TransAtlantic

Colum McCann, “Trans-Atlantic,” Random House, 2013, 304 pp.

An entertaining historical fiction novel utilizing a writing arrangement that flits back and forth across the Atlantic to Ireland and England while narrating various stories that are somewhat linked one to the other.  The book begins its seven chapters by retracing the 1919 first trans-atlantic flight by Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown in a modified WWI bomber from Newfoundland to Clifden Ireland (home of my Great Grandparents).

After Alcock and Brown the novel goes back in time to Dublin in the 1840s, and the visit to that city by Frederick Douglass, only seven years since his escape from slavery.  The Irish famine of that time is briefly discussed.  Then forward to 1998 when Senator George Mitchell is in the midst of brokering the Good Friday Accords for peace in Northern Ireland; then back again, to 1863, as Lily Duggan tends the wounded of the American Civil War, hoping for a sight of her soldier son. Lily is the matriarch of the clan of women who are the other common thread of this novel; daughters and granddaughters cross and recross the water, their destinies bound by their times.

Lily was, in 1845, a maid in the home where Douglass stayed in Dublin. The vision of freedom, of another life, is what inspires her to immigrate to America. This section of the book settles down and covers 26 years, unlike the preceding sections that are more like short stories.

Lily’s daughter is Emily, who becomes, against the odds, a journalist.  She has appeared in the book before when she was a local reporter in Newfoundland covering Alcock and Brown’s flight. But it’s in the section set in 1929 that Emily’s tale is truly told.

Next the book goes to a lough just outside Belfast in 1978, the midst of the Troubles, and to Emily’s daughter, Lottie. The final section takes us forward, to 2011, into the straitened circumstances of Hannah, Lottie’s daughter, heading toward old age herself and struggling to cope.

 P.S.  As my time in Waupaca is drawing to a close, I began getting books from the library by browsing the aisles.  This is how I came upon this book.  I normally confine my reading to books reviewed in the WSJ or NYT or recommended by others.