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Author Delaney offers new spin on storytelling in 'Tipperary'
(by Sara Porter - June 04, 2008)
Charles O’Brien is a storyteller. When he tells you about his life, you are not sure if he is telling the truth, but like all gifted storytellers, he draws you into his version.
That is the idea behind Frank Delaney’s novel Tipperary, a historic fiction about the early days of the Irish uprising. Tipperary falls into exaggeration and outlandishness, but there is hidden truth and enjoyment in this tale of a man and his journeys in such a turbulent time.
Part of the pleasure of this novel lies in the memorable lead character. As a first-person narrator, Charles O’Brien is charismatic, self-assured and grandiose in his narration and his personality. When he begins the book by saying, “To us Irish memory is a canvas, stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the ‘story’ part of the word ‘history’ and we love it trimmed out with color, and drama, ribbons, and bows” you have to believe him.
Throughout his life, O’Brien is involved in unusual circumstances, many of which are based on actual events and people. As a child, he witnesses an English landowner evicting peasants from his land — one of the early catalysts for rebellion by the Irish. He becomes a healer and has many clients, including a dying Oscar Wilde, in exile after his infamous libel trial. O’Brien discovers Tipperary Castle, an estate that belongs to the family of a woman with whom he has fallen in love, and he works to rebuild it. He inadvertently gets involved in the Irish Revolution of 1916 and encounters revolutionary Michael Collins. He relates all of these and other encounters with such verbosity and intelligence that the reader is captivated and mesmerized.
There are moments when Tipperary takes on Forrest Gump-like proportions because, like Gump, O’Brien involves himself in the lives of real people and changes them in real life. His suggestion to writer James Joyce is that he should make his writing “complicated,” and the result is Joyce’s complex novel Ulysses (and the ire of many a reader who has tried to understand it). He writes an article praising MP Charles Stewart Parnell’s relationship with a woman who turns out to be his mistress, and the result is Parnell’s downfall.
Some of these moments stretch credibility too far, and O’Brien begins to seem like that drunken patron in a bar who name-drops the celebrities he claims to have set on the path to stardom. But O’Brien tells of these incidents in such a way that we want to believe him even while we are shaking our heads in disbelief.
To give O’Brien’s point of view some reliability and provide a voice for the captivated audience, Delaney gives us another narrator, Michael Nugent. At first, Nugent is simply a device to give a modern historical context to the story. When O’Brien narrates his landowner’s encounter with the peasants, Nugent interrupts the action to give us statistics of English landowners evicting Irish citizens.
At first Nugent’s interruptions are intrusive and sometimes tedious, but after he introduces himself and gets more personally involved with O’Brien’s story, particularly when O’Brien becomes obsessed with caring for Tipperary Castle, the reader realizes how important Nugent is to the story, just as Nugent discovers how much O’Brien’s story means to him.
Nugent is also there to give us a more rational view of events that the very romantic O’Brien cannot give us. Nowhere is this more evident than in dealing with April Burke, the object of O’Brien’s affection and the catalyst for his involvement with Tipperary. A somewhat flat character, she fails to inspire any romantic feelings in the reader or in Nugent, instead coming across as controlling, demanding and manipulative.
In O’Brien’s eyes, she can do no wrong, and even as she gets him involved in a long court trial over Tipperary’s ownership, he works to renovate the castle and watches in silence as she marries or falls in love with other men. She only comes into her own near the end of the story as she defends what she helped build and finds true love, becoming a better person than Nugent and the reader thought she was.
Tipperary is like a modern version of those Irish legends in which the hero starts out on a journey and discovers not only what he sought but finds a lot more. Each of the main characters begins this book seeking one thing, but ends it finding something different: for Nugent, it was answers to questions he thought he would never ask; for April, it was real love. For O’Brien, it is to be remembered through words and stories.Frank Delaney reads from and signs Tipperary at 7 p.m. June 10 at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid. For more information call 367-6731.
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