Famine and starvation are terrible experiences that make a man do
terrible things that he never imagined to do in all his life. John Kelly draws
that very picture in his book The Graves Are Walking with magnificence.
John Kelly’s research shows that the death toll was staggering during the
potato famine of 1845 where more than one million Irish people died due to
starvation and disease and those who tried to run faced death on their journey
to a so-called New World. The scholar Terry Eagleton calls
it an event “with something of the characteristics of a low-level
nuclear attack” which was clearly the worst disaster of the 19th
century. The author conveys all the feelings
of the horror of that world to the readers in a very dramatic and convincing
way.
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| The Graves Are Walking |
Coming to the talk about
the scene of the famine in 1847 he writes, “Ditches, glens, coach stops,
abandoned cabins, the peddlers who sold lice-infested clothing on the roads,
the unburied dead: there were disease vectors everywhere now.” He talks about the people fighting desperately for
food and water with disease spreading around every corner and people without
coffins mourning the deaths of their loved ones. The author describes the reality
as Phytophthora infections spreads killing the people and turning the once ripe
potato fields of Ireland into dead rotting ground piling with dead bodies.
People who were once happy now victims of hunger, death and disease are looking
nothing more than ghosts with rotting flesh.
All these are
contributions of the filthy rich landowners and Irish Lords who thought nothing
of the poverty of their people and kept the prices of provisions above the
capacity of a farmer or peasant. They were not even concerned about the people
who were ready to provide help to the poor and disease stricken population
which caused them to fail. Ireland's "Liberator" and political icon Daniel
O'Connell or Britain's treasury czar Sir Charles Trevelyan with the best of
their intentions were also unable to handle the crisis that faced the
population of Ireland which ended in 1850s with devastating results.
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| John Kelly |
It is a tale for the lords and
landowners of today too as there are many who still think their farmers and
peasants are petty and unworthy. The chilling sensation that you get after
reading this book will surely make you feel the intensity of the crisis which
the people of that time faced and which you are fortunate enough not to
encounter in the world of today. A great tragedy is described in The Graves Are Walking with such perfection by John Kelly
that it gets to the core of your soul and throttles it to see the darker side
of the world.
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