BOOKENDS

THIS is what is known to trade and criticism as an Irish novel," which means that the prose style is "poetic," that the narrative is threaded with "Irish mysticism," and that the here is a melancholy follow, walking in twilight and yellow fog, and meditating on old, unhappy far-off things. There is a thin and rather outre plot, not much narrative, but considerable dissection of mood and temperament.

If this seems like a cynical reaction toward the work of a writer who has been highly praised, it is a reaction not unmixed with perplexity. There are in fact two possible comments on "The Colored Dome," and the position of its author in Irish literature, but the choice between them depends on certain information which is not usually contained in the cover jacket blurb. One would like to know whether this book was written, as it was published, after its author's recent success. "Pigeon Irsh," or whether it is an early work issued on the strength of the previous one. It was "Pigeon Irsh," which this reviewer has not read, that gave Mr. Stuart his position of prominence among the younger novelists; if "The Colored Dome" is really its successor, that position must be held tentative.

The narrative concerns a young betting clerk who volunteers, in a moment of national crisis, to die in the name of "Anonymous Ireland." Put into a cell with the leader of the rebellion, he discovers that the leader is not a man, but a woman in disguise. The resulting complications destroy the happiness which he had found in the prospect of sacrifice; when he is released instead of being shot, readjustment is impossible, and leads him at the end of the book to a situation of deliberately chosen incongruity.

Put as baldly as that, the story of "The Colored Dome" sounds sufficiently empty, and the false, forced stylization of the author's prose does not much improve it. If this book is in reality an early experiment of Mr. Stuart, on e can only let it go at that, with the wish that it had not been published. But if it is not, if it really is a legitimate specimen of the contemporary Anglo Irish novel, then one can only regret it as a symptom of the distortion of a singularly original tradition of style, for a long time one of the most distinguished in English, and now apparently reduced to a formula and a trick.