Here is a précis of the tale: Cormac O'Connor was born in Ireland, in the 1720s, but he is called Robert Carson. His clan is neither Catholic nor Protestant. His father's a pagan and his mother's a Jew. They have assumed the name Carson- John and Rebecca, but their real names are Fergus and Rebecca O'Connor (née Samuels). Cormac's youth is idyllic, until one winter his mother is run down by a carriage owned by the Earl of Warren.

The rich man pays off his father with ten pounds, as if money can make up for the loss. He and his father must brave the killer winter of 1741, and the famine in its wake, alone. This is a historic reality that is worked well into the tale, and ties Hamill deeply into common Irish themes of loss, despair, death, and perseverance. And it is done with a truly great mix of the poetic lyric and reportorial profane. Then, a few years later, and due to the ridiculous Penal Laws of the day, the Earl and his men stop Cormac and his father, just so they can legally take the family horse, which an Englishman can insist is too pricey for an Irishman to own.

In the encounter, one of the Earl's men kills Cormac's father, and the boy is driven to retrieve the horse and seek vengeance by the mystical sword his father has forged, and which he much later loses. His father told him, 'In our tribe, the murderer must be pursued to the ends of the earth. And his male children, too.' Of course, Cormac does not behave rationally, and chooses the Dumbest Possible Action, pursuing vengeance rather than not, or there'd be no tale. One can usually tell that a tale is doomed when such a moment occurs, for it means the writer is taking the easy way out, choosing stagey melodrama over organic drama.

Along the way, he recalls that his father, after his mother's death, had told him the family secret re: his father's and mother's true religions, and that the family name was not Carson, as he was raised to believe, but O'Connor. Cormac's dad also was against slavery of Africans, for he felt it too much like what the English had done in Ireland. This is another shoehorned bit of ahistoric reality, and one which far too easily foreshadows the role slavery will play in the tale. Heavyhanded auguries are another flaw in the book. Almost every major plot point, after the first third of the book, is seen dozens or hundreds of pages before.

Cormac also encounters the Earl's teenaged lover, Bridget Riley, sold into bondage to the Earl by her parents. She turns out to be pregnant with the old man's child- who will spawn generations of male descendants that Cormac will try to kill, to fulfill his ridiculous tribal blood oath. Yet, he shows mercy to her, and his reasons tip the hat to what will be the penultimate scene in the book, where a similar scenario will play out. Sparing the Earl's lover, Cormac heads to board a ship to New York City, for he has heard the Earl is traveling there. While there was some earlier melodrama in scenes with a local Gaelic 'witch'- Mary Morrigan, and in scenes with Thunder and his father's sword, the scene where Cormac boards the boat is the most over the top yet. Of course, the ship is leaving dock and Cormac gets Thunder to leap across water onto its deck: