Previous convictions

Irish history books are pants
February 20, 2004

I write anything for anybody. There's no end to my versatility. I need the money of course. But I also believe that all these writing activities demand the same thing. In one way or another they all demand storytelling, and that is what I am: a teller of tales.

So when my publisher invited me to write a popular narrative history of the siege of Derry, I was interested. For those who don't remember, it happened in 1689. William of Orange had seized England, and James II was in Ireland, where, thanks largely to the efforts of his superb lord deputy, the Earl of Tyrconnell, he controlled most of the island.

Only one obstacle stood between James and Scotland, where a huge Jacobite army awaited, ready to sweep him on to London. This was Derry, where recalcitrant Protestants loyal to William were hunkered behind the walls. James, unwilling to go to Scotland while Derry remained in his rear, sent an army to make the rebels submit. The defenders withstood the enemy's depredations at enormous cost, subsisting latterly on dogs and rats.



The end came after 105 days. Percy Kirke, the butcher of Sedgemoor, sometime Stuart loyalist but now William's man, had bobbed off the Irish coast for nearly two months with a large flotilla. Finally he ordered his ships to break the boom the Jacobites had put across the Foyle and relieve the city.

With Derry secure, William came over with an army, drove James back to France, squashed the Irish and created the Ascendancy. But centuries later the events at Derry continued to rankle. It was no coincidence that the first major setpiece riot of the Troubles, on 5th October 1968, arose because civil rights protestors and Protestant loyalists wishing to commemorate the siege wanted to march in Derry on the same day.

After a little light research, I concluded that the siege had narrative content plus contemporary relevance. So I said yes. Then I started in earnest, and that's when I ran into trouble. Most Irish history books are absolute pants. I don't mean that they're partial and that they lie - I knew that anyway. I mean they're crud. Most are just reconfigurations of earlier texts that are, in turn, reconfigurations of still earlier texts. The plagiarism is bad but worse is the general authorial allergy to specificity. Most Irish history books not only don't tell you what happened, they don't tell you anything that happened. They're mostly full of hot air and complaint.

Still, as a gung-ho pro I wasn't going to let a little matter like there being no good books for me to crib from stand in my way. I decided to jettison all secondary texts from which I had hoped to get a general steer and that I would use only primary sources. Mercifully, the Protestants in Derry were excellent diary-keepers and letter-writers, and there were a couple of good penmen on the other side for balance.

Finally I started writing. I have always been able to produce a thousand words a day with relative ease, but writing narrative history did not come easily. The problem, I found, was not so much that the words wouldn't come as that the facts were incredibly slippery. Writing the book was like trying to pick bits of liquid mercury off the floor. Every time I thought I had got something fixed, it slithered away from me.

But the advance had been taken and spent. So it had to be done. I completely abandoned any hope of writing a quick slim book - say 100,000 words in six months - and decided the book would take as long as necessary and be as big as it wanted. It took four years and the first draft came out at 200,000 words. The published version will be shorter.

Now that I have emerged from the tunnel I am wiser and, I hope, humbler. Narrative history, I have learnt, may involve telling stories but the effort it requires in the telling is of a different order to everything else that I have done.

Fiction and journalism, screenplays and memoir are produced by acts of will. They have facts, but they are the author's facts. These are acquired relatively easily and they are not hard to meld together. History, on the other hand, is built from facts that aren't the author's. Not only are these hard to find, but once you have them they can't just be thrown together. They are too volatile. They have to be laid carefully and patiently side by side, like mosaics are assembled piece by piece. The assembly work may be micro but the writer has to retain a sense of the macro, the finished book, otherwise the work will not cohere. To pull it off requires a phenomenally deep grasp of complex materials that is not demanded by other types of storytelling.

Before this experience, of course, I was a great admirer of historical narrative. I loved Alan Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile, for instance. But now I have had the experience of trying to write popular narrative history myself, two things have changed. My awe for Moorehead has increased, and my certainty that storytelling acumen can be deployed with ease across all the forms has been revealed as the facile sophistry it is.