Irish Mousetrap

SCHOOL FOR HOPE (242 pp.)--Michael McLaverty--Macmillian ($3.50).

Literate Irishmen like to recall the days when their country used to toss huge logs --Joyce, Yeats, Synge--on the fires of 20th century literature. Last month Dublin's Irish Times keened over the current era of matchstick prose and poetry: "Search the horizon as we will, we can see no budding poet, no young incipient novelist . . . The Irish literary Hamlet has expired; the rest is silence." The horizon-searching Irish Times has apparently overlooked a 44-year-old Belfast schoolteacher named Michael McLaverty, who is admittedly no Hamlet, but whose novels make first-rate kindling for a homely, old-fashioned literary fire.

In Truth in the Night (TIME, Sept. 3, 1951), McLaverty found the makings of tragic dignity in a nagging wife and common scold. In School for Hope, he plants a young schoolmarm's heart with love and self-confidence after thawing out its dark doubts and fears.

Nora Byrne is a girl with a past. Her mother and sister have died of TB. One young man has already jilted her over her "weak stock." Fearful of rousing the peasant horror of TB in the small Irish town to which she has come as a teacher, Nora resolves to tell no one her secret.

The aging ladies with whom she rooms are a sweet-and-sour pair of spinster sisters. The sour one treats embroidery as the first law of life, but the sweet one clucks over Nora like a mother and puts in a word now and then about Peter Lynch, the headmaster at Nora's school, and what a nice husband he would make.

Before long Peter is putting in a good word for himself. At 40, he lives with a devoted spinster sister, who intends to hang onto her bachelor brother for dear life, and for life. Tired of fencing with her own love, Nora tells Peter about the TB jinx, and he waves it aside to propose.

But his jealous sister now has the secret weapon she wants. Before the next day is out. the first mother pounds on the schoolhouse door sputtering about "galloping consumption." Sick at heart, Nora takes to her bed half-convinced that the family curse has indeed caught up with her. And now the kindly village priest appears, trying to get Nora back on her feet.

School for Hope shuns brogue but catches the lilt of Irish talk, skirts bathos but dips candidly into human feelings. In its quiet, pastoral way, it celebrates nature as well as human nature. No more pretentious than a mousetrap, it captures the novelist's most elusive mouse--a little bit of life.

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