Thomas Flanagan is no Tolstoy and he has not written a new "War and Peace"; but "The Year of the French" is sufficiently colored by his intense and informed obsession with place and period for the reader with plenty of time (this is a long, dense novel) to be drawn deep into County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland, in the year 1798. (p. 12)

Mr. Flanagan's method is mainly documents-with-dialogue, and one of his problems has been that the [French invasion of Ireland in 1798] is fairly well documented. If he had used contemporary accounts verbatim, he would not have been writing a "novel." So he cooked the books a bit. For example, one of the chief sources for what went on in Killala is a manuscript narrative by Bishop Stock, the Protestant prelate whose palace in Killala was used as a headquarters by the French. Mr. Flanagan substitutes...