Blood & Mines

STRIKE FOR A KINGDOM (185 pp.)--Menna Gallie--Harper ($3.50).

Menna Gallic's brief and beautifully written first novel of the Welsh coal fields is the sort of book that bestselling authors should be required to copy two or three times in longhand. The language has a strong, sly wit, and the story--of a troubled, strikebound village--is told with force and skill. Welsh-born Novelist Gallie is able to give her sympathy to the strikers without the posturing of protest literature, and to evoke the gamy folk flavor of her villagers without being cute or condescending.

Murder is at the heart of the book. The unloved manager of a coal mine is knocked on the head and tumbled into a river one dark night. There is ample reason for doing him in; the strike, a disastrous eruption in 1926, has been bitter, the manager was a harsh boss, and he has been slipping up the back stairs to visit the wife of one of the miners.

The mystery is complicated when the body of a stillborn baby is discovered nearby--no girl in the village, as someone remarks, was known to have been as pregnant as all that. The local justice of the peace, who is also a miner and a poet, follows the crime to its solution. But violence, although it is one of the elements of life in Novelist Gallie's village, is not the dominant one. The book begins with poetry--impudent, rope-skipping verses shrilled out by little girls--and it ends the same way, as the justice of the peace at last works out the opening lines of a verse that has been troubling him.

A surprising thing about the author's considerable skill is that she knows very well how to write about men; most of the book is seen from a wholly masculine viewpoint. Particularly effective is a midnight episode in which timorous strikers march out to meet a force of equally fearful police. The book's best line is given to a striker who, irritated at politicking women, mimics the old gag: "As we married women unfortunately know, there are certain aspects of marriage at which a gentlewoman shudders, but, ladies, I find that it is possible to live out these times if one sets one's teeth and thinks of ENGLAND!"

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