Tales from the Twilight

Two LOVELY BEASTS (274 pp.)--Liam O'Flaherty--Devin-Adair ($3).

In the days when the terror of death and betrayal lay round every corner, Liam O'Flaherty described Ireland's troubles with a searing directness that has rarely been equaled. Now the Black & Tans, and the Constabulary, are long since out of the country, and that once vociferous rebel has outlived his rebellion.

In this collection of rustic short stories, Liam O'Flaherty finds himself in the uneventful void of an Ireland at peace, with only the piping curlews, the fragrant bogs, the blue hills and the boneheaded peasantry for his inspiration. Typical is his story of The Challenge. A drunken tinker stands in a Connemara market place after a fair, offering to tear the living heart out of any Connemara gouger who will fight him. A few feet away a young Connemara man offers to crucify any tinker living. The two bawl insults at each other till the Civil Guards arrive, then meekly break it up without laying a finger on each other.

In The Bath, the hero is a prosperous barrister who winds up a night of revelry in a country inn a hundred miles from Dublin, and the next morning, half-dressed, badly in need of a pickup, lectures the peasantry in the bar on gentlemanly behavior. Another story tells how little Jimmy holds the sheep still while his mother shears them, watches her spin the wool into white thread, goes with her to leave the yarn at the weaver's house, and finally watches the tailor work the finished cloth up into a suit. Then comes the punch line: "The little suit fitted perfectly and on the following Sunday Jimmy was the envy of all the other village boys as he went to church."

Little Jimmy is not even a distant relation of Nolan, the terrifying and terrified Judas of The Informer, or of the cold blooded Killer-Philosopher Michael McDara of The Assassin. In the intellectual twilight of the placid, humdrum Ireland that De Valera made, Liam O'Flaherty has become all quaintness and whimsy--and a little lost.

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