A Family Divided in the Days Before the Rising
The House Divided
The novel opens in Dublin in the last days before Easter 1916, inside an Anglo-Irish family whose members are pulling apart along the very fault line that is about to open across the whole country. At the center of this household stands Barnabas Drumm, known to everyone as Barney, a former seminarian who left the priesthood and has since drifted into scholarship, drink, and a chronic sense of failure. He has married Frances, the widowed mother of two sons from her first marriage, Pat Dumay and Cathal Dumay, and the household that results is one of stepfathers, half-brothers, and in-laws bound together less by affection than by the accident of blood and the pressure of the times closing in around them.
Murdoch lays out this domestic arrangement with the patience of a novelist establishing a whole social world before she lets history intrude on it. The family’s Anglo-Irish position is itself the problem: they are Protestant or nominally so, propertied, connected to England, and yet Irish by residence and by half-buried loyalty, so that every member of the house is already implicated on both sides of the coming conflict before a shot is fired. The “red” of the title belongs to the British uniform and to the Empire’s claim on loyalty and service; the “green” belongs to the nationalist cause gathering in secret drilling-halls and back rooms. Both colors run through this one family rather than dividing neatly between separate camps, which is the structural point the opening chapters are built to establish.
Barney himself embodies a third, exhausted position — neither soldier nor rebel, a man who has already renounced one vocation and cannot commit to another, watching the younger generation move toward violence with a mixture of envy, dread, and the peculiar guilt of a man who has never been tested. His presence in the household, drinking and half-writing a scholarly history nobody expects him to finish, sets the tone of drift and unfinished commitment against which the younger men’s decisiveness will stand out sharply.
Andrew Chase-White and the Uniform of Empire
Into this household comes Andrew Chase-White, an English cousin who holds a commission in the British Army and is home on leave, wearing his uniform with a self-consciousness that Murdoch uses to open up the novel’s central argument about duty and identity. Andrew is engaged to be married, and his position in Dublin is doubly awkward: he is a serving officer of the Crown in a city where his own relatives regard that service with everything from polite embarrassment to outright contempt, and he is Anglo-Irish enough to feel Dublin as home even as his uniform marks him as an outsider and an instrument of occupation in his cousins’ eyes.
Murdoch presents Andrew’s inner life largely through his uncertainty — not doubt about which side is right in any abstract sense, but a deeper unease about whether his commitment to the Army is a genuine vocation or simply the shape that duty happened to take for a young man of his class and background. He moves through the family gatherings and the streets of Dublin aware that the ground is shifting under everyone’s feet, sensing the coming crisis without yet being able to name it, caught between the woman he is engaged to marry and an unacknowledged attraction elsewhere in the family circle that complicates his sense of where his loyalties actually lie.
His scenes are built around small social frictions — a dinner, a walk, an argument half-suppressed out of politeness — through which the political chasm in the family becomes visible without yet becoming explicit confrontation. Andrew’s uniform, worn through these ordinary domestic scenes, works throughout the novel as the visible sign of the “red” loyalty that his cousin Pat has already renounced, so that the two young men’s diverging paths are dramatized less through open argument than through this simple, unavoidable fact of dress and posture whenever they occupy the same room.
Pat Dumay and the Discipline of Rebellion
Where Andrew drifts in uncertainty, his cousin Pat Dumay has already made his choice and lives it with an austerity that unsettles everyone around him. Pat has committed himself to the nationalist cause and to the coming insurrection, and Murdoch draws him as a young man who has disciplined his whole life — his body, his habits, his relations with women, his feeling for his own family — around the coming action, so that his devotion to Ireland reads less like a political opinion than like a vocation of the kind Barney abandoned and Andrew has never truly tested. Pat’s austerity extends to a near-monastic self-denial that separates him from the ordinary pleasures and compromises of the household, and this separateness is itself a rebuke to everyone still living inside the family’s comfortable half-attachments.
His relationship with his younger half-brother Cathal Dumay sharpens this picture further. Cathal is drawn as more volatile and more fanatical than Pat, burning with a nationalism that has not been tempered by Pat’s discipline, so that the two brothers together dramatize two different temperatures of the same commitment — one controlled and deliberate, the other closer to the surface and more dangerous for being less governed. Their shared cause does not erase the difference in temperament between them, and Murdoch lets that difference generate real friction inside the household even before it can be tested outside it.
Pat’s scenes with Andrew, when they occur, carry the weight of the novel’s central opposition without needing to state it as argument: the cousin in uniform and the cousin preparing for insurrection occupy the same rooms, eat at the same table, and cannot speak plainly to each other about what is coming, so that the family’s Easter approaches under a silence that both young men maintain out of something like tact and something like foreboding. This unspoken tension between the soldier and the rebel, lodged inside one family rather than staged between strangers, is what gives the novel’s title its full weight — the red and the green are not simply Ireland’s two armies but two loyalties dividing one household from within.
Millie Kinnard and the Claims of the Heart
Alongside this political drama Murdoch places Millie Kinnard, Frances’s sister and so aunt to Pat and Cathal, a widow of striking presence whose romantic history has left her something of a scandal within the family’s more conventional circles. Millie’s late husband was a British officer, and her own position — glamorous, independent, financially secure, unattached — makes her a figure of fascination and unease for the younger men around her, Andrew included, whose engagement does not prevent him from feeling her pull.
Murdoch uses Millie to open a second axis of conflict inside the novel, one that runs beneath the explicitly political drama: the pull of desire and personal freedom against the disciplines — whether military, religious, or revolutionary — that the other characters have chosen or inherited. Millie’s house becomes a place where the rules governing the rest of the family relax, and her presence draws characters out of their fixed positions even as the country around them moves toward fixed and irreversible action. Her flirtations and attachments, sketched with Murdoch’s characteristic attention to the self-deceptions people practice on themselves in matters of the heart, thread through the earlier chapters as a counter-current to the hardening political resolve of Pat and Cathal, complicating any simple division of the family into rebels and loyalists by adding the far less orderly claims of love and vanity into the mix.
Barnabas Drumm occupies a stranger position in the household than either of the young men preparing for violence, and the novel gives him space as the uncle whose life has already been broken by a different kind of failure before the political crisis ever reaches its climax. He had once been destined for the priesthood, a failed vocation that haunts him through the drink and the self-disgust that mark his daily existence, married now to Kathleen Dumay and living in a kind of suspended penance for a choice abandoned decades earlier. Barnabas watches the younger generation’s zeal for Ireland and for armed rebellion with a mixture of envy and disbelief, aware that he himself once possessed a comparable certainty about a different calling and lost it, and his scenes function as a meditation on the gap between conviction and the capacity to sustain it. His presence in the house, half comic and half tragic, keeps the novel from treating political commitment as simply heroic, since his own history shows how easily a vocation curdles into something that can neither be fulfilled nor abandoned.
Cathal Dumay, Pat’s younger brother, represents an intensification rather than a repetition of Pat’s own nationalism, pushing the novel’s political spectrum further toward the uncompromising end. Where Pat has arrived at his commitment through discipline, training, and a controlled ideological seriousness, Cathal is drawn to the coming insurrection with a rawer, more impatient hunger, unwilling to wait on strategy or English concession and contemptuous of anything that smells of compromise. His scenes with Pat expose the fractures within Irish republicanism itself, not simply between Ireland and England or between the older and younger Dumays, but between different tempers of revolutionary conviction — Cathal’s appetite for immediate action sits uneasily even beside his own brother’s more considered readiness for the same violence. Through Cathal, Murdoch registers that the “green” side of the title is not a single, unified position but contains its own internal argument about means, timing, and the value of a life measured against a cause.
Frances Bellman, engaged to Andrew Chase-White, is drawn by the novel into the orbit of the Dumay household and finds herself pulled toward sympathies that her English fiancé cannot share, without her ever fully declaring for the rebellion herself. Her father, Christopher Bellman, an old Anglo-Irish gentleman devoted to his roses and to a gentler, backward-looking vision of Ireland under the Crown, embodies a fading order that has made its peace with English rule and cannot imagine, or wants not to imagine, the violence gathering around it. The contrast between Christopher’s garden — tended, orderly, a small survival of settled life — and the political storm closing in on Dublin gives the novel one of its recurring images: an Anglo-Irish world of civility and cultivation that the coming days will make untenable. Frances stands between her father’s resigned attachment to the old arrangement and the passionate, dangerous commitments of Pat and Cathal, her divided loyalties another instance of the “house divided” that structures the whole book, now extended beyond blood kinship into engagement and love.
The novel’s forward movement through these interlocking households converges on Easter Monday, when the Rising actually breaks out in Dublin and the private arguments that have filled the preceding chapters are overtaken by the public event itself. Pat and Cathal go out to fight; Andrew, in his British officer’s uniform, is caught by the outbreak of an insurrection against the very authority he serves, his own position turned at a stroke from a matter of family embarrassment into something far more exposed and perilous. The fighting in the city — the barricades, the occupied buildings, the chaos of a rebellion whose success or failure neither its participants nor its opponents can yet judge — is rendered not as abstract history but through the particular, disoriented experience of characters the reader has already come to know intimately across the drawing-rooms and gardens of the earlier chapters. The domestic novel of family argument gives way, in these pages, to something closer to the texture of war, without losing the psychological interiority that has driven the book from its opening scenes.
In the aftermath, Murdoch draws the narrative forward in time to an epilogue set some two decades later, allowing the reader to see what has become of the survivors once the immediate heat of 1916 has cooled into history. The epilogue measures the private costs of that Easter against the public memory the Rising has since acquired, showing characters — Barnabas among them — living on in a changed Ireland, marked by losses the intervening years cannot undo and by a political outcome that only partly resembles what either the “red” or the “green” among them had once imagined. The novel ends not on the drama of the barricades but on this quieter reckoning, measuring the distance between the convictions that drove the family apart and the altered, diminished, and irreversible shape those convictions finally took.
