“This is a ballad of fools and heroes and maybe you can work out which is which.” The real-life relationship between the Irish aristocrat turned republican revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his servant-cum-saviour, the freed slave Tony Small, is one that has been largely ignored by history. Small is remembered, if he is at all, as a minor character in Fitzgerald’s more celebrated story. But the association between the two men forms the backbone of the author and film-maker Neil Jordan’s latest novel, which explores their tentative, highly unequal friendship from Small’s perspective, and is typically laden with social and sexual ambiguity.
