Ballads' End

By John Skow

With The End of the Hunt (Dutton; 627 pages; $24.95), a novel that sifts the moral and political wreckage left by the Irish civil war of 1921, Thomas Flanagan brings to a rueful close his vast, intelligent, unfailingly civilized trilogy about Ireland's struggle to rid itself of English domination. Here as in the earlier novels, The Year of the French and The Tenants of Time, there is a powerful sense that the future is watching over one's shoulder. Unlike the characters, the reader knows that all the heroism and treachery, all the endless talk and rising-of-the-moon balladmaking, will end without result because the English will not be dislodged.

But French deals with an incident in 1798, and Tenants begins with uprisings in the 1860s; the foreknowledge of history merely colors these works with an agreeable wash of irony. The End of the Hunt seems more tragic because the political failures it describes lead directly to the recent bloody decades, when the balladmakers have given up but the bombers are still at work.

Flanagan's main observer this time is Janice Nugent, a well-born Catholic widow. She falls in love with a scholar on the run from the British who is an aide to the implacable revolutionary Michael Collins. It is a period of shaky nerves in great houses, of informers, of men in overcoats lurking about with revolvers, of Dublin, as ever, "a notorious whispering gallery of rumor, malice, speculation, spiced always and made palatable, such was the claim, by wit and vivacity. Or bad manners passing as such." It is a time that devours its heroes, not always neatly. All this makes the author's concluding study of Irish history a fine, smoldering narrative, even if he can't provide an end to the hunt.