HISTORY: TOBY BARNARDreviews A History of Ireland in 250 episodesby Jonathan Bardon, Gill and Macmillan, 560pp, ¤29.99
GIVEN THE popularity of snacking, the success of an Irish history sliced into savoury morsels seems guaranteed. Jonathan Bardon is an accomplished chef. Deftly he mixes rare meat with amuse gueules and refreshing sorbets. While his compilation is well suited to the contemporary craving for constant novelties, it does not pander to it.
Starting with the ice, Mesolithic and Neolithic ages, it moves briskly to St Patrick, the Vikings, Brian Boru and Dergovilla. The familiar favourites appear - from Shane O'Neill and Swift to O'Connell, Parnell, de Valera and Lemass. Tactfully the story ends in 1965. The subsequent hurly-burly is covered by brief autobiographical reflections.
Inevitably with the format, great men and battles bulk large. Granuaile is one of the few women to be treated separately. Yet, social and economic developments vary the diet, and manage to convey succinctly both the grim and the cheering. Plagues, famines and the recurrent feuds and violence all find their appropriate places. The hard lives of peasants, emigrants, linen-weavers and dockyard workers are evoked. Striking use is made, for example, of the details of a ship, The Sally, that carried emigrants to Philadelphia in 1762.
In contrast, cultural achievements are almost entirely ignored. Illuminated manuscripts, monasticism and the island of saints and scholars receive rather perfunctory nods. Jack Yeats, WB Yeats, Beckett and Myles na gCopaleen are missing persons. Strife and suffering, betrayal and vendettas make a more compelling book than either the humdrum realities of daily lives or the triumphs of visionaries.
The chosen episodes originated in a series of broadcasts for Radio Ulster. They do not altogether avoid a northern weighting. Not just the Dungannon Convention of 1782, but the Belfast harp festival of 1792, the later battle of Dolly's Brae and the bloodshed in Belfast in 1886 have episodes to themselves. So, too, do the depressed condition of the North under Craig and Brookeborough and the heavy casualties from German bombing during the second World War. More worrying is the danger that an anecdotal approach, in making the Irish past digestible, turns it into a Hibernian version of Sellars's and Yeatman's 1066 and All That. On the whole, Bardon's account steers clear of ending as "1014 and all that".
An episodic history necessarily loses the power of the grand narrative with strong interpretative propulsion. In general, Bardon happily subscribes to the emphases and perspectives of his 19th- and early 20th-century predecessors. This is not necessarily unwise: the merits of Lecky, Sir John Gilbert and Bagwell are too easily overlooked by the novices striving to reinvent the wheel.
However, this deference to past masters carries dangers. What is hard to find is the excitement of the innovators who have annexed territories - such as gender and culture - previously shunned by austere historians. Also absent is any sense of why there have been serious and occasionally acrimonious disputes about how properly to render the Irish past. It may well be that some of these controversies owe much to publicity-seeking writers.
Most, however, reflect honourable and genuine differences. Scrupulous scholars argue continuously over the value and reliability of particular kinds of evidence and the best perspectives to adopt. Most of these lively debates are ignored in Bardon's understandable desire not to lose his readers by droning on about theory in his kitchen.
Bardon's dish is more boiled bacon and cabbage than the spicy concoctions of historiographical fusion. But a very real merit of this traditionalism, giving a strong flavour, is the liberal seasoning of quotations from the participants themselves. As a result, his cookery, so far from being picked over daintily, encourages greed, even gorging.
Contrary to his and his publisher's intentions, the meal can be digested at a sitting and leaves the consumer nourished rather than bloated or dyspeptic.
* Toby Barnard teaches history at Hertford College, Oxford University. His most recent book, Improving Ireland? Projectors, prophets and profiteers, 1641-1786, was published last year