Christopher Koch (1)

Out of Ireland was the sixth novel of Christopher Koch (1932-2013), one of our most treasured Australian writers. The book was first published in 1999, and won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for (2000), and also the Colin Roderick Award (1999).

At 702 pages it’s a long book, but it’s a great story when you have long idle hours to spend, lost in a book. Any temptation I had to stop loafing in bed after a chest infection and do some long-neglected housework was quickly quashed by Out of Ireland. I did not want to put aside the book at all…

It’s the story of a Irish rebel called Devereaux, but – like all the other Koch novels – its focus is on issues of trust and betrayal. Based loosely on the fate of rebels transported to Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) after the failed 1848 uprising, the novel purports to be the diaries of its main character Devereaux and is narrated in his voice. This fictional Devereaux aligned himself with the Young Ireland movement but was from the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy so although he considers himself Irish, he does not speak Gaelic and has had very little contact with what he calls the peasant class. He is torn between frustration about their limitations in terms of the rebellion, and romanticising them as noble equivalents of the French revolutionaries.

Devereaux’s English ancestors had taken up estates in Ireland after its conquest by England but by the time the story takes place they have lost their estates and although he’s had an education at Trinity College, he considers himself middle-class. As far as the Irish convicts he meets are concerned, he is gentry, but amongst those transported to Van Dieman’s Land in the same crackdown as he has been, there is the aspirational Liam Kinane who reveres Devereaux’s rebellion but despises his ancestry.

This ambivalence in Devereaux’s character plays out in his love for the convict girl Kathleen O’Rahilly.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/08/29/out-of-ireland-by-christopher-koch/… (meer)

This book is so much more than a travel memoir. Writer Christopher Koch weaves in history from both Australia and Ireland, descriptions of both lands, tales about folk singers and folk songs and his own family's heritage. Although Koch is new to me as a writer I loved the movie made from his book The Year of Living Dangerously. Given how much I enjoyed this book I will be looking for more written by him.

Koch grew up in Tasmania which, when it was Van Dieman's Land, was the place to which many convicts were transported in the 1800s. One of his great-great-grandmothers came out to Tasmania from Ireland of her free will but another great-great-grandmother was a convict sent from Ireland for theft. Certainly the second one was the more colourful but Koch's own mother denied that they had any convicts in their past. The Irish heritage was a source of fascination for Koch and he was well-read on Ireland's history. Although he had spent a few days in Dublin during the 1950s it wasn't until 2000 that he travelled there with his friend, Brian Mooney. Mooney had lived in Ireland for some time and plied his trade as a musician with some of the great Irish folk singers. Through Mooney Koch was able to discover many places not known to the regular tourist. One of Mooney's singing pals was Bobby Clancy (one of the famous Clancy Brothers) and Bobby and his wife took Mooney and Koch to Dungarvan, a town on the coast in Waterford County. Koch wrote this about the area:
At our backs, enclosing the northern side of the bay, is a distant stone sea wall with rows of guesthouses behind, and an old square church tower, small on a promontory. In front of us, as we walk, out on the horizon beyond the esplanade, is another promontory, enclosing the bay in the south. Very long and low under the big sky, it extends for many miles, ending in a lion-shaped headland on the Atlantic. It's a place of far, coloured fields and trees: a promontory of dreaming beauty. A second neck of land extends from it towards us: treeless, sandy, and like a yellow ribbon....But it's the main, distant promontory that holds my gaze, with its patchwork of fields in every shade of green and tawny yellow, and the microscopic trees on its top almost black, stamped against the sky. It glows behind sea-mist and the hazes of afternoon; it dreams outside modern Ireland, and is surely much farther from Dungarvan and its bars and patisseries than can be measured in miles or kilometres.

After reading this I yearn to go back to Ireland. It's been over 20 years since I was there but I remember those landscapes.… (meer)