The End of the Hunt (edition 1994)

Disappointing. Read the 1st two: "Year of the French" was engrossing, despite being something of a sprawl; vol 2 ("Tenants of Time") had some vivid driven characters and an equivocal feel for the violence. This simply moved too slowly for my taste. the multiple viewpoints (also in the other vols) made it hard to follow. Halfway through i still didn't know which character was which apart from Michael Collins, whose name and nature I know from the history books. I stopped reading midway and started again some months later. It seemed as if nothing had moved; still the same themes of poetry reading gunmen sitting around with nice ladies in tea-rooms then going off to prod farmer lads into committing murder. Though I suppose Flanagan is not parti-pris for either side, reading this made me sympathise more with the status quo. Why kill for the word "Republic"? Trollope ("Lady Anna") in his Establishment naivety shows more justification for resisting the English hegemony: the suffering of the Irish poor.
I gave up the struggle.
For an engaged and tragic view of the same era, see Ken Loach's film "Wind that shakes the Barley"
As for the puff from the Spectator "possibly the greatest historical novelist of our time" - Impossible! ( )

This book is the third in a trilogy that Flanagan started writing back in the 1970's. The first two of these books were very good and gave me a great background into the history of Irish rebellion against parliamentary Great Britain that I put to good use when I began to meet people from Ireland. I expected this book to be the same. It was good, but it was also disappointing. This book starts in 1919 after the Easter Rising and the first hunger strike death and covers the complicated history of the Rebellion and the Civil War that ended in 1923. Perhaps the difficulty in reading the book is due to the difficulty in the subject matter? The book tells the story of the rise of Michael Collins and the development of the Irish Republican Army. The legacy of guerrilla urban warfare that this period left in Irish history is indisputable and so very sad. The author uses fiction as a vehicle to tell this very complicated history and I would say that to a large degree he succeeds. However, he was unable to establish an emotional connection between the reader and so few of the major characters that the book seemed ponderous to me.

This book is much more of a learning experience than was Redemption by Leon Uris, and much less emotionally engaging that Trinity by Uris. I was sucked in to the earlier books in this series but it was much more difficult to get emotionally involved in this book. It is definitely more history than the books by Uris, but much less emotionally engaging. Still, for anyone who wants to learn about why Ireland is the way it is today, this series is a must read. ( )

4180 The End of the Hunt, by Thomas Flanagan (read 23 June 2006) This is the third of novels dealing with Irish history, The Year of the French (read 28 June 1979) dealing with late 18th century Ireland and The Tenants of Time (read 9 June 2002) dealing with the 1860s. Flanagan is American-born but you'd never know that he was not Irish to the core. This volume is laid in the years from 1916 to 1924 and while fiction has prominent actual persons as characters. The flyleaf says "any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental" which is a lie since much is historically accurate. So one does not know where truth ends and fiction begins sometimes. I could not tell that any history was changed in the telling. The first part of the book I thought kind of pedestrian but the events of 1921 et seq. in Ireland make the last half of the book dramatic and attention-holding. ( )

Conclusion of Flanagan's Irish trilogy. Very good. ( )

The time of Mike Collins is given "a Flanagan" treatment of historical fiction. Also excellet. ( )