Man Among Boys

THE FEAST OF LUPERCAL (246 pp.)--Brian Moore--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.75).

More or less to the measure of The Wearin' o' the Green, the following verse, illustrated by schoolboy art, was inscribed on the walls of the jakes (John) at Saint Michan's College, near Belfast:

Now boys a dear

and did you hear

the news that's going round

Dev and Cuff have had a fight

cause Cuff's wee niece stayed out all night

and they say Dev put out the light . . .

Dev is Diarmuid Devine, B.A., English master at Saint Michan's and Cuff (socalled for his swift classroom rabbit punch) is his seedy senior colleague, Timothy Stanislaus Heron, M.A., whose raveled gown flaps behind him "like broken black wings." According to Novelist Brian Moore, many moral Waterloos are lost on the playing fields of Saint Michan's. It is not a progressive school; in fact it is the most distressful college that has been seen since Dotheboys Hall. By confession and the cane, the clerical masters rule a cowed proletariat of boys and a middle class of lay masters. Dev may hand out "nippers" (cane on the hand) to his boys when they muck up a stanza from Shelley's To a Skylark or cannot explain the meaning of the Feast of Lupercal (a Roman fertility rite*), but he walks in fear of Father Alphonsus McSwiney, Dean of Discipline, a clerical careerist and bully whose belief it is that "no boy [is] stouter than a good cane" and that a man is, after all, only a layman. Dev knows less about fertility rites than the boys. At 37, he has never made love to a woman ("It was the education in Ireland, dammit, he had said it many a time ... it was a matter of ignorance, pure and simple").

These circumstances, and the great grey circumstance of Belfast itself, where the Catholic Irish tread with resentful circumspection amid the Protestant majority, compose the theater for Dev's tragedy. He is more vulnerable to scandal than an English princess when Cuff's young niece arrives from Dublin. Soon there is talk about Una and Dev. Love leads him to desperate measures: he buys a Tattersall waistcoat and takes dancing lessons. One awful night the high-spirited Una finds the answer to the question: "Where can we go on Sunday in Belfast?" She goes with Dev to his basement flat, and in a seduction scene of pathetic ineptitude, it becomes all too plain that he as well as she is a virgin. They stay that way.

Nevertheless both are ruined. She has slept the night on his floor. He has bought her drinks, and "a man who'd let a young girl get stocious drunk is almost as bad as a fornicator.'' Soon, the school knows, and the writing is on the jakes wall for Dev. Yet--most horrible touch of all--Dev is forgiven, and it is put about that "nothing" has happened. "If it wasn't so pitiful, it would be funny," says Una in an exact summary of the book itself. It is Dev's tragedy to remain a man among boys and a boy among men.

Brian Moore, an old boy of Saint Malachy's College, Belfast, which may or may not resemble Saint Michan's, is now a Canadian citizen living in Montreal. He showed mastery of his craft with his brilliant first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (TIME, June 18) and his second proves the feat no fluke. The danger for this potentially important novelist is that his success will encourage him to become a specialist in virgins--male and female--and in a country apparently heavily stocked with both types.

* Familiar by name at least to the boys of Saint Michan's from Antony's lines in Julius Caesar

"You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.