Blood, Peat & Tea

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY (344 pp.)--Arthur J. Roth--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

It was a great day for the Irish (and for everyone else) when they decided to write as well as fight. Irish society--provincial yet picturesque, with its deep conflicts between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ways, between priesthood and peasantry, its sense of tragedy and the merciless compulsion of its members to explain themselves literately at the top of their voices--is itself a book already half-written. These days there is nothing like the Troubles going on in Ireland, but there is still a spot of trouble--enough for a headline or two and many a novel. The latest, A Terrible Beauty, is a good new potato in the fertile patch.

An Informer, Too. Irish-American Author Roth, a 33-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran who also served three years with the Irish army, writes with the kind of detachment that is unwelcome in partisan and partitioned Ireland. He puts his novel in one of Northern Ireland's "lost six counties" (Tyrone) where those of the Protestant majority have stubbornly held to their British loyalties, their Orange Lodges and their midget state in the face of the Catholic minority. Novelist Roth deals with the minority. His village stage is a stony place called Duncrana, and the leading man on that stage is both a teetotaler and an informer--terrible things to be. Unlike O'Flaherty's "Gypo," who betrays out of weakness, Roth's O'Neill acts from moral strength and does it on a tide of tea. (In fact, as Roth tells it, all Ireland is washed by a Gulf Stream of tannin. Births, deaths, love, wakes and warfare swim in the element.)

Dermot O'Neill is the younger son of a proud Duncrana family dedicated to farming and to the twin pieties of Catholicism and Irish history. When the pieties turn out not to be identical twins. Dermot is doomed. It is 1940. and in the farmhouse kitchen the O'Neills happily record Hitler's latest victory over the British. By tradition. England's extremity is Ireland's opportunity, and the Irish Republican Army--after a long time in the doldrums--is "out" again. Its members have the illusion that Hitler's war aims include Irish "freedom." The young village buckoes give up their Gaelic football in favor of what the parish curate calls the national pastime--giving the British "a touch" or two. They spy on airfields, raid military barracks to loot arms, and in general try to behave like true descendants of "the Bold Fenian Men."

A Good-Matured Devil. Dermot has been a hero in the I.R.A. raids, and marked for promotion, but three things give him second thoughts. He is a "good-natured devil without hate or harm in him," and he has grievously wounded a man. Also he has discovered that his I.R.A. company commandant, the crippled village bicycle mechanic, is a malignant fanatic. Most important, Dermot is a pious lad, and the church has come down like thunder on the I.R.A.

Dermot's moral dilemma is sharpened by the fact that his commandant has ordered an attack on a police station which may well kill innocents. The writing is no great shakes, but there is nothing slipshod about the moral crux onto which Novelist Roth has carpentered his O'Neill. A Terrible Beauty is a plain tale, honest as a pair of well-cobbled brogans. Unhappily, every now and then Roth remembers that writing about Ireland is supposed to be a bit on the poetic side, and sets up a keen about the scenery or the weather. The only terrible beauty in the book belongs to W. B. Yeats and the title, but there is a terrible logic about it.

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