Irish Transported

BRING LARKS AND HEROES by Thomas Keneally. 247 pages. Viking. $4.95.

Writers need myths to revert to--simple unrelenting tales to retell. Americans use the old West. The Irish use their centuries of uprising against the English. In just the same way, Australians use those savage prison settlements that first seeded the new land with transported convicts in the late 18th century.

Thomas Keneally, 32, is an Australian with a pronounced Irish accent. He has found the mythic frame for his novel in the love, rebellion and death of an Irish soldier in the garrison of a penal colony that might have been Sydney, but was historically Port Jackson, 200 years ago. Young Halloran is a corporal and Roman Catholic who has sworn his conscript's oath to the English and Protestant King, George III. He was once destined for the priesthood, and has a Latinate and God-bedazzled turn of mind. Now he guards felons, argues theology with one, and loves another, who happens to be a servant to the chief of the colony's commissary.

Until the 20th century came along, few communities of a few thousand men could have lived so foul a life as did the first white men in Sydney. By Keneally's fictional talent, all is made vivid as fresh blood; the reader is spared the statistical compilations of realist fiction. Yet, we learn in the course of this cruel narrative that a sentence of death by torture (500 lashes of the cat-o'-ninetails amounted to just that) could be handed out by a kangaroo court of Marine officers as casually as a parking fine would be imposed today. Scarred, starved and brutalized, the convict sub-world could credibly circulate the malicious scandal that the cattle belonging to the officers' ruling caste had died of pox contracted through bestial sexual commerce with their owners.

Grubs, lizards and roots were sometimes the food. A prostitute's price was four ounces of salted beef. Sodomy was less costly and more common.

The story's hero is given what might be called Eichmann's choice: do evil for duty's sake or rebel. Inevitably, there is a convict rebellion; inevitably, it is suppressed by slaughter, in which Halloran must fire (though he fires high), and he later helps a leader of the rebellion to escape. Inevitably, his girl hangs, and he hangs. It is as economical, as predestined as that. The last paragraph is visible from the first page.

Readers wary of the plush language of the "gadzooks, hussy!" school may be suspicious of the special idiom of Bring Larks. But there is no Errol Flimflam here. Keneally has devised a garbled-Gaelic speech that seems perfectly to fit the character of his protagonist who, like another gifted innocent, Billy Budd, speaks with the tongue of men and angels. In fact the doomed man's only legacy is verses, hidden in a government ledger and negligently destroyed by a bored governor who could make nothing of them. One poem hopes that out of the cesspool, time will "bring larks and heroes."

This is a high-pitched book, but not only to Australians will the pitch ring true. What Keneally is saying is that out of man's appalling origins, grace and art will come, through courage. His story is as lovely and as spare as a falcon stooping.

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