The Bitch of Ballyknock

THE PROSPECTS ARE PLEASING (217 pp.)--Honor Tracy--Random House ($3.50).

MIND You, I'VE SAID NOTHING! (176 pp.)--Honor Tracy--Brlfish Book Centre ($3.50).

Ireland, in the view of Mayo-born Novelist George Moore, was "a fatal disease" from which "it is the plain duty of every Irishman to disassociate himself." To the waspish eye of Novelist Honor Tracy, herself part Irish, Ireland is less a disease than a delusion. Its inhabitants live as snug and moist as a colony of clams in "a little bubble of [their] own imagining," feeding their dreams on "the piccolo, morte that lurks in the flagon."

In an earlier acid-witty examination of the species. The Straight and Narrow Path (TIME, July 30, 1956), Novelist Tracy rapped the cassocked shanks of Ireland's parish priests. In her two current books, she has broadened her field of ire to include Ireland's impoverished gentry and the grey-mottled middle class, immersed in its misty yearnings for the days of Old Sinn Fein.

Tommy O'Driscoll, the fictional hero of The Prospects Are Pleasing, is a rachitic young Dublin clerk who dreams of being "the Anointed, the Victim, and, at the same time, the Hero" in the "march for a free Ireland." Dispatched to London on a secret mission to recover a canvas of the late Spanish painter, Afrodisio Lafuente y Chaos, that the Dublin press has loudly and incorrectly trumpeted as Ireland's own, Tommy promptly funks it and is rescued by a Wodehousian young Englishman named Felix Horniman. Chiefly because Tommy reminds him of a dyspeptic monkey he once befriended in India, Felix casually pinches the picture for him, and the two of them make off for Dublin. The rest of Novelist Tracy's book is a Waughtered-down Irish stew.

It includes as engaging a collection of eccentrics as have walked the pages of recent fiction: wealthy old Dowager Horniman, who cuts her gowns from old muslin curtains and passes her time collecting pet jellyfish "cast up on the beach by the insensate cruelty of the Spanish tide"; Seumas Cullen, the Dublin painter who established his reputation on one painting, which he exhibits year after year; a poison-pen writer named Peadar, who vents his spleen on a local landlady by addressing a note to "The Biggest Old Bitch in Ballyknock." In a classic display of Gaelic futility, an Irish museum hangs the Chaos canvas upside down ("We're a young country," pleads the director), and Tommy deserts the revolutionary game for a job in a travel agency engaged in selling Ireland's hobnailed charms to rich and innocent Americans.

A skillful nonfiction supplement to

Prospects, Author Tracy's Mind Yott, I've Said Nothing! is a kind of Fielding's Guide to the national mentality that can spawn a Tommy O'Driscoll. The salient points to remember about Ireland, according to Author Tracy, are 1) that its public attitudes never have any bearing on its private ones: "It is the land of Double Think and Double Speak" where ''words are used as . . . a device for concealment": 2) that the main concern of every Irishman is saving face, and 3) that no Irishman is truly happy except when he is "streeling" from bar to bar, going to a funeral or engaging in a national Fuss. Author Tracy has kicked up her own share of Fusses since she made Ireland her literary beat. She is doubtless viewed with mistrust by the large school of Irish writers who, in her phrase, "feel that it is a splendid thing to be a writer and that little or nothing is added to it by writing." She has been "affectionately described as a bitch" by at least one correspondent who had suffered an ill-defined grievance in one of her articles. Judging from past form, she fully expects her latest books to catch it from all corners of the "boggy little land." But among less partisan readers, they are sure to rank as two of the grandest japes of the season.

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