[In the following excerpt, Cunningham faults Brady's presentation of a white child as a slave during the post-Civil War era as unconvincing and historically inaccurate.]

Theory of War is the grim story of how one Irish-American, called Jonathan Carrick, became morally and spiritually deformed, as he wrestled for mere survival in awful pioneering circumstances in the period after the American Civil War, and how he came to pass on his deformities to his descendants.

In the hands of Carrick's narrating granddaughter—who researches her family history from what is, for this fiction, a characteristically portentous wheelchair—the violence of his struggles is an allegory of human existence in general, but more feelingly of American humanity in particular.

The most momentous thing about young Carrick is that he is sold into what his narrator thinks of as slavery. A raw midwestern farmer called Stoke, on the lookout for cheap labour, pays the boy's father, who is down on his post-Civil War uppers, fifteen dollars to bind the boy in an apprenticeship that will last until he is twenty-one. Carrick cannot wait for this agreed manumission time. After beatings, being staked down to prevent escape, terrible drudgeries (on this farm even the wife pulls the plough), a foul kip in a damp sod shack, above all, the taunting of the son of the family, George, a fat boy sent out as a salesman in a frock-coat, Carrick runs away and he never stops hating the Stokes.

His Irish name gets him a job in a rail-yard. Soon he is a switch-man, then a brake-man, jobs involving nimbleness around the wheels of moving trains. It is a life without amenity or grace, in which awful brutality and living like beasts in physical danger and terrible filth are normal. But still Carrick gets on, fired by his hatred, stirred to seriousness by the surreal preaching of a saloon-bar whiskey priest. He goes to Bible College, fetches up as a Methodist minister, turns farmer, sires a family, lies to avenge himself on fat George, transmits his sorrows to his suicidal sons and confesses everything in coded diaries which his paralysed granddaughter reads.

This tale of the deprived little brother and his heritage of hate and revenge is folkish, something by the Grimms or out of the Old Testament, with Steinbeckian trimmings. Humour lightens its desperations at only a few points, and then only in hard satirical farcing—as when the narrator's uncle Atlas, the main source of family oral history, an aged medic slowly killing himself with the drink, pitchforks croûte across the napery at one of his latest wife's French evenings during a low tale about his daddy, a pitchfork and a bull.

Allegory keeps pressing in on Carrick's history. The smallest item can assume allegorical flesh. The frock-coats George wears which Carrick craves, the unsafe link-and-pin couplings on trains. They are the metaphorical bits that will colour up the grand metaphor, the human-American warfare that Carrick's life is offered as comprising. This is endorsed by the narrator's zest for violent events and framed throughout by reference to Clausewitz's theories.

Joan Brady isn't willing to stop there. She goes on to take in the likes of her grandfather, sold like Carrick into "slavery". It's time, this author thinks, to speak up once more about the American way of white slavery. The frequently heard case of the Native American and the African-American needs supplementing with that of the Irish or white American. As the Author's Note declares, "My grandfather was white…. And he was sold into slavery … in the United States." This is not a reminder which the exponents of special Native or African-American sufferings are perhaps quite ready for. Brady's persuasions will lack force for those—like me—who need more to make us believe that child apprentices were really the equivalent of slaves.