Neil Jordan – She Reads Novels

March is Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books, so I looked at my unread books by Irish authors and decided on this one, The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small. Neil Jordan is better known as a film director (his directing credits include Interview with the Vampire and The Company of Wolves) but has also written several novels and short story collections. This is the first of his books that I’ve read.

The Lord Edward of the title is a real person – Lord Edward Fitzgerald, an 18th century Irish aristocrat and revolutionary. His life has been well documented but little is known about his relationship with his servant, Tony Small. At the beginning of the novel, Fitzgerald is fighting for the British Army in the American Revolution when he is wounded at the Battle of Eutaw Springs in September 1781. Small, an escaped slave, rescues him from the battlefield and saves his life, and in return Fitzgerald frees him from slavery. Small then chooses to remain in Fitzgerald’s service when he leaves America and travels first to London, then home to Dublin, and later to France.

As time goes by, Small becomes Fitzgerald’s constant companion and close friend, but never loses sight of the fact that he is a servant and their racial and class differences mean that society will never consider him the equal of his lord. While Fitzgerald enters into a romantic liaison with Elizabeth Sheridan, wife of the famous playwright Richard Sheridan, before becoming involved in revolutionary politics and working towards an independent Irish republic, Small gets to know the other servants in the grand houses they reside in and takes steps to learn about his own heritage.

This could have been a great novel – it covers a period of Irish history not written about very often and seeing things through the eyes of a former slave provides an interesting perspective – but I didn’t like the writing style at all. I have no idea why it seems to have become the fashion for authors to ignore conventional punctuation, in this case speech marks. I found it very difficult to tell where the dialogue began and ended or who was speaking to whom and I had to keep going back to read the same sections more than once before I could follow what was being said. Punctuation was invented to help the reader; choosing not to use it just makes things unnecessarily confusing.

I do appreciate having had the opportunity to learn about the life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the significance of Tony Small and there were some parts of the book that I enjoyed. It was interesting to see other well known historical figures such as Richard Sheridan and Thomas Paine making appearances in the story and I loved the way Jordan showed Small developing a passion for theatre and literature (obviously two passions of Jordan’s own). However, the book felt uneven, with too much time spent on some episodes and not enough on others – the last few months of Fitzgerald’s life seemed particularly rushed.

I had mixed feelings about this one, then, and I’m not sure whether I would read anything else by Neil Jordan, but I’m pleased I managed to fit in a Reading Ireland book this month, as well as the Welsh ones I’ve read for Reading Wales!