Through The Gate Of Ivory

by Patrick Devaney

Trinity student Charles Stanihurst, the son of a Dublin merchant and a Roscommon chambermaid, flees his native city after assaulting an English officer and heads for the West of Ireland, where he encounters a culture virtually unknown within the pale. Beyond the Shannon much of the old Gaelic way of life is still intact, though under growing threat from the political power and land greed of the ‘foreigners’. Charles is forced to confront divisions between his Anglo-Irish and Gaelic loyalties, while seeking his spiritual father, Bishop William Bedell, who is translating the Old Testament into Irish. Set in post-Flight of the Earls, pre-Cromwellian Ireland of 1641, this novel tells the gripping story of a struggle between two opposing cultures that set the scene for the rebellion sealing the fate of Gaelic Ireland.

Genres: Historical Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2004

Reviews

[Ronan Lyons · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointment. I have a huge soft spot for books set in the 17th century and, being Irish, books set in Ireland. This should have been a huge win. But it's a book that wears its learning very heavily - most pages have some Classical references and/or nitty-gritty of Irish/Gaelic history on them. That would potentially be forgivable if the plot kept things ticking over. But the plot is wafer thin. After a bright opening (the first-person narrator has to flee Dublin after an 'incident'), the book doesn't really go anywhere. As someone with ambitions of writing a book set in 17th century one day, I took this as a lesson of how things can go wrong. The one upside is that, given the book is full of history, it's hard not to learn at least a few things about the history of the period.

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fresh look at Patrick Devaney’s novel Through the Gate of Ivory

This is a gritty novel dealing with drinking in taverns, horse racing, hurling matches, sex romps in castle halls, knife attacks in courtyards and other stirring adventures of its 17th century hero, Charles Stanihurst. It is, however, much more than that.
In the very first paragraph Charles tells us, ‘Thirty-three years ago I myself went to hell and to Connacht.’ Since the three sections of the novel start with quotes from Book V1 of Virgil’s Aeneid, it is clear that ‘hell’ refers not just to his disfigurement in Connacht but also to Hades and, like Aeneas’s meeting with his father in that place, it prepares us for the hero’s eventual meeting with his spiritual ‘father’, William Bedell, who translated the bible into Gaelic.
Another prominent feature of this novel is the presence of a pattern of three: the action takes place in three main locations, Dublin, Ballintober and Abbeyboyle; Charles is smitten by three young women, Maura, representing Ēire or aristocratic Ireland, Beibhinn, representing Banba, peasant Ireland, and Frances, representing Fódhla, poetic Ireland; there are three Anglo-Irish villains, the Cootes, and so forth. Cormac, an ollamh or chronicler employed by the O’Conors, elaborates on this aspect of the novel in a conversation with Charles, though it never dominates the narrative.
Since his Dublin father is a member of the Reformed Church and his Connaught mother a ‘Papist’, Charles embodies in himself the religious conflicts that exist in his society and of course in contemporary England. Cormac, however, tells him that the mixture of races is a beneficial thing and that Niall, the famous High King, had an Irish father and a British mother. In this context it is noteworthy that Frances, the object of Charles's passionate love, has an Irish father and an English mother. Finally, the well-known love story of Una MacDermot and Thomas Costello is woven into the story, but only as a subplot.