Classic Irish

A NEST OF SIMPLE FOLK--Sean O'Faolain--Viking ($2.50).

Shawn O'Phelan, as even those who know no Irish may pronounce Sean OTaolain's Gaelic name, is a new star in Erin's sky. Known to only a few U. S. readers by a book of short stories (Midsummer Night Madness), he should soon, if A Nest of Simple Folk gets the audience it deserves, be visible throughout at least one hemisphere. This big novel of classic Irish types is set firmly in the oldfashioned, solid novel tradition, earmarked neither by the violent realism nor the violent mysticism of modern Ireland's civil war of letters.

In A Nest of Simple Folk's 398 sensitive, homegrown pages Author O'Faolain spreads with slow care the history of three generations of an Irish family, from 1854 to 1916. Since Ireland is going downhill, so does his family, but theirs is not a political story. Judith Foxe was what passed for a gentleman's daughter in those parts. When she married one of her father's tenants her father never spoke to her again. But Judith schemed to get her youngest son Leo raised to the noble status of gentleman and, by hook & crook, a better education than his brothers and sisters. She wanted him to be a doctor, but Leo was too common a clay. He did little but drink and wench, letting his property slip through his fingers. Then a meeting with a Fenian fired his blood. He got ten years in an English jail for shooting a peeler.

Out again, Leo found himself nearly destitute, but Fenianism had given him an aim in life. He married one of his old wenches, lived in poverty but went on plotting his revenge against the police. Twice more he went to jail, but he lived to be an old man who liked to think himself a desperate character. At the end the furnace of the Dublin Easter rebellion swallowed him up.

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