Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

be a result of the subject matter, or it may be the author’s narrative mastery at relaying information in such a way that the readership cannot help but feel a personal stake. This is the great strength of Scally’s research: the historian uses the community of Balykilcline to weave a much larger sociohistorical narrative of the rural population of Ireland starving in the Famine and then being displaced from their townlands, and country. Finally, Scally must be commended for attempting to address how notions of identity are formulated within the consciousness of colonized peoples. This is a subtle theme of The End of Hidden Ireland, and one that is currently engaging literary theorists and historians. Scally gently attempts to speculate on how notions of identity altered when the residents of Balykilcline went from a colonized state in Ireland to a postcolonial state in the new world. Every foundation upon which the peasants’ previous ideas of identity were formulated had been bit by bit deconstructed —from the moment they were evicted and their hovels leveled, to the ultimate moment, when, once bound for the New World, they gave a Wnal “backward glance” to their homeland. The End of Hidden Ireland ends with the backward glance to the “auld sod,” yet there are many questions concerning identity that still need to be addressed. Scally’s research, historical analysis, and speculation as a whole is so thorough and satisfying that when he does pose some complicated questions concerning identity, the reader is left hoping that Scally himself, in his next book, will attempt to provide some clear answers through his fresh approach to history as narrative. —Kara M. Ryan Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien, by Donald Harman Akenson , pp. 573, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press/Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994, $34.95. Donald Akenson has written a fascinating biography of “Conor” (as the subject is referred to throughout), chatty in tone and packed with details on O’Brien’s many public careers in Ireland, Africa, the United States, and England. There is extensive detail also on his domestic lives: his childhood in the twenties marked by the prominent political Wgures who frequented his home; his years as a student in Trinity; his Wrst marriage and family; his second marriage and family. O’Brien’s energy for administrative and intellectual work is matched by his appetite for friendship and family; this is a larger-than-life portrait of an extraordinary man, and Akenson’s admiration for his subject is unabashed. The book is dedicated to “the Great Living Irishman.” BOOK REVIEWS 184 It is appropriate that Akenson should begin by referring to O’Brien’s early essay on Sean O’Faolain. O’Brien argued that O’Faolain’s struggle to Wnd an individual voice is handicapped by “ancestral voices,” by the living history of earlier generations which he absorbed, unconsciously, in childhood. In diagnosing O’Faolain’s frustration, O’Brien shows his own determination to resist the mythic forces of nationalism or Catholicism and to preserve and extend the power of individual agency in the shaping of history. In the essay on O’Faolain’s “parnellism” (or what he called elsewhere “delphic nationalism”), and in his Wrst extended essays on French Catholic writers, later collected in Maria Cross, the young O’Brien focuses on that enriching and unyielding interplay of the individual life and the enveloping culture which has been his lifelong preoccupation. From Parnell and His Party (1957) and The Shaping of Modern Ireland (1959), a collection of essays by many hands on the “shapers” of the period 1891–1916, forward to his 1992 biographical study of Edmund Burke, O’Brien’s central intellectual pursuit has been the negotiation of a balance between individual liberty and engagement in the communal life of one’s “little platoon.” In assent and dissent, in love and hate, those bonds have been at the heart of O’Brien’s life in action as in his writings, and it is evident that Ireland is where his loyalties begin and end. While early essays analyze the power of the press, for instance , the “theopolitics” of the Irish Independent, and the...