Review: Dublin by Edward Rutherford

On one level, Edward Rutherfurd’s Dublin succeeds as a collection of well-executed, if somewhat conventional narratives, linked together slightly tenuously by the inter-generational connections between the characters.  On another level it raises some really challenging questions about how we view history.

First the stories.  The book, like Rutherfurd’s other works, follows an episodic structure.  Each section is set in a different time period of Dublin’s history, from the pre-Christian era through to the Reformation.  The same family’s appear in each episode to give a further sense of continuity, but other than that each episode is almost completely distinct.  As mentioned, the stories themselves rarely depart from very conventional plotlines. We have star-crossed lovers, ongoing mistakenly-held grudges, treachery, smuggling and more.  Each episode is granted only a couple of hundred pages and increasingly they encompass a wide range of characters, so logistical limitations are clearly a factor in the complexity of plotlines.