In July, Hubby and I spent a week in the city of Cork, Ireland’s second-city (though with a population of only 300,000 it feels more like a large town). I love exploring new places. Aside from the joy to be had from the main sights, there’s the thrill of simply wandering around a strange city, exploring its side streets and snickleways, and clocking never-come-across-before street names. Unusual street names provide a glimpse into a city’s soul, I think. And Cork was chock full of them.
French Church Street recalls the influence of the Huguenots who arrived in Cork in the late seventeenth century, fleeing religious persecution in France. The exotic-sounding Nano Nagle Bridge commemorates an eighteenth century Irish nun who established a network of schools for poor Catholics despite legal prohibitions. Others celebrate more widely-known figures from Irish history: Oliver Plunckett Street, Parnell Place, Eamon de Valera Bridge.
What the street names didn’t tell me, though, was how Cork city suffered during the Irish War of Independence (also known as the Anglo-Irish War). The conflict lasted from 1919 to 1921 and was primarily fought between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and British military forces, with the IRA employing guerrilla tactics to disrupt British governance in Ireland. In December 1920 the IRA ambushed British Auxiliary forces in County Cork. Two days later, British Auxiliaries together with constables from the ‘Black and Tans’ (named after their distinctive uniforms) looted and burned numerous buildings in Cork city centre. This is the Cork that young Willie Quinton, the hero Fools of Fortune, is plunged into. “The city had been badly damaged in the fighting. Half of Patrick Street was gone, shops and buildings blown apart by the Black and Tans.”
Willie doesn’t linger in Patrick Street “preferring the quays and the docks”. Like Willie, I walked them all: Anglesea Street, Lavitts Quay, Kryl’s Quay, and Merchant’s Quay, where an old man tells him it’s “a grand time to be growing up.” This is post-partition Ireland. “The red letter boxes were painted green; statues of imperial figures were removed; the Irish language was to be revived.” Yet it’s the “strangeness of the city streets and shops” that affects Willie more than “national freedom or the future that was there for growing up in.”
The streets are strange to Willie because he’s only recently moved to Cork with his mother and their maid, Josephine. His previous home, a house called Kilneagh near the village of Lough in County Cork, has itself been torched by Black and Tans; his father and sisters died in the fire. His mother anesthetises her sorrows with whiskey and gnaws on the name of the Black and Tan sergeant who led the torching: Sergeant Rudkin, who “on some previous occasion had told [Willie’s father] he owned a vegetable shop in Liverpool.”
The story unfolds in six sections, first from the point of view Willie, then Marianne (the English cousin he falls in love with), then Imelda (their daughter)…and then Willie, etc , in the same order as before. As you might guess from the title, Fools of Fortune explores how the trajectory of people’s lives, through bad luck or fate (call it what you will) is determined by circumstances more than by their own actions. Whether or not you go along with this philosophy (and I don’t entirely) Trevor’s book is a compelling and compassionate read.
You could, though, also see the title as referring to England and Ireland. Certainly the Quinton family in a sense represent the intertwined history of Anglo-Irish relationships. The Quintons are protestant but Willie’s first teacher is a former Catholic priest. In Willie’s history lessons “England was always the enemy” but “even as I learnt about that […] Irish soldiers were fighting for England in the [First World] war.” Willie’s mother is English but “supported the revolutionary cause”. His great-great-grandmother was English, too, planting the mulberry orchard at Kilneagh to copy the one at her childhood home in Woodcombe Park, Dorset, and later dying of famine fever trying to help the poor during the Great Hunger.
Fools of Fortune won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1983.
Rating: ** Worth reading
PS William Trevor also won the Whitbread Novel Award with The Children of Dynmouth in 1976 and with Felicia’s Journey in 1994, both of which I’ve covered in previous blog posts. The Children of Dynmouth was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
PPS Patrick Street is still Cork’s main shopping street, very smart, very swish – a great place for some retail therapy!
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