Irish Shocker

DEATH IS SO FAIR -- Louis Lynch D'Alton--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

When the bloody bubble of Dublin's Easter Rising fizzled out in 1916, it left a number of ruined buildings, a few snipers still forlornly shooting from housetops, a profound wave of disillusionment in the Irish revolutionary movement. Last week, a young Irishman named Louis Lynch D'Alton dramatized the change in revolutionary hearts in a bitter first novel that showed how two Irishmen reacted to the Easter Week fiasco. To Revolutionist Andrew Kilfoyle, who fought in it, the Rising was sickening, "a revolt of poets and schoolmasters," inept, ill-planned, melodramatic, futile. It convinced him that next time there should be no sentimentality, no proclamations, no self-deception and no pity. But to Manus Considine, who had intended to be a priest, the defeat of the Rising and the execution of its leaders were an incentive to join the rebels. Kilfoyle tried to keep him out, said sentimentalists were in the way.

Death Is So Fair ranks far below masterpieces of the Irish Civil War like Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer or the stories of Sean O'Faolain. But it has a peculiar, acrid flavor, as harsh as the smell of rifle fire, which stamps Author D'Alton as a novelist of individuality and power. It tells of the war with the Black & Tans--ambushes, traps, the killing of spies and suspected spies--in battles that were more like U. S. gangfights than like civil war. Kilfoyle was a master of such tactics; Considine was horrified no less by Irish success than by English reprisal. When Considine was responsible for the death of a suspected spy, and then learned that the man had been innocent, his conscience rode him harder than ever. When he committed adultery with the wife of an informer, it nearly drove him crazy. When a priest refused him absolution, he dropped the revolution, gave himself up, was shot in cold blood. Kilfoyle got away, reflecting sardonically: "The Englishman loves his wife and his dog; the Irishman, his soul."

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