Green Magic

By Annalyn Swan

MOTHER IRELAND

by EDNA O'BRIEN 144 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.

"Suddenly you must get away," writes Novelist Edna O'Brien, 45, in Mother Ireland, her first work of nonfiction. "The country is breathlessly beautiful, but there is too an undeniable sadness, the sadness of being cut off, a cultural atrophy that goes all the way to the brain." O'Brien did get away, but she never escaped from the enchantment of Ireland's bleak beauty and rich legends. Hence Mother Ireland, an aptly titled remembrance of things past that re-creates the Ireland she knew as a child with the help of some nostalgic photographs. Its boundaries are a rural village, a schoolroom, a convent. The characters are the heroes and hobgoblins of the author's past: long-suffering mothers, drunken fathers, a madman, a traveling Jew.

Crossed Legs. In that faraway world, life was "fervid, enclosed, catastrophic." Terror lurked everywhere. Adults were "formidable people" with "inscrutable humors." Even the placid rural scene, full of sleepy sows and hens, could turn menacing on a solitary trek homeward from the village. Sex and sin were constant companions. "At ten or eleven years, when on a visit [to Limerick], you sat in a chapel with your legs crossed and were asked by an incensed lady to please uncross them at once. 'Did you not know,' she said, 'that Our Lady blushes whenever a woman does such an indecent thing?' "

The classroom was ruled over by a high-strung teacher, who let fly with pens, pencils, and a "medley of language that was a compote of Irish, English, Latin and raillery." Life's special occasions, such as the visit of a pale, saintly young priest, sometimes broke the routine. "How we fussed over him, wheeling the tea trolley to the edge of the step, calling him 'Father, father.' " Then, the change: childhood dreaming "giving way to a craving for glitter," and her flight first to Dublin, the gateway to England.

Despite the "unhappy ending," as she ironically calls it, Mother Ireland is more a storybook tale than are O'Brien's novels, with their modern heroines and migraine headaches. She flits through the past like some Gaelic fairy on the wing, with an eye for precise detail and a leavening of Irish wit that precludes sentimentality.

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