Book Club: Colum McCann - TransAtlantic

Editor's note: This episode of Bookclub is available from Sunday 6 December and will be available to listen online or for download.

Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic is a familiar story in some ways, because the story of the links between Ireland and America is so well known, and so embedded in the history of the two countries. But it’s a revelation too. I didn’t know, for example, of the visit made to Ireland by the black anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass in the 1840s. The episode is one of many historical events that Colum weaves into a story that ends in the hands of the great-granddaughter of the woman whose story begins the novel.

Douglass was a magical orator, a former slave who became the beacon of the abolitionist movement in the years leading up to the outbreak of civil war in 1861. He arrived in Ireland in 1845 and he was surprised by two discoveries. Firstly, that even in a monarchical system, which his own country had dispensed with 70 years before to promote democracy, he found himself respected in a way that was often difficult at home, and, secondly, by the suffering of the Irish experiencing the horrors of the potato famine (which would drive so many, in the end, to the United States), something which shocked him deeply. Douglass himself wrote: ‘I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, 'We don't allow niggers in here! ‘

Colum’s novel begins with a striking view of the green fields of Ireland from the air, at the end of Alcock and Brown’s first air crossing of the Atlantic, and it’s a superb device with which to establish the theme that’s at the heart of the story. The aviators land in 1919, three years after the Easter Rising and at a moment when Ireland is sinking into a civil war of its own. For this is a novel of peace and war. In the later stages, another historical figure pops up - one from our own time - Senator George Mitchell, who acted as honest broker in the peace process that led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998. I know Mitchell a little - as Colum has come to - and he catches very well his sober good humour and his political cunning. Rightly, I think, the novel sees his role as connected directly to a century of stops and starts in the troubled relationships in the island of Ireland itself, and particularly with London.

As an Irishman living in New York, Colum has a finely-tuned ear for the subtleties of the story of Irish identity, and its place in the American psyche. He also writes the novel - which has the feeling of a saga, crossing the generations - with a poetic flair that can bring together people in different eras and on different continents with an ease that makes the narrative seamless. That’s no easy task: mixing fact and fiction is often unsatisfactory, and we can all think of books that in trying to yank together different centuries and different countries end up reading like travelogues or inferior non-fiction. TransAtlantic is emphatically not in that category. It is very witty, quick and a passionate novel about the elusive quality of tranquillity that every society knows it has to find, but that so many find so very difficult.

Through four generations of women he tells a story that begins with a discovery - Ireland seen through the clouds - and reveals the lives of its characters with a freshness that it is quite exhilarating. Did you know, for example about the ice farms in the upper mid-west states from where boat loads of ice were floated down the Mississippi to cool drinks in New Orleans? Nor did I.

I hope you enjoy hearing Colum talking about Transatlantic on Sunday (December 6th) at the usual time on 4 pm on Radio 4, with the repeat next Thursday the 10th at half past three.

Our next recording on Bookclub is with the marvellous biographer Michael Holroyd talking about A Strange Eventful History, his fascinating exploration of the lives of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, and in which he takes the reader behind the scenes of Victorian theatre revealing its secrets and mysteries and magic. The recording is on 20 January, at the BBC in Central London and tickets are free and available by clicking here. I hope to see you there.

Happy reading.

Jim

Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4