Mitchel was the Irish son of a revered, non-subscribing Presbyterian minister and a fierce mother. Jenny was the illegitimate daughter of Mary (a coachman’s daughter), the beloved of James Verner who had once commanded a British troop at Waterloo, and would have been Baron of Armagh “had he married properly”. The Verners had been involved in the establishment of the Orange Order, yet Jenny was educated to say that “if it is hatred of other Irishmen, that is not what the Orange Order was founded for”.

Presbyterian Mitchel and Protestant Jenny eloped, but their union was forestalled by the combined action of their concerned parents (in life the pair eloped twice). Their marriage was finally blessed, and celebrated by the Church of Ireland’s Reverend Babington, standing in his church’s porch (not for sectarian reasons, but because his church was being rebuilt).

It’s the fine grain of Keneally re-imagining, and the ironic sparkle of his prose that carries this and the succeeding 29 chapters of his panoramic novel, strobe-lit as it is from the start by an epigraph from Yeats: “Out of Ireland have we come./ Great hatred, little room,/ Maimed us at the start./ I carry from my mother’s womb,/ A fanatic heart.”

Mitchel’s rhetoric and publishing saw him convicted (by Baron Tom Lefroy, a former suitor of Jane Austen) under the 1848 Treason Felony Act, and sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. He was shipped off to Bermuda, and finally, almost by mistake, to Van Diemen’s Land, where he was soon joined by fellow rebels, the charismatic Thomas Meagher among them.

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Jenny and family also joined him, and found a kind of rural peace in the increasingly independent-minded colony. But Ireland was not at peace and its supporters, looking for figureheads, engineered the Mitchels’ removal to the United States. Mitchel was both encouraged by the new vision of American democracy and horrified by the barbarity of 19th-century industrial capitalism, with its callous disregard for the fate of its workers. Worse treated than slaves, Mitchel argued, in an intellectual ferment that included the study of skulls and the race theory of the German Johann Blumenbach.

As the novel ends (somewhat abruptly), Mitchel and his Jenny and their children are seeking (yet another) idyll in the rural beauty of Tennessee. The American Civil War crouches in wait. And the novel’s resonance for our own times is deafening.

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