Erin Go Bragh!

MAD PUPPETSTOWN--M. J. Farrell--Far far & Rinehart ($2).

PIGEON IRISH-Francis Stuart-Mac-millan ($2).

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Though romantic Ireland may be buried: deep, as Irish Poet William Butler Yeats averred, there is life in the body yet. A heartening sign of this life is Authoress Farfell's full-flavored tale of Irish manorial life. In the big house at Puppetstown the accumulations of centuries of aristocratic, carefree culture crowd the charming ramshackle rooms. But the Cheving-tons, for all their culture, still follow the ancient traditions of wild-Irish sports and speech.

"Miss Easter, if you don't stop roarin' an' bawlin' an' tearin' on the red raw minute yell be gettin' tally-whack an' tandam where ye'll not like it." So admonished by her nurse, little Easter, the story's heroine, manages to mind her P's & Q's for a minute, but not for more. There are her cousins Evelyn and Basil to get into mischief with, and Patsy the scullery boy. Patsy breeds ferrets in an overstuffed armchair, knows the countryside and its sports like a book. Fox hunting and trout fishing are more than half of the children's education. The rest they pick up almost unawares in the highly civilized company of Great-Aunt Dicksie, who oversees the housekeeping, and Aunt Brenda, the boys' widowed mother.

With Easter's devil-may-care father to take them to circuses and horse races; with Plenty of ponies in the enormous stables and old Jer Donohughe's hounds to follow, it seems to the children that pleasures will never end. But along comes the War. Easter's father is killed. Follows Ireland's revolutionary unrest. Encircling Puppetstown, the lovely mountains Mandoran, Moncooin and the Black Stall are infested with Sinn Feiners. Aunts Dicksie and Brenda still keep open house, entertain the Army officers from nearby. One day one of them, motoring with Brenda, is ambushed, killed. On that same day the children, careless of the lurking danger, have been trout fishing in the tarn on Mandoran's top. Benighted on their return, it is only Patsy's understanding with the mountain outlaws that gets them home alive. Terrified, Brenda whisks the children away to England. Aunt Dicksie refuses to budge from Puppetstown. stays on with only Patsy to guard her from sudden death. "Ah well," as Patsy said when things got bad, "sure what is it all only passing through life?"

In England the children are expensively educated, and expected to be expensively wed. In their new sophistication they forget their wild Irish days. Evelyn, graduated from Oxford, gets betrothed to Lady Middleton's marmoreal daughter Sarah, but when Easter and Basil see the trim life to which he is doomed they clear for home. Puppetstown has become a moldering tomb, Aunt Dicksie a crotchety recluse. She hates to have the children spoil her frigid peace, but warms to them and to life in the end. Puppetstown resounds again with the laughing speech learned from immemorial tradition and the local Blarney Stone. In a style extraordinarily luminous and concise Author Stuart's novel treats of highly-pitched human relations, no less real for being rare. Though peculiarly Irish, they are peculiarly human as well. The book, probably too poetic to be popular, will be rated by knowing heads as one of the most remarkable to come from Ireland since her so-called Renaissance.

The time is during some future European war. Scientific murder is perfected now. Over the battlefront hangs, pall-like, a colorless deadly plaid woven of beamless rays that no airplane can pierce. Beneath this pall the long entrenched lines, locked together, writhe and push. Should the westerly line crack, the alien hordes will roar through, flood the lands beyond with death or with their super-mechanized civilization worse than death.

In the Republic of Ireland, as in an ark in a rising flood, Intelligence Officer Frank Allen and Brigid, his bride of a year, await the worst, find solace in each other's love. To their farm outside Dublin, used as a carrier pigeon base, come their friend Joe Arigho, Commandant of Home Defense, and his young daughter Catherine, who trains the carriers. They are expecting messages from the front. Allen tries to make his guests easy, is made uneasy himself by Catherine. Just out of a convent, she has strange ideas of martyrdom for Ireland's sake. She talks fervently of a plan to meet the threatened invasion--to surrender parts of Ireland without resistance, in exchange for parts to remain unmolested, where Irish culture, Irish religion can be preserved. To matter-of-fact Brigid this is nothing but schoolgirl's talk; but Catherine, with her saint's face, wakens a kind of fanaticism in Allen-her fervor makes her ideas seem feasible and right.

From the sky, after a terrible flight, come the pigeons with news from the front--the worst. Arigho flies off to join the troops, leaving Allen commandant in his stead. At the Staff meeting in Dublin, measures to meet the crisis are harangued. The politicians, represented in the army by Commandant Malone, want only to pull their chestnuts out of the fire; but Allen, to his own surprise, proposes Catherine's plan. Malone's men accuse him of treason. Before they can court-martial him he escapes with Brigid and Catherine, to the friendly aviation base at Rathdonnel.

In the ensuing breathless events Allen loses everything-his friend, his wife, his military honor. He suffers the martyrdom without which Catherine predicted nothing valuable for Ireland or for himself could be won. Outcast, Catherine accompanies him. Like her carrier pigeons, that fly always in one direction through the sky's abyss, the two are oriented by a single ideal, head instinctively toward its consummation, as the pigeons head towards home.

Author Francis Stuart, 29, is the very model of modern Irish patriot-litterateur. His family, Ulster Unionists, schooled him at England's rugged Rugby. He became a Roman Catholic in 1920, joined the Irish Republican Army, was taken prisoner by Free State troops during the Dublin street-fighting of 1922, interned for 15 months. He married a niece of Maud Gonne MacBride whose soldier-husband, a Boer War gallant, was executed in Dublin after the 1916 rebellion and whose son Sean is now active in Irish Republican affairs. Author Stuart lives at Glendalough (Dublin suburb). Novelist Liam O'Flaherty is his good friend. Flying is his sideline. Unpublished in the U. S. are another Stuart novel, Woman & God, and a volume of verse to which the Royal Irish Academy, with Poets William Butler Yeats and George William ("A.E.") Russell judging, gave a prize.

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