Shindy About Nothing

THE QUIET END OF EVENING

by HONOR TRACY 241 pages. Random House. $6.95.

In a string of novels that began in 1956 with The Straight and Narrow Path, Honor Tracy has made a particular corner of Ireland her own. It might be called County Farce. It lies just this side of the Dire Straits, along the border of Blarney. It is peopled with grotesques, inanimate as well as animate: crumbling mansions where the plumbing has a will--but not a constitution --of iron; a Hereford bull that for reasons of its own sits down in a kitchen, blockading the stove; an alcoholic postman who carelessly stuffs mail into a tree stump, then thinks to bring the practice into line with regulations by carving the words post box in the bark.

In such a realm, as a character in this latest Tracy novel reflects, "the declared friend was the secret foe. What looked like perfect peace was in truth an endless, confused shindy about nothing of any importance."

All of which is an accurate enough synopsis of Evening. The setting is Inishnamona, a peninsula that becomes an island when its residents blow up the causeway to the mainland in a short sighted gesture of independence that ends by cutting off the vital tourist trade.

The book's episodic narrative grows out of the resulting disasters that pile on the local populace -- especially on Heroine Sabina Boxham, whose brother wants to sell the old family estate.

Honor Tracy has made this comic territory so much her own that it no longer bears much resemblance to the Ireland on the map or in the daily headlines. Evening lacks the satiric bite of her earlier Irish novels, yet still provides diverting summer reading. But that creaking sound the reader notices may not be the hammock. It may be the plot.

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