1976's best-seller: Leon Uris' Trinity is a mythic epic

 

Another historical drama in my run, which is much more akin to Centennial than to Ragtime, Trinity is a relatively taut story about the build-up to Ireland's Easter Rising and stunted rebellion against English control. Mind you, as it is indeed historical fiction, it's more about impossibly heroic figures in a palpably realistic struggle, which makes for a great read if not, and I say this without personal expertise on Irish life at the turn of the 20th century, a wholly reliable picture of the times.

The growth of Conor Larkin from young observer to activist (though maybe defeatist is the end result) is engrossing. He's a fun character because he's built like a legend: a smart, sensitive, warrior-poet (to borrow a line from Braveheart), but, because of his nature, I couldn't help but feel for the more ordinary people surrounding him throughout his whole life and the chaos his incredible nature and exploits bring into theirs, often to their detriment. 

Conor is an idea written into a man, and this idea, an independence, while noble and unrelenting, is meant to show that it must also bring pain into the world when it succeeds, as even its success divides the people of Ireland.

I suppose that thinking about these big ideas and wanting to learn more about the documented truths of those times, and the continued struggles that follow after the book's ending, might well have been the ultimate goal for Uris. Again, the story is great and the characters are fun (and more than once I mourned for losses, so these people meant something to me), but Uris could have set this in a completely fictional setting or shielded it behind a dense allegory - instead, I suspect that Uris hopes to be like his character Mr. Ingram, imparting upon us, as Ingram did Conor, the gift of curiosity to keep reading and keep learning about his world's real history.