A savoury Irish stew
By PETER HART

Whenever I read the phrase "history of civilization," I think of those big textbooks used in schools or universities. You know the ones: endless pictures of child labourers in satanic mills or whatever else illustrated an era, inevitably improved through enlightenment and progress ? all attempting to predigest centuries of every kind of human activity.

Well, Don Akenson's new book may span millennia, but he doesn't find much in the way of progress. An Irish History of Civilization is prefaced by a transcript of a meeting between Richard Nixon and Billy Graham in 1972 ? not generally recognized as a milestone in human endeavour. Nor is Akenson interested in serving up historical pap.

The book begins with Paul in 16 BC and ends with the Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1970: Graham and Nixon again. To deal with everything in between requires four books in two volumes, divided into chapters on particular places and periods, which are themselves divided into numerous brief ? often dramatic ? stories of one sort or another, each with its own point to make.

After dealing briskly with the creation of Christianity (a terrific chapter), Akenson moves to Gaelic Ireland and St. Patrick, then brings on the monks, Normans and Elizabethan conquistadors. With the latter, we move across the Atlantic with the British Empire to America and the Caribbean, occasionally circling back to Ireland to catch up on developments there. Masses of people arrive in the 1600s as soldiers and settlers; even more leave and go westward on the same missions. By 1782, the new American republic has embarked on what Akenson calls its Thirty Years' War against the natives, with savage Irish adventurers picking up where the Elizabethans and Cromwellians left off. Here ends Book One of Volume One.

Succeeding chapters expand territorially to include the Antipodes, Polynesia, Africa, England and Canada until Irish people, their descendents and their works permeate the English-speaking world. The whole thing more or less ends in 1969, thereby sparing us the Northern Irish troubles, the Celtic Tiger and the triumph of Irishness as a global brand.

It is an unusual book for a historian to write ? in fact it is almost certainly unique ? but then Don Akenson is an unusual historian. He is iconoclastic, original, eclectic, literate and astoundingly productive. His main subject has been modern Irish history, but this has extended to New Zealand, Montserrat, South Africa and Upper Canada. Among his many and various books is an award-winning biography of the great pessimist, Conor Cruise O'Brien. Another, the indispensable Small Differences, on Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, was recently named in the Guardian as one of 10 essential works of Irish history. Most recently, as if understanding Ireland weren't tricky enough, Akenson has turned to explaining the Bible and the Talmud. He has previously combined history and fiction, as well, to the surprise and delight of his Canadian colleagues. Although not always recognized as such, he is one of this country's foremost writers.

Thus, a 1,500-page quasi-fictional work on life, the world and Ireland may actually represent a kind of natural culmination of Akenson's career to date. It also revisits many of his old haunts, although it is much more than a summary.

So what does it all add up to? In his words, he has written "a micro-Talmud of humankind" in the form of "a collection of fictive short stories" about Ireland and its ever-migrating people, some of which are "accurate" but all of which are "true." Moreover, he sneakily adds that some errors are even intentional, so I won't comment on factuality except to stress that no one should ever use the book as a reference work. In any case, I don't know exactly how much he made up. Most of the dialogue, I imagine, not to mention the readily accessed thoughts of his subjects. At one point, famous fictional characters mingle with actual people.

Does it work? I found it very absorbing and entertaining, sometimes exhilarating and occasionally exhausting as the writing raced from place to place and event to event. Of course, as a reviewer I was reading it in abnormally large gulps and taking notes, so my impression is a bit skewed. It isn't much like reading historical fiction or fact; what it did remind me of was Neal Stephenson's global intellectual thrillers, crammed with energy and ideas.

Akenson is superb at description and detail: what people were like and how things were done. Many of his stories are one-offs ? Dr. Bernard O'Connor writes a history of Poland in the 1690s ? but others follow a protagonist over time, and these series show the author at his best. Patrick converting Ireland; William Stapleton grappling with colonial Montserrat; anthropologist Peter Buck investigating Samoa: These tales were all invested with personality and interest. On the other hand, well-documented figures like Daniel O'Connell or Michael Collins sometimes come off as two-dimensional.

This is no mere chronicle, however. The book begins with Paul memorizing genealogies and lineages, and images of chains or ropes reappear throughout. Akenson appears to be tracing the genealogy of Western civilization through the various conjunctions of Christianity and empire, beginning with Rome, moving on to Britain and ending up with the United States. Ireland was shaped fundamentally by these forces, and Irish people in turn became powerful agents in driving them onward. A strong theme running throughout is the effect this has on native and captive populations elsewhere, particularly in the Americas and the South Pacific. So much for sainted Irish victimhood.

Another long-standing concern of Akenson's much evident here is the irrelevance of religious belief or culture to rational economic and social behaviour. Irish Protestants and Catholics acted in much the same ways when they got to new lands. Moreover, they were equally Irish, despite the eventual conflation of Catholicism and Irishness.

Yet there are also contradictory impulses at work. Akenson despises settlers and missionaries en masse but clearly relishes writing about pioneers, adventurers and go-getters of various sorts (pirates appear whenever possible). He believes that religious difference wasn't important, but characters are frequently identified by religious type: as hard-case northern Catholics, for example. In part, this is due to his tracing of particular Irish ecclesiastical bloodlines. Irish Catholicism has its own history, as does Irish Protestantism, particularly its more evangelical varieties, both of which end up influencing American religiosity. Hence Billy Graham.

But genealogies have their own problems, and this is really my one serious reservation about the book. Everybody gives pride of place to parts of their family tree over others, but while this may make for good stories, it's not good history. Many of Akenson's characters have some Irish ancestry (Nixon being one), but why is this necessarily an important factor in what they do? And are they necessarily important? The McDonald brothers, who started the food chain of the same name, were second-generation Irish, but they didn't invent hamburgers, french fries or franchising, and it was Ray Kroc who built their name into an empire. Is this really an Irish contribution to civilization? That's a minor example, but such assumptions are made over and over again, especially in the final book ? it began to remind me of Chekhov on Star Trek, claiming that everything was a Russian invention.

Then again, these assertions only lead to another, even bigger seeming contradiction with a much larger and absolutely vital theme at least implied by Akenson over and over again: Don't believe any version of history based on such claims. If you buy Paul on the road to Damascus, Richard Nixon's (or the average Irish immigrant's) piety or any old line about Irish people acting differently from anyone else or possessing any sort of fundamental identity or purity, you've been had. They're just stories, supposedly non-fictional but definitely false.

I don't think there's any great need to reconcile these possibly contrary but interwoven meanings. Akenson may well have intended to subvert or check one line of thinking with another, and the book can anyway be read on several levels. Despite the intercontinental canvas and cast of thousands, this complex thematic agenda keeps the whole massive project coherent and moving forward. And the sheer vitality and multiplicity of these thousand and one stories produces a cumulative richness of imagery and narrative unmatched in much conventional fiction. It is an extraordinary feat of writing.

Peter Hart holds the Canada Research Chair in Irish Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His biography of Michael Collins will be published later this year.

Saturday, March 19, 2005 Globe and Mail