Cork's Carney

BIRD ALONE--Sean O'Faolain--Viking ($2.50).

Few modern political upheavals have given rise to as many works of fiction as the civil war in Ireland in 1919-21. With novels by such varied talents as Frank O'Connor, Liam O'Flaherty, Peadar O'Donnell, Sean O'Faolain dramatizing different aspects of the struggle, followers of Irish literature may occasionally get the impression that the entire Republican Army was made up of accomplished novelists whose stories were better than their strategy. Of this talented crew, Sean O'Faolain has recently emerged as one of the best novelists in the ranks of fighters for Ireland's independence.

In Midsummer Night Madness he wrote a series of subtle, melodious, highly-polished stories that pictured the disorder of civil war--wild chases across country, confused fighting, chance love affairs between battles--set against serene Irish landscapes beautifully described. In A Nest of Simple Folk he wrote an historical novel that covered the period from 1854 to the Easter rebellion of 1916; in Countess Markievicz he turned his cadenced prose to a biography of a picturesque Dublin aristocrat who joined the rebels, was sentenced to death, and saluted in one of Yeats' loveliest poems.

Last week Sean O'Faolain offered U. S. readers a novel far off the subject of his previous books, suggesting that he has put aside the Irish revolution as material for his fiction, and concentrated on tragedies of peace more compatible with his peaceful style of writing. This time he tells the story of Corney Crone, born in Cork in 1873, the son of a narrow, unsuccessful, whining father and a slovenly mother who soon drove four of their five children from home. The fifth was feeble-witted. Corney's youth was dominated by his picturesque, poetic grandfather, an old Fenian who lived in a garret and spouted Shakespeare to his grandchildren. Corney was in on the tragedy of Parnell's disgrace, touched politics when he was arrested for the death of a "peeler" that one of his friends killed. His passionate, pious, innocent sweetheart, Elsie Sherlock, saved him by telling the truth: he had been in the woods with her when the crime was committed.

Corney suffered when he visited his friend in jail, absorbed his grandfather's hatred of England and its ways, but his heart was not in politics. On a trip to London, Elsie got away from her brothers, who were all priests, and became his mistress. But her father refused to let her marry one of the shiftless Crones. When she became pregnant she almost went crazy while Corney made plans that came to nothing. At desolate, run-down Youghal Corney decided to confess to her father. Thereupon she tried to drown herself, brought on a miscarriage that killed her. Corney became one of the eccentric characters of Cork, grew old enough to realize that if he could live his life over he would do it all again, except for the week when he had been "untrue to his sins" and begged Elsie to confess to her father.

As in Sean O'Faolain's earlier books, the distinction of Bird Alone lies in its prose. His pictures of narrow, gossip-ridden Cork, of peaceful provincial scenes, have a lyric quality that remains in the memory: "I can hear tonight beyond my window-curtains, as so many years ago I heard it often, the rain falling intensely from a townlit sky, the river mumbling in flood, the muddy city humming away to its sleep: and I hear a boy crying his evening paper against that windy rain. He is being raised as I was raised. . . ."

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