Star of
the Sea
By
Joseph O’Connor
At the
beginning of the film, “Gangs of New York”, I thought, “Who could have written
such bleakly cruel science-fiction?” But the reality of human cruelty is always
more shocking than any fiction. “Star of the Sea” is an incredible, epic,
unputdownable story of the potato famine in Ireland and attempts of thousands
of people to survive by immigrating to America.
Ironically,
I read this novel just after watching the film “A Beautiful Country” about the
modern day horrors of emigrants fleeing Asia – stuck in steerage, dying of
dysentery, typhoid and malnutrition. So in over a hundred years basically
nothing has changed – only nationalities.
O’Connor has the intimate warmth of the old-fashioned storyteller sharing
anecdotes at the fireside and this makes the horror of mass starvation
unavoidable. The families in the story are not good or evil cardboard cutouts,
but complex, irritating and admirable. And the images that are painted are so
vivid, they remain long after the last sentence has been read. For example:
“I saw one
elderly woman, little more than an agglomeration of rags, barely gain the
gangplank only to die on the foredeck. Her children beseeched the Captain to
take her to America anyway. No means were available to pay for her burial but
they could not support the shame of dumping her body on the wharf. Her aged and
crippled husband was lying on the quayside, too afflicted by famine fever to be
able for the journey, a few hours short from death himself. He could not be
asked to witness that sight as one of his last sights on earth.”
And…
“In one
doorway an artist has been seated at an easel, trying to draw whatever was
happening inside. A middle-aged Corkman, he had been commissioned by a London
newspaper to go to Connemara and make pictures of the Famine. He was weeping
very quietly as he tried to draw…This was not happening in Africa or India but
in the wealthiest kingdom on the face of the earth…Nothing had prepared him for
it: the fact of famine. The trench-graves and screams. The hillocks of corpses.
The stench of death on the tiny roads.”
But what
makes the novel so powerful is its focus on the major characters – the
criminal, the aristocrat, the maidservant. They are touching and overwhelming.
A stunning piece of work.
