For Erin Dear

INSURRECTION (248 pp.)--Liam O'Flaherty--Little, Brown ($3).

The story of the Irish rebellion has been told so often that any Irishman who wants to tell it again should first issue the general invitation, "Stop me if you've heard it." But Ireland's Liam O'Flaherty, author of that fine old favorite, The Informer (which a lot of people think was written by Victor McLaglen), takes up the theme as if no O'Faolain, O'Casey or O'Flaherty had ever played a variation on it before--and in two ticks he has the frayed old harp twanging away as rich as the day it was strung.

Author O'Flaherty's hero is a Madden of Connemara--a distinction that may not mean much to a Smith of Brooklyn or a Brown of Grand Rapids but apparently means a lot to a Madden of Connemara. "There isn't a better class of fighting man from Oughterard to Letterfrack," shrills Mrs. Colgan, the old lady who introduces Recruit Madden to the rebel army just in time for him to get in a few licks in the Easter Rising. And sure enough, Madden quickly proves himself the sort of character who looks his best in very curt sentences, e.g., "Madden floored the bricklayer with a right to the jaw."

But O'Flaherty's romantic heat is well-tempered with chilly realism. Madden is fighting the English not so much for the noble cause of independence as because he hero-worships his company commander and feels "liberated" by complete surrender "to the authority of a leader." Old

Mrs. Colgan doesn't care two straws about the fate of Ireland when she urges Madden into the insurgent ranks; she just wants him to keep an eye on her adolescent son, who has been swept off his silly feet by patriotic ardor. And when the rebel song rings out,

For Erin dear we fall!

the heavy thud that follows is caused as much by Irish whisky as English bullets. It is this mixing of noble and ignoble motives that gives Insurrection its salty, human tang. By sticking close to the theme and laying it out in the plainest of prose styles, Author O'Flaherty gives the sharpest possible picture of Dublin bursting its buttons, its streets crisscrossed with an interweaving mob of poets, patriots, drunks, floozies, looters and sharpshooters. The result is not a great novel, nor even a very remarkable one, but it does suggest that the "Troubles" may go marching along in fiction as indomitably as the American Civil War.

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