Mapping the Past by Charles Drazin, William Heinemann, £20
Charles Drazin’s Mapping the Past begins on a melancholy note that never quite departs from the rest of the book. On the first page, his mother is told that no more can be done to treat her cancer. Out of the blue, she expresses a fervent, hallucinatory wish to go back to Quin, the village of her birth in County Clare. She had come to England 60 years before and never returned.
Patsy Drazin did not go back to Ireland right at the last. But, in the short time before she passed away, she began unburdening all she could remember about her childhood and, in particular, about her father, Patrick Lynch, who died when she was nine, an event which she felt blighted her life.
Patrick was one of five brothers who joined the Royal Engineers where they mapped and surveyed far-flung corners of the British Empire. All five went on to serve in the Great War. One died at Armentières. Another suffered severe shell shock. Patrick himself returned to Ireland, started a family and eventually joined the new Irish Land Commission. (Drazin’s other grandfather was a Jewish tailor who fled Tsarist Russia for London, which allows Drazin to award himself the fairly fabulous title of British Jewish Irish Catholic).
Inevitably, there were gaps in Patsy’s story. And so Charles Drazin picked up the gauntlet his mother had gently laid down and pursued “a story of irresistible romance” – five Irish Catholic brothers “charting the unmapped lands of Empire”.
A little disjointed at the outset, the story takes off when author gets his hands on his grandfather’s service record. This is truly a wonder to behold: “the military equivalent of William Blake’s grain of sand – a world on a sapper’s index card”. Ubique was the motto of the Royal Engineers: “Everywhere”. Patrick Lynch of County Clare travelled to all corners of the globe.
Drazin delves fully into the life of the Royal Engineers at the turn of the century, into the very spirit and practice of Empire, and drinks deep from what he finds, a kind of elixir that allows him to bond with his grandfather and grand-uncles. He becomes a “helpless fan” of the regiment, and how it embodied “optimism, enterprise and progress”.
Direct information about his relatives remains thin on the ground (partly because they were not officers), but Drazin compensates skilfully. There is, for instance, a fascinating chapter on Thomas Drummond, a Royal Engineer from Edinburgh who laboured heroically to improve the lot of 19th-century Ireland as the country’s Under-Secretary. There are also passages on events such as the Boer War, which serve to illustrate the inglorious side of the Empire (in which sappers under orders also played their part). Drazin grows quite remorseless in hunting down guilty truths about the White Man’s Burden.
Nevertheless, there is often not a Lynch brother in sight. Eventually we do get to see the brothers in action across the globe: one, for example, goes to Nova Scotia, laying underwater mines, while Patrick Lynch joins the team that mapped the Freetown peninsula in 1903. (Royal Engineers were back there in 2014 building Ebola treatment centres.)
Drazin cleverly stitches whatever he is able to find out about the brothers into larger stories. So, for example, a bout of malaria suffered by Jack Lynch provides the occasion for a dollop of medical history about Sir Ronald Ross, the first Briton to win a Nobel Prize following his discovery of how that disease enters the body.
Sometimes he strains perhaps too hard to find a connection, especially when he has an agenda to press, as when conjuring up the possibility of deep fellow-feeling between Patrick and a native African on the basis of a ring he wore from his time in Sierra Leone. Equally, some of the reflex ironising about Victorian mores can become a little grating.
Drazin’s own first trip to Clare becomes, at one and the same time, a route march through the grievances of Irish history and a hopeful, beguiling introduction to Ireland of the welcomes. This Ireland is also the country that has finally “thrown off the shackles” of the Catholic Church. In this, Drazin displays the common lack of curiosity about why the Irish so readily assumed those shackles in the first place and why they clung to them for so long. A remark in a pub comparing old Ireland to Hitler’s Germany passes without comment. And there is not much consideration for whether the Church, as well as being the source of things Ireland wants to leave behind, might also account for some of the things that have drawn people to Ireland and the Irish. Catholicism, in this view, has only been a pollutant of Irish character and never a wellspring.
But don’t be put off by this one gripe about something that occupies a very small part of the book. Mapping the World is a worthy endeavour – a thoughtful, engaging, humane reflection on one family’s trek through some of the most extraordinary tangles of history.
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