Bloody Irishmen

By Mayo Mohs

MORTAL FRIENDS by James Carroll

Little, Brown; 607pages; $10.95

Doom hangs on this grandly hewn novel like fog on the Cliffs of Moher. Colman Brady, a Tipperary bridegroom, waiting for the dawn of his wedding day. wakes his brother and sister for a nocturnal trek. Their goal is "a rock shadow over the village, at once enchanting and threatening"--one of those mysterious neolithic monuments that mark the fringes of Western Europe, ancient altars still defying the new Christian God. Chilled, the two siblings retreat. Brady greets the sun alone with exhilarated hope. It is a false dawn. A chill grips Brady's life for four decades and 600 pages.

As Novelist James Carroll shapes it Brady wages his war against the fates over a vast and richly colored terrain, ranging rom the Irish rebellion of the early 1920s to the Kennedy era of the '60s. Brady plunges into the rebellion: he captains a bloody ambush and emerges as hero and cherished aide to the historical patriot Michael Collins, whose negotiating team he accompanies to England. But the resulting treaty triggers civil war at home, and Brady's family, save for infant Micko, is wiped out. Bitterly, Colman and son embark for America.

There he rides the coattails of a rising Boston politician named James Michael Curley. Because the Curley machine needs Boston's Italian North End in its pocket, Brady arranges a pardon for a notorious Sicilian Mafioso named Gennaro Anselmo. Dishonesty continues to lure Brady: he builds an insurance empire through which his new friend Gennaro sluices his racketeer's profits. Carroll's message is an old one: with such mortally dangerous friends, one needs no enemies. Time and again, the man who won his first fame by setting up an ambush is himself waylaid by his friends.

Throughout this long, vivid saga, Novelist Carroll thoroughly exploits the Ragtime device--an interplay of historical figures with fictional characters. The portraits of the authentic personae are intriguing, but the question recurs: Are they real? Bobby Kennedy blackmails Brady's son into planting a bug in Anselmo's office. Young Brady protests that "it's not legal." Replies the Attorney General:

"F--legal." The late Richard Cardinal

Cushing of Boston talks with the senior Brady about a dispensation so that his son can marry a Protestant. "I listen for the voice of God," says Cushing at one point, "but to tell you the truth, he don't speak my language. What I listen to mainly is pain." Warm words from a people's pastor, but did Cushing ever say anything like that? Did he, as the book also suggests, drown his painful illnesses in alcohol?

More troublesome is the fictive Curia

Cardinal Borella. It is easy to imagine Borella blithely exchanging a dispensation for a substantial "offering" earlier on in the book. But it seems vaudeville villainy when the Sicilian prelate, learning casually about young Brady's connection with Robert Kennedy's investigation, warns the Mafia in Boston.

Nevertheless, James Carroll -- an ex-priest but still a committed Catholic -- is not simply lashing out at his alma mater.

A basic affection for the church, wards and all, shines through. So does his priestly sense of morality, his conviction that not even a life of deepening compromise can ultimately elude the Hound of Heaven. Inside corrupt Colman Brady is a just man screaming to get out, and in the book's final, purging episode, he makes that desperate leap-- to save not his own soul but another's. Even at the end of a terrible trail of carnage, Carroll seems to be saying, there may be a glimmer of salvation.

-- Mayo Mohs

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.