Three Irish Novels
We in Captivity. By Kathleen Pawle. (Cassell. 7s. 6d.) -Fires of Beltane. By Geraldine Cummins. (Michael Joseph.
. 7s. 6d.) Ugly Brew. By Jake Wynne. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) OF Miss Kathleen Pawle's book all one can say is that it has neither reality of fact nor imagination. I have not read, nor do I pretend to review the whole of the novel, but I do not think it likely that anybody who could write 200 pages of such unmitigated drivel is likely to have made a last-lap repentance. It is the most hoary kind of Bejabers-begorrah-bedad kind of .stage-Irish (or American-Irish) romancing and might well be tiled away as one of the purest examples of the peculiar form of literature which arises when people write lovingly about what they have never experienced. The story presents one Ignatius Proudfoot, a Leinster boy, the son of well-to-do parents, half- Irish, half-English, and one Maureen, the wild daughter of Mary the Brogue who is little better than a tramp. When Mary the Brogue dies we find the wild Maureen, who has a habit of seeing fairies and visions, lying naked by the fire with Ignatius, whispering to the old woman : Soon, me darlin' you'll be welkin' in gardens with the golden fruit on the trees. Rose petals'll be under your feet and lovely maidens'll hold up your gown and you'll be beautiful, more beautiful than Grania or the daughter of King-under-the wave."
Then she croons and the fairies come. . . . Ignatius goes to
• Rochenoir College in Dublin—driven down O'Connell Street by Danny the jarvey, and Pegasus his horse, while Danny swigs whisky and "lifts up his voice in a hoarse bellow" of song about poor Parnell, just as if he had been paid to do it by a keen Irish Tourists Association anxious to supply local colour. After a period in Rochenoir, where the usual fellow- ship of friends is prepared for the later holocaust, and the - priests behave like the chorus of The Monks of the Screw, Ignatius is called by " the goddess of griefs, In belle dame sans merci, the shan van vocht, Deirdre of the Sorrows, also known as the Poor Old Woman," is sworn into the Irish Republican ,Brotherhood by Pearse, ipsissitne, just in time for 1916, and Maureen, who has gone into service with Lord Chalice in the .Castle at home, &c., &c. All as if Yeats, or Joyce, or O'Casey had simply never been !
Miss Geraldine Cummins is faintly touched by the eerie quality of the Celtic Twilight, and when she writes of the simple life of the fields—with great sensitiveness and with that pleasingly " quaint " touch peculiar to women writers-- likes to add a magic powder to her mixture. So we get her title, Fires of Beltane, referring to the May •Night festival, still hallowed in most Celtic countries, during which Nonili Keogh, the gentle, timid, saintly country girl, Catholic born .and bred, suddenly reverts to the pagan within her and lOses her innocence and happiness with John Louis St. Blaise, the rake from the city. This mingling of the eleusinian and the overt (if anything in Ireland is ever overt) makes a heady drink, and the nearest word I can get to describe Fires of Beltane is to say that it is intoxicating—though, I must add. those who are habitually intenlperate in the matter of novel- -reading will probably turn aside from her wine to Mr. Wynne's ugly brew. The mysterious light that plays over Norah, from time to time, whether she is seeing Christian visions or Pagan visions, never prevents her, however, from being impressively real, and in her soft, shy innocence, her kind-heartedness, her natural idealism, and her natural turn for romance, she is the most pleasant portrait of Irish girlhood at its weakest and best that I have met for a long time. The background, whether of people -or country, is warm and homely, but the city scenes are strangely unsuccessful.
. Ugly Brew is well named—a powerful, impressive picture of the Irish revolutionary period, creating an atmosphere of horror that so communicates itself to the reader that he must sigh with relief to think it is all fiction. Yet he feels that it was not fiction at one time, and so derives a Corn- pletely satisfying enjoyment from his reading: If anything, one must say that all this business of shooting, and running, and terror-by-day, seems better fitted for autobiography. and that a little lyricism, perhaps, or a little recueilkinen!. might have moved the whole backward into a clearer focus. What considerations there are-criticisms of school-life, or *commentary on Irish Catholicism, or on the Gaelic revival. or satirical remarks about middle-class home life in large 'families—are so angry and loud that they jangle in the ear like an angry telephone. That makes more impact than -impression. This arises from the modern method of synchro- nising the sequence of experience and realisation in a sub- jective record, so that Martin O'Neill, the gunman hero, is made to feel things in 1921 rather too much as Mr. Wynne _feels them in 1936 ; e.g., " he felt he was mimicking an act in Grand Guignol " at a 'time when he could not have seen :a Grand Guignol play. The general _tone of the book, -post-War remembering war, is summed up in the final 'savage comment. Martin, leaving Ireland for Africa, " stag- gered to the rail and vomited noisily into the sea. It was his farewell gesture." Of its kind it is one of the best. Ten years ago it would -have created as much interest as any of .0'Flaherty's first novels. Today it cannot claim to be original. But since that is largely the fault Of the subject, we shall have to keep a keen eye open for the next book by this author. He is a born writer ; it yet remains to be seen if he is a novelist—if, that is to say, he contains within
not merely one kind of experience but many, and the - power to present each one with the same zest and fire. • • g'Fautpx.,
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