It also reeks of the Dumbest Possible Action trope that set him on his path to America, and infects many bad Hollywood films, for there is no real tension nor drama to the bulk of Cormac's long life, merely the insertion of absurd guidelines. In this way, the tale never flows organically from its characters, and has the feel of a B film plot line, instead. While true that most of life- even of those with normal lifespans, is a relentless slog of dullness, this is not something a work of art need recapitulate in extended detail. Poetic concision can be a great help in these instances.

After Cormac gets to New York, the book becomes a sort of compendium of how quickly the centuries pass. Cormac settles into journalism, and changes jobs every few years. He gets to know the rich and famous, and leads that aforementioned dull life, that gets compressed into several extended episodes. Some critics have called this portion of the novel the Forrest Gump approach to telling such a tale, but this is patently untrue. Cormac does, indeed, get to know George Washington, the infamous Tammany Hall hack William 'Boss' Tweed, a few celebrities of the 20th Century, and witnesses 9/11, but that's about it. Given the fact that he spends a quarter of a millennium in the city, that's certainly a reasonable enough brushing up against history.

Where the book does unfortunately founder is in its portrayal of race. The aforementioned 'Mystical Negro' aspect is especially weighting, but so is the false equation of solidarity between New York's Irish and black communities. In fact, since free black slave labor was one of the few economic forces that could undercut Irish wages, there was terrible discord between the two groups, including many instances of wanton violence. Not that there could not have been a particularly enlightened Irishman, such as Cormac nor his father, but that we focus in on one of the few enlightened micks lends an air of contrivance to the whole plot. After all, there really is not single reason that the whole of the tale could have remained Irish, with the immortality curse being granted by the mystic Irish woman, Mary Morrigan. The appearance of the slaves, especially in an Irish port, has the distinct reek of PC appeasement. Hamill's skilled and focused prose guides one past that, but the book never really recovers from such pointless digressions, and, by the end, loses its way.

Hamill has claimed that the book was completed the day before 9/11 happened, and he was ready to send it off to his publisher, but then sat on it for months, before reworking the tragedy into his pages. One might immediately think that the tale's tanking at the end is because of this last minute revisionism, but it is not so. In fact, the tragedy lends irony and poignancy to the fact that Cormac breaks his murderous tradition of killing the male Warren descendants who come to Manhattan, only to have the scion he spares, Willie Warren (who also, far too conveniently, turns out to be the new owner of his father's long lost sword), get killed in the Twin Towers.