In Fanatic Heart, Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally takes on one of the most controversial figures of the fight for Irish independence to wrestle with the conflicts at the centre of a complicated legacy. John  Mitchell, the lawyer and polemicist newspaper editor with pro-slavery views, stands between Irish patriots  Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stuart in the pantheon of the 19^th century, sworn enemy of British crown.

Summer 1847 people are getting used to the corpses lying by the road and along the ditches as the world famine will  forever conjure the hollowed faces of Ireland’s dead, the liquid Irish of the past now mute on their tongues. Mitchell will do all he can to fight for the destitute. The starved, the forgotten. His Odyssey will take him all the way to America – that land of promise, when on arrival in New York he was greeted by the Napper Tandy Artillery Regiment of the Militia with a 21-gun salute and hailed as “President of our Irish Republic”.

In Fanatic Heart, Thomas Keneally chronicles Mitchel’s life in three distinct parts, his youth, his marriage and freedom struggle in Ireland. His conviction on the specious charge of treason felony and his transportation across the world and his eventual escape and residence in the US. Keneally sketches Mitchell’s education at Trinity College, Dublin, followed by his elopement and subsequent marriage to Jenny Verner. He begins his working life as a lawyer in Newry, where his defence of small Catholic landholders in front of “Orange Judges”, which earns him a reputation as a covert papist. He later returns to Dublin , writes and edits The Nation Newspaper, become increasingly outraged by the horrors of the Famine and injustice by the British Imperialism, advocates rebellion and is put on trial.

Mitchell’s private emotions are explored only in relation to public events. His love for Jenny and his guilt at his father’s death, he has little inner life. Keneally’s vivid account of the transportation. The British authorities afraid of his inflammatory influence, forbid him any contact with his fellow inmates. On Christmas Day in a prison ship moored off Bermuda, he hears “ the noise of a convict theatrical below decks which brings home to him the extent of his isolation.  He is then sent first to the Cape of Good Hope and then to Van Diemen’s Island, where he is reunited with several of his former young Ireland comrades and finally with his wife  and children, who sail out to join him.

Mitchell’s colleague and rival Thomas Meagher, the passionate poet Jane Wilde, who wrote under the pen name Speranza and who later gave birth to Oscar Wilde, and the convict constable Garrett stand comparison with the master.  Mitchell escapes in the outback, where he evades capture up to the very last minute, its models are the adventure novels of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

In the final part Mitchell migrates to America  where he settles in New York where Mitchell returns to journalism, founding and editing The Citizen, in which he vents the pro-slavers views that make him such a problematic figure today.  He copies Psudoscientific theories of the inferiority of the black race and justifies his position by claiming  that, if Southern slaves were given their freedom, the would be subject to equally deliberating servitude in the factories of the north.

 Mitchel’ statement saying “ I deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold salves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves…” and “I for my part wish I had a good plantation, well-stocked with healthy Negroes in Alabama.”

 Fanatic Heart by Thomas Keneally, Faber £20, 464 pages.