It’s not surprising that Derek Lundy chose to start his new book with a scene set at sea – the Salt Spring Island writer has done well with his previous, nautically themed books. The opening of The Bloody Red Hand, however, is unlike anything in either Godforsaken Sea or The Way of a Ship.

The prologue to The Bloody Red Hand recounts two versions of the claiming of the Ulster shore in Northern Ireland. In both yarns, fighting men struggle in rough seas to reach the shore. When the leader promises that “the first man to touch the sweet Gaelic strand with his hand or foot takes possession of it,” a particularly inspired man “lays his arm along the bulwark … severs his hand with one swift sword blow and throws it ashore onto the sand before anyone else can make the leap.”

The story serves as a convenient and convincing metaphor for the blood-soaked history of Ulster, and the dual versions serve to summarize the historic and ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland. In the first version of the tale recounted by Lundy, the founder is named O’Neill – Irish-born, though serving with a crew of Norse raiders. In the second version, the founder is named MacDonnell, the leader of his Scottish clan. Both the O’Neills and the MacDonnells adopted the bloody red hand as their crest, and it became a symbol of the Protestants of Northern Ireland, “a near-perfect expression,” according to Lundy, “of the strange, ambiguous claim by Ulster Protestants … that they are ‘British’ and not Irish.”

The Bloody Red Hand is not a history of Ireland, but a canny historic analysis of the conflict that shapes the contemporary Irish consciousness. It is a fundamentally personal work for Lundy, who was born in Belfast and has lost friends and family to the Troubles. He shapes his analysis around three of his (possible) ancestors: Robert Lundy, William Steel Dickson, and Billy Lundy. By exploring the lives of these men and their actions, Lundy unwinds the tangled skein of the conflict, searching for understanding rather than easy answers. There is no pandering here; Lundy comes down heavily against zealotry of all stripes.

Lundy’s exploration of the life of Robert Lundy, for example, balances dispassionate history with commentary and personal recollection. While Lundy is unsure whether the 17th-century Scot (and supporter of James II), who was appointed governor of Derry in 1688, is in fact an ancestor, it quickly becomes clear that some might want to avoid any association with the man. During his tenure as governor, Lundy attempted to surrender the city to the (Catholic) army of King James. The Ulster Protestants rebelled and branded Lundy a traitor, expelling him from the city just before it came under siege. Using the barest of historical records, Lundy attempts to delineate the possible motivations of a man whose effigy is still burned annually in Derry.

The sections on William Steel Dickson (a 19th-century clergyman who spent four years as a political prisoner) and Billy Lundy, Lundy’s grandfather, a “Protestant bigot who did not like Catholics at all” and who fought against home rule in the years around the First World War, are equally compelling and thought-provoking.

Of necessity, the history in The Bloody Red Hand is complex and multifaceted, further complicated by Lundy’s laudable inclusion of multiple perspectives on historical events. The book’s complexity is leavened somewhat by the inclusion of accounts from Lundy’s many trips back to Northern Ireland, personal glimpses into life in contemporary Ulster from a privileged outsider’s point of view. While some of these stories are amusingly surreal, they serve as a potent reminder of William Faulkner’s fundamental truth: “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”