Hit Him Again, He's Irish

THE DARK by John McGahern. 191 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

"Ireland," said George Moore, "is a fatal disease." Author John McGahern gloomily agrees. In The Barracks, a first novel of keening intensity, he called the disease cancer and described how a woman dies of it in a squalid Irish village. In The Dark, his second novel, he calls the disease despair and describes how it drains and ultimately destroys a young man of talent.

Mahoney is his name, and his despair is the nth term in a series of miseries. He is born poor. He loses his mother when he is nine. He hates his father, a foul-mouthed brute who wallops his children by day and molests them by night. He dreads his visits to the priest, a hemi-homosexual who lies down beside him in bed and talks about the boy's soul while he strokes his body.

Sickened by all this, Mahoney desperately reaches out to a new life. He studies till his eyeballs boil and wins a scholarship to the university in Galway. But the struggle to escape exhausts his will to live. Fearing achievement more than failure, he subsides again into despair, quits college and sinks into the working masses, possibly forever.

Some parochial Irish critics, scandalized by McGahern's lascivious imputations against clerisy and family, have argued that his image of Ireland is false. They miss the point. The author may not be true to life but he is true to significance. He may be uncertain in technique but he is sure of what he feels and means, and he is honest in a way that is traditionally Irish. "The Irish are a fair people," Samuel Johnson wrote. "They never speak well of one another."

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