Enemies within
Ian McGuire on his new thriller about a Fenian plot, The Abstainer
Your new book is set in Manchester in 1867. What tensions were simmering in the city at that time?
In 1867, police sergeant Charles Brett was shot when the prison van he was guarding was ambushed by a gang of armed men. Two of the prisoners inside the van were leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret organisation which had attempted a rebellion in Ireland six months earlier. The killing sparked widespread anger and fear. There was a sense, among some, that the city’s large Irish community now represented an enemy within, and there were rumours of plans to blow up the Manchester gasworks and even to kidnap or assassinate the Queen as she travelled south from Balmoral. That fevered atmosphere is the context of the novel.
What was the Fenians’ background?
‘Fenians’ is a collective term for members of two secret societies both formed in the late 1850s: the Irish Republican Brotherhood (based in Ireland) and the Fenian Brotherhood (based in the US). Their main aim was to provoke a violent revolution that would overthrow British rule in Ireland. They were largely unsuccessful, but their failures took on a heroic quality and became part of the mythology of Irish nationalism.
Is your story inspired by real events?
The novel begins with the public hanging of three Fenians, William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien, for the murder of Charles Brett. That hanging is a matter of historical fact, but the novel then goes on to imagine various aftereffects, which although plausible I hope) didn’t actually occur. The novel’s main character, James O’Connor, is a Dublin policeman who has been brought to Manchester to help deal with the Fenian threat – a number of Irish policemen were brought across to Manchester for that purpose, and I have drawn on records of what they did and thought.