Beyond the Western Sea Vol 1. The Escape from Home; Beyond the Western Sea Vol 2. Lord Kirkle's Money

With c.700 pages making up these two volumes, Beyond the Western Sea represents an ambitious undertaking on the part of its author, Avi, whose work is well-known in the United States but less so on this side of the Atlantic. The story takes place over a period of three months in the mid-nineteenth century. Maura, age 15, and her brother Patrick, age 12, are evicted from their village in County Cork and leave famine-stricken Ireland for Lowell, Massachusetts, financed by money sent by their father who had left Ireland for America eleven months previously. Much of the first volume concerns their journey from Cork to Liverpool and their sojourn there while waiting for the departure of the ship which takes them across the Atlantic. Interwoven with the story of Maura and Patrick is that of 11-year-old Sir Laurence Kirkle, son of Lord Kirkle who owns the land from which Maura and Patrick were evicted. Following a beating by his father he runs away from home in London and ends up in Liverpool where he stows away on the ship on which Maura and Patrick sail for America. In the second volume these three young people and a small cast of subsidiary characters who have crossed their paths endure the hardships of the sea journey. They arrive in Lowell at a time of industrial unrest and anti-Irish feeling in which they become embroiled.

Throughout the two books the plot moves at a fast and furious pace and in particular the Liverpool scenes have many of the elements of a French farce. The sea voyage is the strongest part of these novels and something of the misery of the passengers is conveyed. However, characters remain two-dimensional. The speech of the Irish characters is rendered into clumsy stage-Irish brogue, and surely a nineteenth-century Liverpool landlady would not have said 'The loo is out back'? This phase of Irish-American history is full of possibilities for a storyteller, and it is a pity therefore that the author felt it necessary to introduce such a number of bizarre characters and occurrences.