Foley's Asia

While an anarchist group blows up the equestrian statue of General Gough in Dublin’s Phoenix Park during the 1950s, the narrator recalls his mother’s Kiplingesque tales of childhood in India, recreating the atmosphere and events of the Irish abroad in the service of the British Empire. The life of John Henry Foley (1818-1874), Queen Victoria’s favourite sculptor, is interwoven with those of some of his principal subjects, Hardinge, Montgomery, Outram and Lawrence, Foyle College boys from Derry, who formed a remarkable constellation of soldier-administrators in northern India during the nineteenth century.

The powerful, suggestive sketches of these Irishmen speak for generations gone. Engagements, atrocities and counter-atrocities are colourfully drawn in a language of heroism that conveys that turbulent, chaotic thing that was Britain’s empire in Asia. Gough himself was a hero of the Peninsular War, wheeled out in the 1840s to pursue the punitive Opium War in China and to conquer the Punjab.

Ronan Sheehan has created a remarkable imaginative work through these related narratives, shifting between nineteenth-century set-pieces and modern-day Ireland. The statue from which the book derives its name, the vulnerable and defiant figure of Asia below subverting Albert above in the Hyde Park memorial, expresses the conflicted loyalties at the heart of Foley’s finest monuments. By exploring these fractured identities and interrogating the past, Foley’s Asia enriches our understanding of this sculpted world.