Fenians -- Fiction. |
Manchester (England) -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction. |
England -- Manchester -- Fiction. |
Manchester, Eng. |
Manchʻēsdr (England) |
Manchester (Greater Manchester) |
City and Borough of Manchester (England) |
Angleterre |
Anglii͡a |
Inghilterra |
Engeland |
Inglaterra |
Anglija |
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Summary
Summary
"This is Dickens in the present tense, Dickens for the twenty-first century."--Roddy Doyle, The New York Times Book Review
An Irishman in nineteenth-century England is forced to take sides when his nephew joins the bloody underground movement for independence in this propulsive novel from the acclaimed author of The North Water .
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times * The New York Public Library * New Statesman * Publishers Weekly
Manchester, England, 1867. The rebels will be hanged at dawn, and their brotherhood is already plotting its revenge.
Stephen Doyle, an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War, arrives in Manchester from New York with a thirst for blood. He has joined the Fenians, a secret society intent on ending British rule in Ireland by any means necessary. Head Constable James O'Connor has fled grief and drink in Dublin for a sober start in Manchester. His job is to discover and thwart the Fenians' plans whatever they might be. When a long-lost nephew arrives on O'Connor's doorstep looking for work, he cannot foresee the way his fragile new life will be imperiled--and how his and Doyle's fates will become fatally intertwined.
In this propulsive tale of the underground war for Irish independence, the author of The North Water once again transports readers to a time when blood begot blood. Moving from the dirt and uproar of industrial Manchester to the quiet hills of rural Pennsylvania, The Abstainer is a searing novel in which two men, haunted by their pasts and driven forward by the need for justice and retribution, must fight for life and legacy.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McGuire (The North Water) imagines the early years of the Fenian Brotherhood in this taut, atmospheric tale of an Irish American freedom fighter and an Irish detective squaring off on the rainy streets of Manchester, England, in 1867. James O'Connell accepted a transfer from the Dublin police department to Manchester after exhausting the goodwill of his superiors, who initially tolerated his drunkenness out of sympathy for O'Connell being a widower. In Manchester, he's tasked with gathering intelligence from the local Fenians, who are in a rabble over the hanging of three men. After O'Connell's main source, Thomas Flanagan, gets a message to O'Connell that the Fenians have sent American Civil War veteran Stephen Doyle to Manchester to orchestrate a retaliation for the hangings, Flanagan is found out and murdered. The episode tugs on O'Connell's conscience, especially after he meets Flanagan's grieving sister, Rose. The arrival of another American, O'Connell's nephew Michael Sullivan, complicates things further, as Michael is determined to infiltrate the Fenians to catch Doyle in exchange for a reward. McGuire demonstrates a mastery of classic realism, building the characters through their reactions to unflinching scenes of brutality, from a Manchester rat-baiting pit to memories of Civil War combat and a botched public hanging. Manchester in particular is evoked with keen impressionistic detail ("Outside, the rain repeats itself, low and constant, like the hum of a machine or the words of a prayer"). Plot threads of romance and revenge emerge from O'Connell's dogged impulsiveness, as he pursues Rose and then Doyle through Manchester and beyond. McGuire's crackling work is one to savor. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
After his wife's death, Head Constable James O'Connor undertook a career-tanking drinking spell that earned him banishment from Dublin to Manchester. Now, in 1867, he abstains from drinking and is determined to redeem himself by rooting out members of the Fenian Brotherhood, the rebel organization fighting for an end to British rule in Ireland, who are hiding among Manchester's working-class Irish. He's managed to turn a few informants, and he's relying on them to ensure that the upcoming hanging of a trio of Fenians doesn't erupt into violence. Meanwhile, when Stephen Doyle, a committed Fenian and a sharp-witted veteran of the American Civil War, arrives in Manchester and manages to get his hands on O'Connor's list of informants, the constable's winning streak comes to a bloody end. O'Connor's nephew, fresh off the boat from Dublin, offers to infiltrate the brotherhood, and O'Connor's blunder with his informants' identities leaves him no other choice. Thus begins a hunt for Doyle that will take O'Connor from Manchester to Pennsylvania, chasing revenge but finding redemption. O'Connor's showdown with Stephen Doyle delivers a gut-wrenching finale that will leave readers hoping desperately that McGuire (The North Water, 2016) has an O'Connor prequel in the works. O'Connor's palpable alienation and the subtly drawn comparisons between the Irish insurgency and America's then-recent civil war create layers of depth in this exceptional period thriller.
Guardian Review
Ian McGuire's gripping historical thriller reminds us that long before the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, there were the Manchester Three. In November 1867, three Irish nationalists were hanged before a large crowd from a gibbet erected on the walls of Salford prison. They'd been fitted up for the murder of a police officer shot through the eye two months earlier. Outrage over a terrible crime led to the railroading of these innocent men, and perpetuated a cycle of injustice, martyrdom, radicalisation and terror. McGuire draws on these events for his third novel The Abstainer, a followup to 2016's Booker-longlisted The North Water. He begins on the eve of the three men's execution. In an office with the "homely barracks-tang of stewed tea and Navy Cut", Manchester police brood over the possibility of reprisals. The newly industrialised city is teeming with Irish immigrants, many of whom harbour republican sympathies. It's a tense, chilly opening, full of ominous portents of the retaliation to come. From the off, the crisp, purposeful prose gives us the reassuring sense that we're in the hands of a writer at the top of his game who is keen to unfold a story: "Bright flames from a dozen watch fires glint orange off the black and boatless Irwell. Inside the Town Hall on King Street, James O'Connor knocks the rain from his bowler, unbuttons his topcoat and hangs them both on the iron hooks by the recreation room door." O'Connor is the novel's titular character: a teetotal Irish police officer who harbours grave doubts about the wisdom of attempting to suppress the Fenians with violence. "It is hard detective work and good judgment that will win this fight, he believes, not exhibitions of bombast or cruelty. Yet cruelty and bombast is what the English prefer." As the only Irishman in the police department, O'Connor is an outsider, able to move freely among Manchester's large Irish population. From his network of informers, he soon learns that the Fenians are preparing to escalate. They're bringing over a veteran from the US civil war, a man named Stephen Doyle, to carry out a spectacular but as yet undetermined act of terror. The stage is quickly set for a battle of ruthlessness and cunning between the two émigré Irishmen. The book is written with the vividness and economy of a screenplay, unfolding through a series of sharply observed scenes full of cliffhangers, misdirection and reverses. Its lovely, rhythmic prose evokes the stinks of the Victorian city, its factories, rat-baiting arenas and slaughterhouses. McGuire dwells with fascination on the process of police work; in the breadth of its sympathies and its curiosity about detection and surveillance, the novel reminded me of the best police procedurals - The Wire by gaslight. McGuire does everything well: evoking the pungent atmosphere of a teeming industrial city, recreating the period in a way that resonates with our own time without seeming preachy, and writing sharp dialogue that crackles with subtext. We're dropped into the milieu and expected to pick things up as we go along, making the strangeness of the world more intriguing and the parallels with the present more urgent. You might argue that a game of cat and mouse between an alcoholic cop and his scarred, implacable antagonist is not exactly breaking new ground in a thriller, but one of the pleasures of this book is that it reworks familiar tropes in surprising ways. What separates the two men on different sides of an ideological conflict is really a matter of psychology and temperament. O'Connor, the abstainer, attempts to forgo the intoxication of both alcohol and righteous violence: "He feels uncertainty and emptiness and occasionally, growing between the two, like a weed between flagstones, a frail and incongruous kind of hope." His opponent Doyle is not a simplistic baddie, but we do sense that something dark and narcissistic supports his capacity for bloodshed. The architecture of the book is so close to a typical Hollywood three-act structure that it can't be accidental. For a moment, this worried me: the third acts of thrillers are notoriously hard to pull off. As the conflict narrows, the stories tend to become stereotypical. I had visions of O'Connor and Doyle chasing each other around a derelict cotton factory, firing pistols at shadows and saying: "Don't you get it? You and I are the same!" Thankfully, while adhering to some of the conventions of the thriller, the book's final act manages to be both satisfying and oblique, rooted in possibilities raised by the specific biographies of its characters. The ending is replete with consolation and irony. While never being so clumsy as to carry any overt message, it also hints at the seductive combination of transcendence and delusion that lies behind the promises of all world-changing ideologies.
Kirkus Review
The Irish Republican Brotherhood battles the British in Victorian England. Like McGuire's second novel, The North Water (2016, etc.), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this violent, noirish tale focuses on two men: policeman James O'Connor and Irish rebel Stephen Doyle. It's Nov. 22, 1867, in Manchester, and "the sky is the color of wet mortar." Three Fenians--members of a secret society working for Irish independence--are about to be hung for killing an English policeman. (McGuire based this on a true story but made up everything that came after.) A group of policemen are discussing the hangings, and there's talk of reprisals; later, an informant says he's heard about a man coming from America "to wreak some havoc, that's what they say." The man is Doyle, a Union soldier from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A "strange bastard," he meets with some Fenians and is told about O'Connor, a Head Constable who was brought over from Dublin a few months ago to assist the Manchester police in spying on the Fenians. O'Connor's wife, Catherine, recently died and he turned to drink. Now an abstainer, he's a "man maligned, a victim of ignorance and English prejudice." O'Connor is beaten at night and key pages from his police notebook, stolen. Complicating matters, another transplant, O'Connor's nephew Michael Sullivan, has come to Manchester from New York. Against O'Connor's wishes, he infiltrates the Fenians to become an informer. O'Connor becomes infatuated with Rose Flanagan, whose brother Tommy is one of his informants. There's talk of an audacious Fenian revenge plot, but they'll need handguns. Reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, McGuire's taut, intricately woven novel captures the aura of a dark, violent world riddled with terrorism and revenge, where a "man's life on its own is nothing much to talk about." This well-told, suspenseful tale will appeal to fans of Deadwood and Cormac McCarthy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the late 1800s, Head Constable James O'Connor has left sorrow and the bottle behind in Dublin to start over in Manchester, England, and he uses his Irish connections to commence spying on Fenians working to free Ireland from Britain. Meanwhile, long-lost nephew Stephen Doyle arrives on his doorstep from America, in search of work. But Stephen's dedication to the underground Fenian cause will crack open James's life. McGuire's The North Water was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and named a New York Times Best Book, and the BBC is turning it into a miniseries.