[Thomas Flanagan] has with one exuberant book abolished my prejudice against historical novels. I haven't so thoroughly enjoyed an historical novel since "The Charterhouse of Parma," and "War and Peace." "The Year of the French," consisting of straight narrative, snippets from journals, swatches of invented memoirs, scraps of song, sworn statements to magistrates and subalterns, hindsight and myth, is grand and sad, with ferocious sweep.

There is, necessarily, a poet—the red-haired, whisky-drinking, licentious Owen MacCarthy, a schoolmaster tormented by an image: "Moonlight falling on a hard, flat surface, scythe or sword or stone or spade." He is surrounded, whether he knows it or not, by other people putting pen to paper and equally dismayed by our Celtic Lebanon—a Protestant minister, a clerk to Cornwallis, a lovelorn girl, an ambivalent solicitor, various informers, a historian trying to make sense of the Girondists. Their truths collide with MacCarthy's...