Book Review : A Complex Pattern of Irish Trouble

No Country for Young Men by Julia O’Faolain (Carroll & Graf: $19.50)

Would that the battling factions in Northern Ireland could coexist peacefully as the disparate strands in Julia O’Faolain’s novel. There are two distinct stories here, held together by sheer willpower and skill.

The first and more original is an account of events in the 1920s, when Ireland was torn by rifts and passions intense as those rending the country today. Fifty-five years ago, Judith Clancy was a girl in her teens, daughter of a family so deeply involved in the Troubles that a brother was killed in the fighting, her sister’s fiance imprisoned and her widowed father embittered and remote. Now in 1979 Judith is a frail and ailing nun, about to be expelled from the convent that has been her haven for more than half a century. The order has been secularized, the younger members eagerly exchanging their cells and habits for city apartments and tailored suits, preparing to enter the world as liberated social workers and teachers. “We shall be going to the people,� triumphed Sister Mary Quinn, “living in manageable units and acting as the shock troops of the Lord.�

Because there is no place in that plan for the likes of Sister Judith, the elderly nuns have been returned to their families like lost parcels; Sister Judith sent to live in Dublin with a grandnephew and niece who barely know her. Though in some cases arrangements were made for superannuated nuns to be cared for by their more vigorous sisters, Sister Judith cannot be accommodated so readily. She presents special problems, having entered the convent in a mentally anguished state after witnessing an incident terrible enough to unhinge her mind. Though a series of shock treatments restored her reason and enabled her to teach kindergarten, advancing age has undone the therapy.

Tormenting Memories

At 75, Sister Judith is disoriented and fuddled, “a bad 75,� desperately trying to regain the memories still tormenting her. “I feel,� Reverend Mother said to the grand-nephew Michael O’Malley, “that it would be misleading to describe her as disturbed . With us, she fitted in, had her little habits, friends . . . what sort of institution would suit her. We will provide fees up to a reasonable rate.�

Michael hasn’t been able to think that far ahead. His wife has left him, taking herself and their 14-year-old son Cormac off to England. The truth of it is, Michael is a lush, and Grainne O’Malley has been staying with a friend who runs a home for battered wives. Though not physically abused, Grainne has gone away to sort things out; to decide whether or not to divorce Michael. When he’s landed with Sister Judith, Grainne willingly returns, a touch of the martyr being an O’Malley family trait. Grainne is still in love with Michael, remembering how desperately she’d wanted him when she was at finishing school in Rome and he studying opera there, an Irish tenor with the voice of an angel and at least a few graces to match.

Now the voice is gone and Michael has a footling job with the Heraldry Commission, but no matter. The O’Malleys had prosperous woolen mills, and Michael’s uncle, who inherited the lot, pays Michael a stipend. With that and the income from the Commission, the family lives well enough, Dublin not being an exorbitant city. The impact of Sister Judith upon this small troubled household is superbly managed; resentment, kindness and duty combine in fine ironic scenes full of humor and compassion.

The precarious accord is shattered by the entrance of James Duffy, an American academic who arrives to research a fund-raising film for the Irish Republican cause, a documentary on survivors of the Troubles. Duffy has gotten the job through a chance meeting with an old school friend, Larry O’Toole, and jumped at it. Duffy’s teaching contract had not been renewed and he was in the mood for a change from university life and from Therese, who had once been his professor and was now his wife, having altered not at all in her attitude by switching roles. The heart and soul of the proposed film is “American intervention in the fight for Irish freedom,� designed to appeal to Irish-American purses. “There’s a parallel with Israel today,� O’Toole assures the dubious Duffy. The hero of this film is to be an actual American named Sparky Driscoll who’d gone to Ireland in 1922 on a fund-raising mission and been killed by Orangemen in the north.

Of course, it’s none other than Sparky Driscoll himself who was closely connected to the Clancy family so long ago, a device bringing the American Duffy straight to Sister Judith and her fragmentary recollections. Of course, Sister Judith is now in residence at the O’Malley house, where Grainne is looking after her great-aunt and her disintegrating marriage.

Intermingled page by page, knitted up in patterns complex and original as an Aran sweater, are the stories of Sister Judith as a young girl and Grainne O’Malley and James Duffy here and now. Back and forth these tales go, blending and breaking apart into separate designs; contemporary passion and bygone adventure. Told with a marvelous sense of the sights, sounds, personalities and rhythms of Irish life as it was and remains, the novel could be summed up by the traditional Irish toast to expatriates:

Health and long life to you

The woman of your choice to you

Land without rent to you

And death in Erin.