A sweeping saga of ‘Ireland’ that’s mostly blarney

Run up the Irish flag and you will get every genius, crank or sentimentalist throwing in whatever bit of debased wordy coinage in their possession.

Frank Delaney modestly titles his ninth novel (and his first to be published in the United States) “Ireland.” He should have known better. He should have known he was courting disaster as surely as rain falls in Ireland.

Delaney must be given credit for an absence of modesty. He simply intends to tell the whole history of Ireland from the time that, and I kid you not, “[f]our ice ages attacked Ireland, one after another, and the ice took possession of everything” right down to the Easter Rising in 1916, all through the voice of a wandering storyteller who shows up one day in 1951 in the house of a 9-year-old “blond as hay” boy, Ronan O’Mara.

Fortunately for everyone, the storyteller speaks in English, so there will be none of that messy business as to whether it or Irish is the real language of Ireland.

During the course of the novel, the lives of the boy and the storyteller will intersect in a convoluted manner, but it is the quality of the prose that defeats any appreciation of “Ireland.” How to take seriously a tale-teller who says, “In all my wanderings, my mind divides my life into Time’s portions: morning, afternoon, evening, and night of spring, summer, autumn and winter”?

And the potential reader is well-warned of the ambition of Delaney’s novel. At the end, the storyteller is either bragging or complaining: “It isn’t my story alone. It belongs to every Irish person living and dead. And every Irish person living and dead belongs to it. And to all the story of Ireland; blood and bones, legends, guns, and dreams, Catholics, Protestants, England, horses and poets and lovers.” One appreciates the discretion in leaving out the leprechauns and green beer.

When one thinks of esteemed Irish writers, names that come to mind include Frank McCourt, Maeve Binchy and (even) Leon Uris, whose “Trinity” is still held in high respect by many readers as one of the definitive books on the Irish revolutionary tradition, just as his “Exodus” is a founding novel of the Israeli national myth.

Delaney does catch the necessary gravitas of serious novel writing: “In the year of our lord seventeen hundred and ninety-eight, the people of Wexford rose up against the oppressor, England, who had captured most of our land for centuries.” But again he should have known better, or maybe it is really impossible to teach a journalist anything but old tricks.

Delaney is a veteran BBC journalist and practiced author with many nonfiction books, novels, film scripts, radio and television programs to his credit. His first nonfiction book was “James Joyce’s Odyssey,” a popular and interesting illustrated guide to Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which could easily serve as a valuable addition to Vladimir Nabokov’s great lectures on “Ulysses.”

So it can’t be said that Delaney doesn’t know what a good book is. Instead he has chosen to supply us with another sort of book, one of the greatest examples of blather we will ever be privileged to read.

Thomas McGonigle is the author of “Going to Patchogue” and “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.”