The Matchmaker of Kenmare (#78) by Frank Delaney surprised me. I guess I was expecting a warm, cozy Irish folk story, along the lines of the movie The Quiet Man. I think even the cover flap blurb leads you in this direction. What you get instead is an absorbing, but on many levels, disturbing tale of Ireland during World War II.
Ben McCarthy is a young man roaming Ireland on his bike collecting stories from remote villages and hamlets for the Irish Folklore Commission and simultaneously searching for clues to the whereabouts of his missing wife, Venetia Kelly. His travels eventually lead him to Kenmare to meet their legendary matchmaker. The matchmaker turns out to be two women: grandmother and granddaughter. Miss Kate Begley is the younger and Ben is immediately struck by her. Although Ben has not recovered emotionally from Venetia's disappearance, he feels that his fate is entwined with Kate's. While observing Kate's matchmaking techniques, they encounter an American soldier stationed in Ireland, Charles Miller. Kate knows that she has met her match. Everything else that happens in the book, their multiple forays into war-torn Europe as neutral Irish citizens, is driven by Kate's determination to marry Charles, and then to find him behind German lines. Unbeknownst to Ben, Kate is acting as a spy for the Allies. The major question the novel raises is: can a person be neutral politically when confronted by horrifying devastation; or emotionally when one loves and the other does not?
I'm not sure after reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare that I liked or admired either Ben or Kate. I did want to find out what happened to them, but Kate led Ben around by the nose and always got her way. She did regret that she hurt or caused the death of many innocent people because of her actions, but it never stopped her from pursuing her own ends. Ben, on the other hand, I wanted to dope slap. Why did he go along with Kate's wild schemes so meekly? Yes, he was in love with her, but he know the havoc she was wreaking on everyone around them. And what about Charles Miller? He was portrayed as such a strong, forceful character by everyone that I did not buy what happened to him. If you've read Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (See my 4/28/11 post on this.) I don't think you'll believe it, either.
I really wish I had read Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show first. Ben and Venetia's story is apparently told in this book with the complications of Ben's father's involvement with Venetia and how that played out ten years later. Maybe I would have understand Ben better. My recommendation is that if you read The Matchmaker of Kenmare, make sure you do read them in order.
The second thing was that as soon as I came across the name Joachim or Jochen Peiper, I googled him. There are a number of websites on him, and I read through a few. I don't know that much about World War II, and this gave me a lot of useful background information that filled in a lot of blanks in the narrative. I would advise that you do the same. Besides, when a book uses a real person as a character, I like to know what they looked like. If you read the Wikipedia article on Peiper, be sure to check some of the other sites to get a more balanced picture.
Frank Delaney is a wonderful writer, but you'll have to make up your own mind about this book. I'm thinking I loved the writing, but not the subjects.
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