Fanatic Heart (Hardback)

From the Irish Famine to the American Civil War, Fanatic Heart is a powerful literary adventure story from a Master of historical fiction. Thomas Keneally has created an unforgettable novel about John Mitchel - Irish patriot, journalist, escaped convict, hero, father, husband and, deeply flawed man.

Fanatic Heart by Thomas Keneally is a brilliant conjuring of the early Irish patriot John Mitchell. The novel lays out through meticulous research and fine prose the first potato famine and Mitchel’s rise to rebellion against the British in the 1850s; followed by his arrest, separation from wife and family, and his forced expulsion along with several famous cohorts to a penal colony in Tasmania. Mitchel’s wife, Jenny, also comes to life on the page, bringing her family by sailing ship around the world to join the rebel in exile only to support his daring escape to America and their final road to freedom. Outstanding.

For fans of historical fiction, I would recommend Fanatic Heart by Thomas Keneally, author of the Booker-winning Schindler’s Ark. His new novel is a gritty tale of the life and exploits of 19th-century Irish patriot John Mitchel.

Enlightening … Keneally’s descriptive gift comes into exquisite play … his prose tempered, characteristically, by an ironic undertone that keeps the narrative buoyant. With Mitchel’s protracted, dangerous and endlessly frustrated escape plan, Fanatic Heart takes on something of the character of a nineteenth-century adventure novel … With this, his fortieth novel, and now aged eighty-eight, Thomas Keneally shows himself to be as adept as ever at converting research into illumination and evocation.

From the splendid opening line, this novel reads like no ordinary tale of the Irish potato famine . . . In all this Keneally has a lively style as he veers between omniscience and Mitchel’s viewpoint, the prose studded with exclamation marks and a winking authorial tone . . . Fanatic Heart is a story busy enough never to be boring, even if the details are crammed too tightly. And Keneally doesn’t whitewash his man . . . Even by the standards of his time, Mitchel was deeply racist: he wanted to reopen the transatlantic slave trade 50 years after its abolition, and argued against rights for Jews, who suffered similar restrictions as Catholics did in Ireland. That’s the problem with a fanatic heart: you never know which way the fanaticism is going to turn next.

Meticulously researched and full of compelling historical detail . . . Dickens is referenced more than once, and there are times when this compendious novel . . . stands comparison with the master. But in its gripping account of Mitchel’s audacious escape 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 . . . a gripping and resonant story.