Of Ireland & Life

THROUGH STREETS BROAD AND NARROW (340 pp.)--Gabriel Fielding--Morrow ($4.50).

In his Confessions of a Young Man, George Moore wrote: "Ireland is a fatal disease--fatal to Englishmen and doubly fatal to Irishmen." Moore's diagnosis lies at the heart of this exciting new novel by Gabriel Fielding, who, under his real name of Alan Barnsley, is a practicing British physician. In earlier books, Brotherly Love and In the Time of Greenbloom, Author Fielding dealt with the family background of John Blaydon, a British schoolboy, and carried him through an adolescent love affair. When the girl was brutally raped and murdered by a wandering psychopath, John's sanity was saved by Horab Green-bloom, a Jewish intellectual who is for ever on the move -- mentally, physically, metaphysically. But not even Greenbloom is able to prepare young John for Ireland.

Mountains of Mourne. Like many a Sassenach before him, Blaydon lands in Ireland expecting an easy conquest. After all, he is tall, dark-eyed, handsome, as capriciously intelligent and nearly as wordy as the Irish themselves. Descending on Dublin in the mid-1950s to study medi cine, Blaydon does battle -- on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets -- with a suc cession of colleens. Beautiful Theresa has a voice as misty as the mountains of Mourne, and a heart hard enough to splinter Cuchulainn's sword. After another fruitless try, with a girl named Oonagh, Blaydon comes to grips with Dymphna Uprichard (pronounced "Eweprichard"), a pale, leggy hoyden who adores wrestling by the hour in hallways and on sofas.

But at critical moments, Dymphna in variably develops a sudden prudence.

Irish males prove equally elusive. Mike Groarke, as threadbare as he is arrogant, takes clothes, money and girls from Blay don with the air of an emperor accepting due homage. One moment Groarke is an intimate friend; the next, a malicious intriguer, and the next, a drunkard hitting out with anarchic fury. Just as baffling is upper-crust Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch, who seems only a silly-ass clubman but whose character proves to have as many layers as an onion; hamhanded Jack Kerruish could not be anything more than an amiable athlete--or could he? Coves & Cobbles. Blaydon's five years in Dublin end in a vast betrayal. Without a word, devious Dymphna drops him and marries someone else; trusted Mike Groarke not only sells Blaydon out but beats him and sneers, "You amused me when you didn't sicken me." Blaydon cannot even deal with a great omadhaun like Kerruish, who hoodwinks him with ease. When the ever-various Horab Greenbloom sweeps into Ireland, even he loses his sure footing among the slippery coves and cobbles of Dublin.

Author Fielding writes a torrential prose, and his imagist phrases, fabulous incident, antic characters and peripheral violence whip the story forward. He shares with the late Joyce Gary the belief that a novel's most important qualities are narrative and action. Too many writers, complains Fielding, fill their books "with things which rightly should be confined to their diaries, their lavatories or their psychiatrists." His greatest strength--dramatic invention--contributes to his greatest weakness: over-plotting.

Fielding's thematic point is that everything is unimportant except what makes a man suffer, and he makes his point well.

At novel's end, with his nerve ends jumping like a field of grasshoppers, Blaydon flees home to England, to await the next volume of his saga. In parting from his friend-enemy, Groarke, Blaydon says accusingly: "You are Ireland, the same the English have been running their heads into for the past fifteen hundred years." Groarke answers: "No. I'm not like Ireland, I'm like life."

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