One can be forgiven for misreading the title. This new book (actually a whopping two-volume, 1,500-page set) from writer and Queen’s professor Don Akenson (whose previous titles include such impressive pieces of scholarship and surprise bestsellers as Surpassing Wonder and Saint Saul) is not really a history of Irish civilization. Welcome though such a volume might be, Akenson has delivered something altogether more ambitious and impressive.

The two volumes are correctly labelled, though. From scenes of Paul of Tarsus as a boy in 16 CE to Billy Graham’s International Presidential Prayer Breakfast in 1970, Akenson weaves together strands of diaspora, slavery, faith, famine, and family to create a kaleidoscopic history of western culture, with Ireland and its history serving as a primary locus point.

The history is geographically far-reaching, encompassing Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as Ireland and the British Isles, with considerable time and attention to Canada and the Caribbean. Focusing primarily on the last 600 years, Akenson expertly melds traditional and social history with a deft narrative acuity to produce a compulsively readable and informative account that is at once educating, often surprising, and emotionally rich.

The two volumes defy easy categorization. Is this history rewritten to read as fiction? Fiction rooted in historical fact? Or a seamless combination of the two? Fictory, perhaps. Histion. Despite its epic historical scope, An Irish History of Civilization is a shockingly intimate volume. Akenson offers short, narrative snapshots of (usually) single moments or incidents that involve or reference the broader scope of history. In this way, a brief account of the intimate difficulties faced by 17th-century colonialist Captain Thomas Warner and “one of the daughters of Chief Tegramond” who was “given to him, as a welcoming present by the chief” predicates the birth of “Indian Warner,” who would become a leader of the Carib, and would be betrayed and killed by his half-brother Philip.

The approach – at times reminiscent of John Dos Passos, at others of a TV Heritage Moment – allows for a vivid human scale, oddly at odds with, though instrumental to, the march of time. Akenson’s is a chaotic approach to history; he has a gift for tracing the faint trails back from the storms to the faintest flutters of the butterfly wings which set the winds in motion.

Akenson writes with a dramatist’s eye and a mordant, dry wit. An ill-fated meeting between Joyce and Yeats, for example, over tea and sticky buns (in a segment entitled “Battle of the Network Stars”) reckons with the differences between the two voices of Ireland subtly and to great comic effect:

“The treacly icing on the buns made little crumbs of bran stick to the fingers. Yeats kept wiping his hands with his pocket handkerchief, as if he had recently been in a particularly nasty public lavatory. Joyce let the crumbs and icing accumulate and looked longingly at them. He had not had breakfast and if he were alone he would have licked his fingers.
While moving their lips in discussion of serious matters, each lets his mind wander:
How can anyone have such long and filthy fingernails?
Christ, I wouldn’t even want to be hanged in such a silly-looking tie.
They agree to keep in touch.”


It’s certainly not all lightness. While the heartbreak and tragedy of the Famine are an inevitable subject vividly rendered, Akenson also examines the ongoing role of Ireland as battered “laboratory, the place where the tricks of settling among a hostile native population are being worked out.” The history of the Irish people is a history of brutality and betrayal, of shifting allegiances and malleable faith. Akenson never flinches, and never holds back.

While the breadth of An Irish History of Civilization is impressive, its depth is more so. Every word carries the weight of immeasurable research and discovery while simultaneously referring and resonating outward. A seemingly trifling section like “Ghosts” gradually unfolds into a revisioning and updating of “The Dead”:

“In middle age Gabriel and Gretta Conroy spend Christmas Day remembering. They remember the good times, at least that’s what they call them now, when the Misses Morkan held their annual Christmas dance. Gretta and Gabriel censor their reminiscences. They are careful to avoid the bright talk and snow-traced pain of the 1892 party, when Gabriel learned for the first time that he was not the only light his wife’s eyes had seen. They let that ghost lie.”


It takes a tremendous amount of hubris to face one of the finest stories in the English language head-on; it takes a greater amount of skill to both pay it respect and to subsume it into one’s own narrative.

The combination of the visceral human impact of Akenson’s writing and the depth of the underlying historical knowledge results in a heady dish best consumed slowly. Each portion deserves to be lingered over, savoured slowly, and allowed to reveal itself before fully before moving on to the next. While an initial reading of An Irish History of Civilization should certainly proceed from cover to cover, readers will find much reward in revisiting sections at random, revelling in Akenson’s vision and seemingly immeasurable skill.