Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor (2004 fiction)
I am an Irish immigrant. I am educated. Star of the Sea shocked me in depicting a harrowing tale of poverty and man’s inhumanity. Although fiction, this story is extraordinarily well researched. Connemara is a wild, mountainous and barren province in the west of Ireland. Protestant landowners and Catholic peasantry shared harsh conditions which achieved apocalyptic dimensions in 1847, the year of the Great Famine. The potato crop failed. There was no food, no mercy for rent defectors whose cabins were levelled. There were no safety nets. Towns had no resources for thousands of starving country folk. Anonymous mass workhouse graves and coffin ships beckoned. O’Connor introduces a varied cast of characters, intermingling sex, religion, and class distinctions. We meet the Mulvey brothers, Nicholas sacerdotal, plus unscrupulous, plus moves to England where his adventures expose the reader to London’s underworld, English prison conditions, and monstrous crimes. We meet David Merridith, who disappoints his father Lord Kingscourt and is ruthlessly disowned. David then marries a tradesman’s daughter and ends up with Pius on the Star of the Sea. All three, Nicholas, Pius, and David, have had relations with Mary Duane, also on board as nanny to Merridith’s boys. The voyage is Gothic, the ship a floating ward of the terminally ill, with upper class accommodation for the Kingscourt family and others, including Mary. The lower steerage class die off daily, inexorably. The overcrowded conditions resemble the vessels hauling Somalians across the Mediterranean today, but the voyage lasts weeks in Atlantic weather. There is a murder plot, a passenger under life threatening orders from disaffected Connemara peasantry to kill Kingscourt. Finally, upon arrival in New York, the ship is quarantined for seven weeks, for fear of fever, alongside 170 other vessels. People die within sight and sound of welcoming wharfside relatives. Kingscourt is discovered decapitated in his cabin. No murderer is identified. Star of the Sea arrived. Thus did the Irish immigrants of 1847 land in the USA.
Reviewed by Martin Waldron
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