January Books 7) The Rising of the Moon

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7) The Rising of the Moon, by Flynn Connolly

I started off expecting this book to be just silly – in a future United Ireland where the Catholic Church has taken over, Nuala Dennehy foments a feminist revolution – but in the end I actually found the author’s enthusiasm for her cause and her characters rather endearing. There’s a lot for the Irish reader to nit-pick, not least that when the book was published, in 1994, the tide was definitely on the turn and Ireland’s lurch into modernity becoming irreversible. But taken as a tale of the general processes of revolt and revolution, it’s fair enough; and even if the situation of women in Ireland is unlikely ever again to be as bad as in Connolly’s novel, there are enough other parts of the world which are there or heading that way for the specific political message to remain relevant. The narrative falters only at the very end when the fate of Nuala and her closest friends seemed to me to be a bit implausible. I can’t say it’s great literature, and Irish readers will be annoyed by the errors (eg the crowd gathering in the park opposite Belfast City Hall – so where has City Hall been moved to? Or what block of commercial buildings adjoining Donegall Square has been demolished?), but it was a better read than I expected.

One thought on “January Books 7) The Rising of the Moon”

  1. Not to mention this from the UN.

    The big problem is that there is no good division between Europe and Asia, unlike other continent boundaries. The ancient one of the Bosphoros was fine at a local level for the Greeks, and if you continue that line, then Georgia is well within Asia, since it’s NE of Turkey, and Turkey is in Asia (well, excluding Istanbul).

    Using the Urals is fine for the north part of the boundary. But it becomes very messy at the south end of the Urals, where they peter out into steppe. Somehow you end up drawing an arbitrary line from there to the Bosphoros, across the Black Sea. It’s difficult to draw a line to the SW corner of the Black Sea and not have Georgia, in the SE corner, not end up to the SE of that line.

    Geopolitically, yes, much more European than Asian.

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