The first chapters of [The Year of the French] deal with conditions leading up to the [French invasion of Ireland in 1798]…. These chapters are recited by an impersonal narrator, the voice of history uttering its disinterested truth. Most of the later events are conveyed from different points of view and in suitably different styles. In certain chapters we hear the voice of history not in complete impersonality but as it yields itself to a particular character…. Still other chapters narrate the events through fictitious documents, such as An Impartial Narrative of What Passed at Killala in the Summer of 1798, by Arthur Vincent Broome, the local Protestant minister in the novel.

These devices make for variety in a long novel: the several points of view keep the reader sensitive to the proportions of ignorance and knowledge in any account of an experience. Another effect is that the characters and...