Redemption Falls

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.

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.

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.