INTRODUCTION

Ireland’s modern war against England began on an Easter weekend, and, eighty-two years later, it ended on an Easter weekend. The Irish are a pilgrim people, and the progress of that resolution ran from 1916 to 1998, from the Republican insurrection on Easter Monday to the Good Friday Agreement establishing peace among Belfast, Dublin, and London; between Unionists and Republicans; Protestants and Catholics.

That the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the brackets within which this history unfolded has profound resonance. A theology that gives primacy to sacrifice, even martyrdom, was embodied in the embrace by all sides of redemptive violence. But the willingness to die for a cause bled into readiness to kill for it. Enemies abounded in Ireland, and so did heroes, but sorting out one from the other depended on myth, denial, and a habit of misremembering. Alas, across most of a century, the self-destroying island was shrouded in green fog, an air of asphyxiation. This novel tells one of the island’s stories, or two of them—or three. Such pluralism is what Ireland has learned.

An Irish-American raised to the music of IRA rebel songs, I learned from my mother that her uncle Jim had died back home in Tipperary in 1916—the mythic year. He died, she said, fighting the British in the great insurrection, the Rising. When I later went to Ireland myself, I sought out the old, abandoned cemetery where my mother’s uncle was buried, but what I found shocked me. The weathered grave marker confirmed that he’d died in 1916, but not as an anti-London rebel. The tombstone identified him as a British soldier who’d been killed in France, perhaps at that year’s savage Battle of the Somme when, only two months after the Rising, legions of “Micks” were killed. And that simply, in a flash, I was brought into the complex middle-ground of authentic Irish experience—a complicated landscape in which I’ve built my life.

Supply of Heroes unfolds across that terrain, where either-or absolutism yields to both-and complexity. In this novel—a war story, a detective story, a love story—enemies are not what they seem, and neither are heroes. That is why the narrative centers on an Anglo-Irish family whose place in-between the extremes was laid waste by both sides as the Troubles exploded, as if that hyphen were a sacrilege. The Catholic rebel who intrudes on that forbidden middle space finds his loyalty not so much divided as redefined—redefined by love.

In 1916, while hundreds of Irish Catholics rose up against the British in the doomed Easter rebellion, tens of thousands of Irish Catholics were in France, wearing the British khaki, and many of them, like my great-uncle, died. In the green fog, their stories were lost. This novel aims to bring them back from the dead. I wrote it as a haunted young man, and I am still haunted.

That middle ground where I’ve made my life is full of ghosts.

Redemptive violence? No. Romantic sacrifice? No. In No Man’s Land, where every war draws to a close, the “terrible beauty” of which Yeats wrote is more terrible than beautiful. My great-uncle’s fate opened my eyes. After that, I moved the emphasis of remembrance from the much mythologized glories of the Easter Rising to the brutal actualities of World War I—actualities mostly lost to Irish Catholic memory. November poppies are rarely seen on Dublin lapels.

The current of mayhem that began flowing out of the River Somme—forever marked by the million casualties of that 1916 battle—ran on through the rest of the century, with one horror building on another. That horror is my subject.

In the decades since I first published Supply of Heroes, a tremendous hope was lifted up not only by Irish peace-making, but by the non-violent end of the Cold War. But as I write today, the current of a brutal new war is rushing through Europe again, this time out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Therefore, the dark themes of my novel, alas—we humans being what we are—still apply. But so must its hope, for we humans also refuse to let hope go.

I take this opportunity to lift up the memory of an exemplar of that hope—the great Irish peacemaker John Hume. He defended the hope for a better Ireland across his entire life, and in doing so he made the great peace possible. His slogan was “a new Ireland,” and he created it. Supply of Heroes was part of what led to my being introduced to John Hume, and to my being invited, astoundingly, to call him friend. For me, that alone is enough to justify the pages in this book.

I want to acknowledge certain debts I owe to those who helped me with this work. Among the literary sources from which I drew information and inspiration, three were especially useful: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, and William Irwin Thompson’s The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, 1916. I am grateful to these authors.

With large-hearted energy and good cheer, my manager Daniel Sladek ushered this book back into print by introducing me to the fine people at Blackstone Publishing, to whom I offer, along with Daniel, a special word of thanks. I am proud to be on the Blackstone list.

When Supply of Heroes first appeared, I dedicated it to my mother, Mary Carroll, whose story started mine; and to Jenny Marshall Carroll, my daughter who, while I was writing this book, came into the precious life I share with her mother, my dear wife, the writer Alexandra Marshall. Jenny died shortly after being born, but she has been an unforgotten presence to our whole family all these years. With unfaded love and gratitude, I renew the original dedication for this edition—“For my mother and for Jenny.”

Boston, 2022