Among the survivors is a Pius Mulvey, known on board as “the ghost”, a would-be balladeer and a reluctant murderer. On board are a handful of first-class passengers, including an American journalist (the novel’s chief narrator), an impoverished syphilitic Irish landlord with his family and their servant Mary, and an enigmatic maharajah, as well as some few hundred miserable wretches travelling steerage in appalling conditions, whose deaths are recorded day after day in the log-book of the fatalistically-minded captain. 1It has become a commonplace to note that although the Irish Famine was a major cataclysm, and one which contributed to the complete reshaping of Ireland in the late nineteenth-century, it has not often found its way into Irish literature – arguably because it was simply too traumatic for representation: as Terry Eagleton puts it, “the events strains at the limits of the inarticulable.” In Star of the Sea, however, the young Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor not only vividly conjures up the memory of the disaster out of which modern Ireland was born, but produces an acutely contemporary piece of experimental fiction disguised as a quaint Victorian historical novel.ĢThe eponymous, antiphrastically-named “Star of the Sea” is a ramshackle coffin-ship making its final voyage across the Atlantic in the last months of “black ’47”.
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