So I was presented this book as a school prize for history in 1985. Now here I am in 2017 having finally read it. I hauled this book from one end of the country to another. I made several efforts to start it that never got very far. I didn't win many prizes as a kid, or hadn't up until then. It meant a lot. I was not going to be parted with it for anything. I had no idea if I'd ever read it. And here we are.

The story of an Irish family, but also a story of Ireland. Magan doesn't go in for half measures. His story goes back to the dim forgotten unwritten reaches of pre-history, to the ancient Pictish people who inhabited Ireland before the Celts, then the Celts themselves. The first traces of his family can be picked apart from the myths and the genealogies and traced down through the lives of the Old Irish chieftains and their clans, down to the arrival of the Normans and the absorption of invading races, until finally, England has had enough, and Cromwell comes with fire and sword and ethnic cleansing.

Part of Magan's project here is to explain the English to the Irish and vice-versa, never losing sympathy for either but never engaging in apologism, either. So it becomes easier to understand why England treated Ireland the way it did, though the self-interest of it may not make it easier to forgive.

Through the turmoil the Magans, through luck and sacrifice and careful planning, survive and thrive, splitting into a Catholic and a Protestant branch. More details accrue, more characters and personalities emerge. Magan celebrates their lives and achievements even as he describes the cost of it to the ordinary Irish peasants suffering appalling hardship and deprivations as part of deliberate policy. Perhaps only a descendant of the Ascendancy could manage to be even-handed about deploring the conditions of one and taking such vicarious pleasures in the doings of the other, or perhaps Magan is simply at such pains to be completely fair and even-handed.

It stumbles a bit at the Famine, this fairness and even-handedness. In one line the Irish lose the sympathy of the English public after some hot-headed revolutionaries revolt somewhere, curtailing charitable efforts that were already woefully inadequate, in another disdaining to delve too deeply into the complex issue of blame for the Famine itself and the response to it. At any rate, his family made it through okay! They were probably one of the good landlords!

That annoyed me intensely, but I suppose the wonder of it is he didn't annoy me more.

Great-grandparent and grandparents and parents are more thoroughly fleshed out and others too, as Ireland slouches towards independence and land reform. No sense of resentment at the redistribution of the valuable asset that kept his ancestors in ridiculous wealth for so long, although one admirable aunt fares horribly badly with the IRA during the War of Independence. It's World War 1 that really puts paid to the Ascendancy, thinning their ranks considerably, though in the latter chapters every other paragraph seems to end with a portent about some part of the era coming to a close.

Having made a study of Ireland's past, Magan goes on to give some thought to Ireland's future, and honestly there isn't much to fault him with. He predicts a growing movement towards peace and reconciliation a decade or so before the Good Friday Agreement at a time when, if I remember correctly, optimism about the future of Northern Ireland was thin on the ground. Increasing prosperity in the south, along with secularisation and a more prominent place on the world stage would, he thought, gradually begin to defuse most of the genuine fears of Protestant Ulster about the Republic, provided the violence of the IRA could be curtailed. He also, incidentally, predicts the fall of the USSR and warns of the possibility that before, or as, it happens, the boyos at the Kremlin taking an excessive interest in a violent revolutionary movement in a strategic location at the edge of the North Atlantic. I actually don't know if that was ever a thing, and now he's said it it seems an obvious enough worry. Were we ever in danger of being a new front in the Cold War?

So there it is. Erudite, engaging and told from a useful, unusual and valuable perspective. I enjoyed it. It was my Prize. I won it. In 1985.