Books: Hate In Ireland

TRUTH IN THE NIGHT (218 pp.)—Michael McLaverty—Mocm/7/an ($3).

“God writes straight with crooked lines,” muttered an old woman of the island as she poked her peevish fire. In her roundabout way, she was meaning Vera Reilly and Martin Gallagher and she was right in at least this much, that no human hand” could make straight the vexatious scribble of their lives.

Vera is an Irish mainland girl who married an island boy expressly to escape a home she detested, only to discover that she liked her new home little better. Now that her husband is dead, she sees Martin as her new escape. But Martin has been to the mainland and has come back to his island with the knowledge “that the more we travel the more rootless we become.” Truth in the Night is Michael McLaverty’s story of their troubled courtship and tragic marriage, a tale as bleak as the rocky slopes and the grey loughs of its Irish scene, and one as nearly perfect as any ever written of its minor Irish kind.

Vera’s Bubble. The trouble with Vera is that she doesn’t really like herself, but rather than admit it, she has blown a big, pleasant bubble of egotism about herself. The least touch of reality, as Vera well knows, will collapse her flimsy shelter; so she lives in dread and hatred that slowly encompass almost everybody and everything on the island.

She hates her first husband’s family because they “interfere” with the way she is raising her daughter; actually, she hates them because their natural friendliness is a living reproach to her unnatural hostility. She hates the hired boy on Martin’s farm because, she says, he is a foundling bastard; truth is, she hates him because Martin loves him, because she needs every last breath of Martin’s approval to keep her bubble full-blown.

When Martin resists her idea of moving to the mainland, Vera takes to relentless nagging. She insults his friends, drives the hired boy off the island, even neglects and abuses her own daughter, the one thing truly dear to her. In the end, the daughter dies, partly because of her mother’s carelessness in a crisis. Shock and a miscarriage kill Vera too—but not before her bubble has burst, and she sees herself as she is and life as it must be lived.

“This Was It.” “I was spoiled,” she sobs on her deathbed. “I was bitter and heartless, but if God allows me to live a while, I’ll try to undo it all. . . I lived for what was to come, and in my foolishness didn’t know that this was it.”

The man who can make a universal tragic figure of a common scold is no ordinary wordster. Irishmen know Michael McLaverty, 42, a teacher in a Belfast parochial school, as one of their finest contemporary writers. U.S. readers, because of the strong local coloration of most of McLaverty’s stories, have been slow to take him up.

Truth in the Night is quiet and grave in pace. It will never shoot to the top of the bestseller list, but it will please a lot of people who find their way to it.