The End of the Hunt

Thomas Flanagan

2016-04 · New York Review of Books

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Volume 3 of Thomas Flanagan’s Irish History Trilogy

This third volume of Thomas Flanagan’s best-selling Irish-history trilogy (which begins with The Year of the French and continues with The Tenants of Time) brings to epic life the events of the Irish War of Independence. Flanagan’s gaze is both world historical and intimate as he tells the story of Janice Nugent, a recent war widow who strikes up a romance with Christopher Blake, a historian and propagandist for the IRA; of Patrick Prentiss, discharged from the British army after losing an arm in World War I to find Dublin engulfed in civil turmoil; of a Virgil-toting gunman named Frank Lacy; and of a panorama of meticulously drawn historical figures on both sides of the conflict, from Winston Churchill and Lloyd George to Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins. While violence escalates and losses mount, the once-mighty British Empire shows signs of strain and Irish independence finally glimmers on the horizon.

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Thomas Flanagan (1923-2002), the grandson of Irish immigrants, grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he ran the school newspaper with his friend Truman Capote. Flanagan attended Amherst College (with a two-year hiatus to serve in the Pacific Fleet) and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied under Lionel Trilling while also writing stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 1959, he published an important scholarly work, The Irish Novelists, 1800 to 1850, and the next year he moved to Berkeley, where he was to teach English and Irish literature at the University of California for many years. In 1978 he took up a post at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, from which he retired in 1996. Flanagan and his wife Jean made annual trips to Ireland, where he struck up friendships with many writers, including Benedict Kiely and Seamus Heaney, whom he in turn helped bring to the United States. His intimate knowledge of Ireland's history and literature also helped to inspire his trilogy of historical novels, starting with The Year of the French (1979, winner of the National Critics' Circle award for fiction, reissued by NYRB Classics in 2004) and continuing with The Tenants of Time (1988) and The End of the Hunt (1994). Flanagan was a frequent contributor to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Kenyon Review.