“The Last Prince of Ireland”, by Morgan Llywelyn

 

368 pages, William Morrow & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0688107949 

I bought The Last Prince of Ireland by Morgan Llywelyn from the overstock shelf at – get this – B. Dalton (seems to me I’ve said that before). So anyway, this novel is about O’Sullivan’s March, in which Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, the last independent Chief of the Name of the O’Sullivan Beara Irish clan, gathered a thousand of his remaining people – about all that was left – after their defeats at Kinsale and Dunboy and set off northwards on a 300-mile march, starting on December 31^st, 1602. If you know next to nothing about Irish history – place me firmly in that column – then all of that was Irish to you. But, by and large, you don’t need to know any of that when reading this book, as it is a tale of resilience in the face of starvation, exhaustion, betrayal and hopelessness that can appeal to anyone.

The story builds steadily in emotional intensity to the point where one becomes highly attuned to the emotional states of the characters, feeling both their pains and their joys. This is one of the strengths of the book, as there are no two-dimensional cardboard cutouts to be found; each character has depth and are not merely representory stand-ins or typical archetypes. As they fight and strive and suffer and die, you feel for them and egg them on but, as you do so, you cannot escape the sense that their cause is ultimately doomed, as are they. That so many of these people are ordinary – and non-combatant women and children to boot – only makes their plight all the more impactful and their survival all the more invoking (and to think, the Irish had 300 more years of English misrule to undergo).

So be warned: there is a lot of doom and gloom to be found in this book, hanging over these people like a literal dark cloud. If detailed descriptions of people suffering, struggling and starving as they fend off attacks from the marauding English – and other Irish, as well – then The Last Prince of Ireland may not be the book for you. But survival was the goal; the physical survival of all the people that O’Sullivan Beare was obligated to lead and to fight for. But this physical survival was always seen by the lords as concurrent with survival of what was truly “Irish”, which is simply a bitter truth: in the effort to simply survive, much of what was once treasured is lost to the ravages of time and expediency. An old lesson, to be sure, but one that The Last Prince of Ireland teaches all too well and all too tragically.