Irish Bog

RAIN ON THE WIND (312 pp.]--Walter Macken--Macmillan ($3).

The rich Celtic twilight of William Butler Yeats and J. M. Synge has long since faded, but their disciples are still lighting little peat fires on the general bog of contemporary Irish literature. The latest of these, a novel by Walter Macken called Rain on the Wind, never quite bursts into flame; the book carries so much sentimental moisture that it douses its own glim.

Yet for pages together, it smolders with a pleasant aroma of the ould sod.

The hero, Mico Mor, is a broth of a fisherman's boy in County Galway -- no champ for brains but strong on earthy virtue. In one of his first scenes, young Mico rashly throws a tin cup at a flock of geese; they charge down the beach and drive him near to drowning in the sea. But like the youngest prince in the old stories, Mico comes through where many a more calculating fellow fails.

Mico's brother, a bright one who goes to college and accepts all the bejabbers of modern science, grows up to be a dusty wielder of test tubes. His best friend, a ranting revolutionary, is knocked out of his wits by a hurling stick in a game of Irish hockey, and later kills himself. Big, slow Mico goes steady ahead, fishing the waters, eating the bread, waiting for the girl of his portion.

The girl's name (Maeve) and the way he finds her at last (kneeling by the sea in a storm) are good cues to the book's worst fault: the bleary Irish rapture of it all. As an actor, Walter Macken has demonstrated to U.S. playgoers in The King of Friday's Men (TIME, March 5) that he can trip the light fantastic tongue of Ireland as well as any man. Yet when he comes to write, the tongue seems to wag the man. Except for a few set pieces, e.g., a vivid description of a storm and some fine, clear passages of Irish speech, Rain on the Wind is a standing example of what happens when Erin goes blah.

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