "But when I started reading them again just to get the flavor of the use of the language at that time, I found I liked them a lot."

Like Dickens and his counterparts, O'Connor in Star of the Sea incorporates lavish chapter headings and synopses. 

"All of those books were written over a two -ear period as serials in the papers and magazines," O'Connor pointed out. "So I think it's basically a good idea— in a book that's long— to tell your reader at the beginning of each chapter what you are going to tell them. It sort of keeps them on board."

With such a long and twisty narrative, O'Connor first mapped out the sequence of events using a variety of charts and maps before he commenced writing.

"Because I thought I would get lost," he said with a chuckle. "I actually thought it would be like getting into the ship without a chart, you know. You might be sailing for New York, but you might end up in Rio De Janeiro— so I did a lot of structural work before I wrote it."

Firm Roots in Ireland
While a great number of the Irish whom he wrote about found their way to America, O'Connor himself does not have any relatives in America.

"I'm the only Irish person I know who can say that. My father's parents came to Chicago during the late '20s, and they stayed for a couple of years and then went to Toronto. And anytime they managed to make a few dollars they lost it again— So they came all the way back to Dublin."

But one area of his personal life that did lend itself to the book is his family's connection to Connemara in Galway, a region of western Ireland that was hit particularly hard by the famine.

As a child, O'Connor spent summers in Connemara in the same house and with the same family that his father stayed with when he was a boy. 

"We have a kind of connection to the place going back 50 years now, so I feel totally at home in Connemara. For a child of the city, I feel that I kind of belong there, and I know it very well."

Born in 1963 in Dublin, O'Connor is the eldest of four children. Musician Sinéad O'Connor is his sister. He earned a BA and MA in English and history at University College, Dublin, and then did postgraduate research at University College, Oxford. O'Connor lived in London until 1996. When he started writing full-time in 1989, O'Connor wrote columns for Esquire and the Irish Tribune for 10 years.

O'Connor is the author of five novels, including The Salesman, (1998) Cowboys and Indians, (1991) and Inishowen (2000). He is also the author of five books of nonfiction and a number of screenplays and collaborative works. O'Connor's stage play Red Roses and Petrol was filmed in early 2003 as a feature picture starring Malcolm McDowell and Blythe Danner.

The author has garnered numerous awards and nominations, including the Hennessy First Fiction Award in 1989 and the Miramax Ireland Screenplay Award in 1995. Cowboys and Indians was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1991, and Star of the Sea was shortlisted for The Sunday Independent/Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award in December, 2002.