The Horrors & the Poetry

THY TEARS MIGHT CEASE by Michael Farrell. 577 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

The first guerrilla war of modern times was neither Lawrence's campaigns in Arabia nor the Boer War--two of the usual candidates--but the century-long struggle of the Irish for independence from Britain. The Irish experience, in its factionalism and atrocious savagery, was just like the more recent guerrilla wars, but it is set off from the others by its sense of Irish gaiety in the midst of bloodletting, of poetry rising from its bitterness. Thus the most rousing songs of the best Irish tenors celebrate some irregular victory or bravely borne defeat. And it is just this--the rich lyric feeling of Irish patriotism--that is the real subject of Michael Farrell's evocative novel of the growth to manhood of Matthew Martin Reilly during the worst of the Irish troubles as they rose to a crescendo at the time of World War I.

Farrell himself, like his hero, lived through that period as a young man, and in a sense was ruined by it. Though he was a recognized figure on the fringes of the Dublin literary world for more than 30 years, he poured his time and best efforts into this one novel. But he was so entangled with the book that he could never bring himself to stop revising, adding, "perfecting." He refused to let it out of his hands. Only with his death, in 1962, could the manuscript be prepared for the printer. The process required drastic editorial surgery: the present book represents about one-third of the manuscript Farrell left.

The result is not quite a masterpiece, being a shade too sentimental for that, but it is certainly a wonderfully engaging book. From the wrenching yet joyful nostalgia of the village Christmas described in the opening pages to the streets of Dublin that could be swept by love and laughter or in the next moment by machine-gun bullets, Farrell captures the bittersweet agony of that time. Most of all he captures the strength of the Irish spirit and the lilt of Irish speech, not in rank dialect but in the kiss of the brogue. Farrell's lifework may well challenge Liam O'Flaherty's Famine as the national novel of Ireland.

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