Review

Redemption Falls

By Joseph O'Connor

Published by Harvill Secker

Although Joseph O’Connor’s follow-up to his bestselling Star of the Sea begins with the journey of Eliza Duane Mooney, the child of a passenger aboard that titular ship, it would not be accurate to call it a sequel.

Set twenty years later, in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, Redemption Falls follows the spirit rather than the letter of the earlier novel, as O’Connor attempts to give a voice to the impoverished and luckless numbers who silently inhabit the past.

Part of this relates to the Irish journey towards, and experience in America during the 19th century – to those who fled the ravaged old land in hope and expectation, and found instead a new country tearing itself apart. Eliza is their representative, and her journey forms the unremittingly bleak core of the novel, her trials many and without respite.

As such, she also becomes a kind of Christ figure, her sufferings – and those of the masses she represents – identified with ‘The Redeemer...hipshot at Gettysburg, blinded in the Wilderness, torched alive at Shiloh, gutted at Manassas’. The narrator, whose true identity is revealed only at the book’s close, claims that Eliza’s long walk ‘is for my redemption’.

As the title implies, redemption is the theme that binds O’Connor’s broad cast of characters together. Redemption Falls is itself the name of the town towards which all of them are drawn, and in which much of the action takes place. Thus, all seek redemption (whether knowingly or not) but whether it is possible after the horrors experienced in the Civil War and elsewhere is a question that hangs, unanswered, over the novel.

The traumatised populace of the town – and of the newly united states – might suggest not, with the threat of violence permanently in the air even after the formal end of hostilities. Yet in the tale of the marriage between General O’Keeffe (the former Irish hero now despised for his Union sympathies in the war) and his neglected wife Lucia, there is hope that warring parties may reconcile, and that damage wrought can be repaired.

Following the same template as Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls is written in the form of letters, memoirs, journals and official documents from a variety of ‘sources’. Lucia’s nephew, years after the main events, tries to piece them all together in an effort to make sense of the past. In turn, the reader too plays detective, attempting to construct a coherent narrative from frequently unreliable witness statements.

Whilst at times this can be a frustrating experience, it’s an ultimately rewarding one. It gives O’Connor’s book a fragmented quality that is nonetheless appealing, acknowledging that stories of love and war alike have more than one side to them. Even as he gives voice to those forgotten by history, he reminds us that some people, and some events, are partly a mystery, and will never be fully understood.

Reviewed by Rosa Anderson, Booktrust Literature Promotions Officer

---