A Shout in the Blood

CHILDREN OF THE RAINBOW (512 pp.)--Bryan MacMahon--Dutton ($3.95).

Many modern novelists have an allergy--they can't stand life. Bryan MacMahon of Ireland's County Kerry is none of these. The joy of living runs through his poems and short stories like a shout in the blood. In a first novel, Author MacMahon, 42, casts a glad eye on youth, and on a time in the mid-'20s when "lives were so thronged with small beauties that you wouldn't think 'twas sons an' daughters of the flesh we were, but children of the rainbow dwellin' always in the mornin' of the world!"

The children of the rainbow are 20-year-old Ches Macnamara, a saddler's son, and his friend Finn Dillon, whose studded belt marks him as "Prince of Cloone," the tiny village in which they live. Poor men's sons, they have only words to squander, but the words are never counterfeit. They buy belief in the small beauties that rouse Ches and Finn, e.g., the quicksilver grace of a hare giving a pair of pelting hounds the slip, the brotherly ritual of turf-cutting in the broil of a summer sun, the benedictions of the parish priest at the church of Mary Without Stain.

Young Fingertips. Finding reason enough for their lives in the ways of Cloone, Ches and Finn pick up the rhyme of it from the old folks. There is Brink-o'-the-Grave, midwife and layer-out of the dead who can still keen the ancient Gaelic laments; Lord Caherdown, the bogus aristocrat and tosspot; and Old Font, the village Boswell. "The night our local member of Parliament threw the mace at the Speaker of the British House of Commons ... to call attention to the wrongs of Ireland," recalls Old Font, "we lighted bonfires here in Cloone an' held cheerin' till it whitened for day in the eastern world."

As the sap of young blood rises, Ches and Finn do their share of "kissin' and bleedin' like the Cloonies." When the light is doused on a picnicking foray into a sea cave, Ches feels the touch of a woman's hand. "The fingertips of my right hand then encountered the woman's breast. The touch was fugitive: yet how sweet it was when the fingertips were young and the touched breast, too, was young." But the girl is English and wealthy as well, and before the two fall fairly in love, her father's gamekeeper trounces Ches and Finn for gaffing salmon in a shallow stream on the family estate.

Who's James Joyce? Finn's taste of love is more bitter. He worships Shoon Lawlee, a gingery colleen with almond-shaped eyes. She spurns him, and flounces off to the big world, only to come home pregnant and die. Finn buries the sting of it in underground work for a united Ireland. In the end he is hanged, and Ches gets his princely belt, only to see Cloone razed by fire.

The plotline of Children of the Rainbow is not its lifeline: that is in the glow of living that runs through the book. Novelist MacMahon escapes the twin vices of Irish fiction, blarney and bathos, and he writes about his Ireland as if he had never so much as heard of Dublin's James Joyce and the sad, dark view he took of it all.

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