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Redemption Falls

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"A hard history. A tale of war. Then came the act that ennobles this bleak tale, shading it, perhaps, to a love story."

REDEMPTION FALLS is a kaleidoscope of bright and dark pieces that forms a stunning tale. The surprising narrator has assembled memories, letters, transcripts, interviews, old fliers and newspaper clippings to tell the story of General and Mrs. O'Keeffe and a drummer boy who captured their attention. A cacophony of characters screams from the pages, their voices all vying for attention.

Most notable is James (Con) O'Keeffe, who might as well have gained that nickname from his status as a prisoner, self-released (without permission) and thereafter quickly took himself off to America. Sharing center stage with him is his wife, Lucia-Cruz Rodriguez and Ortega McLelland-O'Keeffe, a woman of great beauty, means and talent. She provides strength and support --- often unearned --- to her ungrateful husband. If only she could make him happy.

After service in the army, during which time Con O'Keeffe made a name for himself (although opinions vary widely as to whether good or bad), he wins the very dubious honor of an appointment by President Lincoln as Governor of his new home state. He has taken up residence in Redemption Falls, in the Mountain Territory, an imaginary town served by roads and rails that sometimes become too dangerous to travel. There are some rough people hanging about in the Mountain Territory, and some hard times coming.

Lucia, reunited with her husband after the war, turns to writing poetry as an outlet for her unfulfilled emotions. The man she fell in love with has changed. The General --- or is it Governor now? --- often turns surly, bordering on abusive. The couple's marriage, which started its decline from nearly the first day of their matrimony, continues on a downward slope. Lucia is at a loss to understand why. When not brooding about his slowly revealed past, O'Keeffe dives deeper into the bottle, pushed there by that selfsame past.

"How wonderful that would be: to remember nothing. To be blank, and the road still before you. What would he do differently? Nearly everything, perhaps."

The Governor's drinking has become something of a legend. Local citizens know not to bother him when he is in his cups, for his moodiness is not reserved for his wife alone. "Even back in those days there were whisperings about the drinking --- was his stallion shot from under him as he led the zouaves at Fredericksburg, or was its rider the worse for liquor, as some claimed? They say his temper was vicious, drunk or sober..."

But it may not be the drink that is O'Keeffe's undoing. It may be the child.

"Twas never proven it was the child done all them things. He got the blame for every wrong was ever done in that bugtusslin dump."

For some reason, Con O'Keeffe wants to parent the boy. Keeping O'Keeffe --- and everyone else --- at arm's length, Young Jeddo Mooney remains mute, having seen atrocities that no 12-year-old should have to witness. The war took his family away; he's alone in the world now. At least, that's what he believes.

Irish author Joseph O'Connor writes with a mournful pen. Sadness and misery share the same sentence with a quiet wit. The beauty lies in the creativity, for the mental pictures conjured up are of exceptional horror.

Don't expect pretty prose here. REDEMPTION FALLS is a book of lyrical, ugly and brilliant language. O'Connor's vividly rendered images assault the senses, dredging up horrible pictures of the realities of war. It is not the story so much that's remarkable as the telling of it. While some parts are difficult to get through, the tenacious reader will be richly rewarded. It might bear a second read, maybe even a third.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

This is a story - multiple stories actually, bound by common threads that are not altogether evident in the early chapters. It may be best read at times of quiet when interruptions are rare and the mind has time to gather and ponder - but stick with it! For what will seem at first a series of disjointed vignettes, somehow linked to the enigmatic Eliza Mooney on a cross-country quest to who-knows-where, will expand into an epic tale of many whose lives entwine in post Civil War America.

O'Connor's story provides the reader a vicarious experience of living the frustration and ugliness of when America was at war with itself, and in particular, the desperate times immediately afterward. The book is definitely a cut above with its profuse incorporation of period illustrations, song lyrics, photography, poetry, letters, and language - that may at times seem heavy on the ear - so descriptive it might have been penned by one who lived during those wasted days.

The reader is also rewarded with a surprise twist at the end of its telling - enough to have brought shivers to the spine of this reader - perhaps not unlike those that coursed the body of Eliza Mooney as she set out on foot to walk her long dusty road to begin the telling.

Over the weekend I devoured Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor. Although there is not a unified, authoritative voice (rather a compilation of "contemporary" sources that moves the book along somewhat jerkily), the stories, language, history strikes this reader as authentic, moving and remarkable. A very good read indeed.

Told in the myriad voices of those who bore witness to the events described herein, "Redemption Falls" is at once both historical fiction profiling the Irish experience during and after the American Civil War, and a lugubrious chronicle of the human condition under duress. As a student of the American Civil War, the Emerald Isle's Joseph O' Connor employs the presumed idiom of the period; his characters come to life as they chronicle events. The illiterate and semi-literate seem woefully so. The educated speak to us in the wordy formality of the Victorian period. Visually, O'Connor bolsters his gritty tale by weaving in anachronistic poetry, army recruiting and `wanted' posters; effects that convene a finely tuned `1860s' cadence to Redemption Falls. The author's laborious description of a painting depicting a headdress'd American Indian gives the warrior life. Adroit at writing sentence fragments, O'Connor seamlessly shifts scenes, locations and voices--both fictional and real--from one time frame to another. O'Connor forces readers to savor every crafty word.

Mildly akin to Charles Frazier's melancholy "Cold Mountain," O'Connor's story unfolds in post-Civil War America. Former Irish rebel Cornelius O'Keeffe serves as titular governor of an unnamed western territory, although readers might assume the story is set in Montana. For O'Keeffe's character bears such striking resemblance to the first real-life governor of the Territory of Montana, Thomas Francis Meagher, that it's unlikely the similarity is coincidental. Following commutation of death sentences for perfidy against the noble Crown in Ireland, both Irishmen wind up as prisoners in Van Diemen's Land (Australia, Tasmania)--a life sentence they quickly escape via boat. Subsequent events find both our fictional protagonist and real-life Meagher in New York where they marry into society's crust. Both men serve with checkerboard distinction for the Federals during the Civil War. After the war and brief lecture careers, they head for the frontier to pursue roughshod careers that thrive there. Fueled by indomitable courage and the bottle, territorial governorships and decline await the once vainglorious O'Keeffe and Meagher.

Our fictional O'Keeffe and his fiery wife Lucia-Cruz reside in Redemption Falls where himself is routinely mocked and despised by its citizens, many of whom served in the Confederacy. Unkempt, sullen, often drunk, the governor plants one foot in the past where the ghosts of soldiers he sent to their deaths haunt him. In the present he's as unforgiving of himself as he is towards others. Con O'Keeffe boasts no friends save for a couple of abrasive deputies.

Following a tip, Con O'Keeffe happens on a grisly murder scene in the backcountry and discovers a filthy young Irish urchin lurking about. Defiant and mute, the pre-teen Jeremiah `Jeddo' Mooney faces O'Keeffe displaying a flash of the same pugnacious spirit that the governor himself boasts. Unable to find Jeddo's people, O'Keeffe hauls him off to live at his cabin at Redemption Falls.

Hewn from sawn timber, the unfinished cabin is not a happy place. The missus and her freed-slave cook, Elizabeth Longstreet, seem none to keen on housing a mute waif with behavior issues. Jeddo rapidly drives a nail into the marital coffin of a childless couple who, to remain so, sleep in separate bedrooms. (`Tis a Catholic thing.)

Which brings readers to Eliza Duane Mooney. Late of Louisiana and not-yet seventeen years old, she's walking fifteen hundred miles to the frontier in search of a brother she carries with her only as a worn daguerreotype. "Have you seen this boy?" she inquires. She hears rumor. "You've seen him where?" Eyeing the sad parade of broken Confederate soldiers trudging shoe-less back to the South where homes and farms once stood, road agents take advantage of her as Eliza plods on.

Back at the O'Keeffe cabin the story takes a twist as we learn Lucia-Cruz keeps a Civil War skeleton in the closet. Meanwhile, Con O'Keeffe casts a blind-eye toward young Jeddo's disruptive shenanigans. Townspeople accuse Jeddo Mooney of skullduggery as the O'Keefe's marriage continues a downward slide.

Searching for a character readers can hang onto, we're reminded that after war's physical fighting ends the battle goes on interminably for the casualties of war--one message drawn from "Redemption Falls." O'Connor's hard-edged text further recalls that veterans and sympathizers of both the Federal and Confederate armies flocked to the frontier where blood flowed as the Civil War's spirit lived on for many.

Do any of O'Connor's characters find redemption? The book's title implies so. Yet those who read authors like Joseph O'Connor or Cormac McCarthy know that the hero doesn't emerge unscathed--or at all. Unearthing the answer in this case is worth the ride it takes to get there.

Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) says "Redemption Falls" took his breath away. What can one add to that?

I just finished this book last night and thought it so good that I am currently here writing my first review on amazon Ever.

Simply put, This is book once started will not be put down.

Excellent book. Worth every penny

I loved Joe O'Connor's Star of the Sea so much that I was really looking forward to part two of his American/Irish trilogy but was disappointed at the tenuous link between the two books.
Reading it was a hard slog and I wasn't too enamoured with his poetry, songs and posters scattered throughout the novel but it was insightful and I plowed on.
The style of this novel made it difficult to keep up with the story as there are so many characters and it was hard to see how they connected.It wasn't until the very end of the book that it came together for me and I was satisified that I had persevered but I know many who started the book and never finished it.
The plot is good and the idea for the novel is brilliant but for me it didn't match the brilliance of his former novel. However, it was worth the read and I am glad I finished it.

I can't quite believe all Jospeph O'Connor took on with this novel! It's scope is both huge (the nation during the Reconstruction, the West as it was being formed,) and personal (the lives of people living through those times, how they shaped and were shaped by them.) I feel O'connor wrote his heart out with this one, but if I was him, I'd surely feel it was worth it -- as a reader I certainly feel enlarged by the experience of this book.

This book is something like the HBO series "Deadwood" crossed with "Cold Mountain", and yet more, much more. For one thing, this is the first fictional account I have read of the experiences of the Irish Americans in the Civil War, and that part was just excellent too. O'Connor brings in the sense of a kind of fractured freedom that the American experience can be seen to be, an experience at once exhilarating and devasting, even excruciating. It was a very hard time to be alive;few got any breaks, and God help you if you were a woman -- a sentiment voiced early on by one of the characters, Elizabeth Longstreet. Given how dark this novel is in many ways, it is a testment to the sheer power of his writing that once begun, I was just absolutely taken up by it, felt I was practically living it. I absolutely adored the collage effect of the narritive(s) being overlaid with posters, songs, and poems of the times, which deepened the story immesurably to have the broader sense of the culture at large there in with the voices of the characters. I have resolved to get the audio CD from my library system now, to hear this, as some of it is written as transcriptions of oral recordings anyway.

But I should say, if you are one who likes a linear story, beginning, middle, end, one narrator all the way through you may find yourself challenged by this. Personally I loved the insights the inner musings of the characters gave to my understanding of them and the story at large.

I have to agree with other reviews..loved the idea,love historical fiction, and I was really excited to read a follow up to Star of The sea, but was disappointed. I found myself skimming not sentences, but paragraphs. I did want to find out about Eliza, she was quite the compelling character. I found the story did not flow very well, maybe too many points of view?

Had I not spent last week reading "Star of the Sea," this may have been a 3.5. I have tried to convince myself that I would have liked this better had I waited a few months between the two, but I don't think that would have been the case.

I can't argue that the writing is excellent. However, it just doesn't flow like "Star" did. Sometimes it is a bit too wordy and often the plot was hard to follow because of the jumping back and forth. It's funny to say that because "Star of the Sea" did the exact same thing, but it just didn't work for me this time. Instead of making me want to know what the answer to the mystery was, it made me want to say "Get on with it, would you?"

You might not want to read this paragraph if you do plan on reading this book. Although the ending eventually tied up the loose ends and fulfilled what the title alludes to I felt cheated because it ends with a twist that was eerily similar to "Star." This time it seemed a little too far fetched. Again, what worked for me in the earlier book definately did not work here - it seemed old and tired.

While I can say that this is a "good" read, had I read this book first I would not have read "Star." I hope the third book of the trilogy is better.

Mid-Victorian melodrama, Western adventure, post-Civil War vigilantes, frontier squalor, and Irish American idolatry of escaped Fenians: these make up, in a kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting, ambitiously conveyed, and ultimately satisfying sequel to the Famine novel "Star of the Sea." O'Connor has traveled across America (see my review of his "Sweet Liberty") and captures the slightly formal, quaintly antiquated diction of 19c American journalism, poetasters, balladeers, bureaucrats, eyewitnesses, historians, and integrates these into a tale told by many voices, compiled by the nephew of one of the main characters into a sprawling chronicle. He also adds period photos, mock-ups of wanted posters, and oral history transcripts.

The summary of the plot can be found on Amazon. Here I wish to share the prose itself, which is wonderfully rendered. Samples will illustrate the range of registers adapted by O'Connor (his research can be briefly found at the end of the book-- while Con's based as he admits loosely on Thomas Francis Meagher, I also was reminded of William Smith O'Brien and the Catalpa, another famous Fenian tale). I remain, most of all, impressed by the manner in which he's allowed his muse to inspire him to enter into how people thought and spoke a century and a half ago.

Con's letter to his wife, Lucia, about Redemption Falls: "What a thing is 'called' has too much import out here: every rock they mean to christen for some moldering cadaver. Backwards-looking nincompoops, reversing into the future they hate. Better if the towns were named for letters of the alphabet. But that would satisfy none of the illiterate swine I suppose. These are brutes for whom 'A' is what you stitch on a harlot's breast, and 'B' is the bastard that stings you." (70)

The editor, Lucia's nephew, on Irish American republicanism: Con "founded a radical paper, all manifestos and denunciations, the kind of Irish journal that calls on monarchs to resign, but appears to have become bored before its fourth number appeared. There were squabbles with the staff and editorial committee, fellow revolutionists of the caucus he helped to establish-- the United Force for Gaelic Brotherhood and Freedom: a body neither unified, nor forceful, nor brotherly, only free with the insults, usually in Gaelic." (151)

More of an omniscient voice here, in Joycean style drifting into Con's mind: "This, my home: this desolate shade. Desperadoes, secessionists, dispossessed. New Ireland, Young Ireland. Copy of the old. Mountainous, empty; fueled by drink and old hatreds, a nowhere with commandingly barren scenery of the kind to which fools attach adjectives. A place about which there will forever be arguments, whose people will always know they are living in a laboratory, their talking found exotic, collected by the fossil-men, while the rest of the world, if they notice you at all, see reflections of reflections of your clichés. Only it is larger than the old one, bitterer in winter. Apart from that difference, you are home" (182-3)

Testimony of an Irish miner later made rich: "Stand outta my way and bury me decent And that's why this country wont never turn Red. Cause we come a long way to get what we got. It's me and its mine and brother dont you figure on takin it, nor ask me to share it with some hoeboy I dont know. Some vaquero layin in bed and scratchin his whatever while Im workin my plot fo his keepin and beer? Thank you, Mam, no. Shut the latch on your way. Bible tell you the meek shall inherit the earth. In Paradise maybe. Not in the West. Cause I'll draw you a line they call the hundredth parallel, and left of that, brother, the meek inherit sh[*]t." (250)

Allen Winterton, cartographer for the government, notes the lack of a complete gazetteer, and this by an Italian Jesuit "who ventured into the badlands to convert the indigenes. A fur-trapper happened on his skeleton six months afterwards, lashed to a tree, manuscript wedged betwixt its ribs. The epistle was published within the month (of course), dismayingly unproofed, & in many pirated editions. It is frightful, bloody stuff, an ecstasy of adjectival slobbering. Perhaps the killers were literary critics." (286)

A few pages later, the editor McClelland footnotes Winterton's own effusions at the terrain: "There follows a great deal more of this sort of material, in essence pointing out that the Mountain Territory is mountainous." (289)

Winterton (who can be quoted at length for O'Connor truly captures his elegant style and his stoic self-awareness) recalls a line comparing love to the constancy of a star. "But the stars are not constant. They flare out and burn up; and the entire of the momentary nothing they sparkle, live always encircled by out-and-out darkness, which encroaches, as it must, until all light fades. A star is merely an explosion seen from a great distance, and, like all distant violence, may be attributed significance. But that is all it is: a cruel event. And we poor fools pen poems about it." (302)

The omniscient voice, this time from Eliza Mooney's perspective: "A beam of cave-light, dust-filled, opaque, comes coursing through an aperture in the roof far above her and shines like a visualization of the power of God in a prayerbook intended for children." (304)

Lucia contemplates, filtered through the narrative control, her own thwarted love as she listens to honeymooners in the hotel room upstairs: "At night, you can hear the percussion of their bed. And once, as she lay in a weltering sleep, a whimper of powerless pleasure from the cathedral of their room. Raw western dawn: the silence of the Plains. She was weeping as the small death came. Everything living wants to escape the body. It is why there are poems, and stories, and songs, and drink and churches and oratorios and children. Why marriages last. Why marriages happen. Why people go on being married after love has burned away. Because we cannot be alone in the stone." (349)

Lucia, as McClelland reports the lack of later correspondence from her in light of subsequent happenings in the denouement: "Those from whom we seek mercy are sometimes not the ones who can give it, but since they are present in our lives, we ask them. An onerous burden. We see ghosts in one another. But when I picture her guiding that boy from the darkness he inhabited, I believe that life is worthwhile." (449)

The editor, in the novel's coda, emerges with hints of his own story that could earn another novel from O'Connor. Perhaps there will be another? The necessary narrative distance from the final events in the plot makes for a rather too distantly felt connection by the reader with the protagonists, given the intensity of much of the preceding 450 pages of this briskly organized but extensively detailed and absorbingly dense account. This is less a shortcoming of the book than an appropriate departure point given O'Connor's arrangement of the events, but it did leave me slightly detached instead of utterly engrossed in the climactic scenes.

This novel, in its grand scope and accurately rendered tone, recalls for me Thomas Flanagan's trilogy of Irish history 1798-1922, fictionalized similarly with many narrators and documents in "The Year of the French," "The Tenants of Time," and "The End of the Hunt." For once, the effusive blurbs by fellow Irish writers such as Frank McCourt (his is highlighted as a "red sun" that mars the evocative cover design), Colum McCann, Nuala O'Faolain, and Colm Tóibín are well earned, log-rolling though they may be. This novel deserves attention and acclaim. Like Flanagan's compilers, McClelland labors to make sense out of emotions channelled into events, and perhaps quails at such hubris. But, authors press forward, and we are the richer readers for such herculean efforts of imagination and reconstruction.