Books: Purblind Furies

AN END AND A BEGINNING (315 pp.)—James Hanley—Horizon Press ($3.95).

James Hanley is the kind of Irishman who gives the impression that his life has been a knockdown, drag-out fight with reality. To enter his literary world is to enter a dark room in which at first the sparse furniture seems made of human bones. But as the slow light comes up through the long narrative, it is made clear that the ribs on the wall are a hatrack, that the upended coffin is a wardrobe and the skull under the bed is a more commonplace utensil.

Peter Fury appears in this strange novel as a shade rendered vague by 15 years served in a British prison. His character is as shapeless as the slops they issued him at the prison gate, and his condition as hopeless as the five shillings in his pocket. Slowly, as the Irish say, it is “let on” that Peter was a “dismantled Roman wreck,” having studied unsuccessfully for the priesthood; that his father was a seaman, his mother a pious termagant, his brother a “great, rearing, clumsy bucko.” Why was Peter in jail? The question involves a real novelist’s art—the reverse of the whodunit, which is to disclose the crime and disguise the motive. Halfway through the book, when all the motives are clarified, Peter’s crime is disclosed: he has killed a woman and stuffed her mouth with banknotes.

The woman was a moneylender, but Peter Fury’s crime was different from that of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. He did not kill out of pride but from shame and pity. He had been marked for the priesthood by his mother, and her merciless determination to pay for his education had led him not to the altar, but to the loan shark’s table. After getting out of prison, he finds that all the members of his family have died or been scattered. He lives on in a desolation of scene and spirit that the French, under the fashionable name of existentialism, have jazzed up as something to be talked about; here it is something to be felt. Fury rejects, out of his own dumb innocence, every kind of forged card of identity offered him. He finds himself redeemed in a trance of love. That part of the book is pure corn—a simple and nourishing product.

Among novelists, James Hanley, 57, is a rare bird of dark plumage. A child of the Dublin slums, he educated himself between odd jobs (railway porter, cook, butcher, postman), went to sea and found no romance in it. His history and temperament have preserved him from the British novelist’s preoccupation with class and the detail of social life. He writes with no special idiom or accent about the human condition. Hanley has been obsessed by his purblind Furys for a quarter of a century. (This volume is the fifth installment of their saga, the third to be published in the U.S.) Those who treasure the art of fiction above entertainment will read An End and a Beginning with the respect and attention given to a somber passage of music.