Ireland Without Tears
Never No More. By Maura Laverty. (Longmans. cos. 6d.)
Miss MAURA LAVERTY is a new writer, and her first book—memories of childhood in a village on the plain of Kildare—should certainly give great pleasure to a great number of readers. Always, in the train coming up from Munster to Dublin, one looked out eagerly for the enchanting, odd little town, Monastrevan, so grey and neat, with its canal and streams and bridges and its air of sweet tran- quillity ; but one never dreamt that behind its composed facade lay a region of such humours, oddities and charms as Miss Laverty now reveals to us. For the best of her book is that it is great fun, and that all its humour is fresh, broad, innocent and most accurately idiomatic. It abounds with life and with generous comedy, and it will be a poor heart that will not smile and draw refreshment from it ; for it is as true as it is gracious, and neither its quality of tenderness nor its flaws of sentimentality and something like gush can weaken its straight country realism or check its vigorous life.
The flaws are .those of the natural writer, and Miss Laverty has so much talent that she should look to them. Curiously, she imagines very badly ; she can record and remember brilliantly, but when she invents, truth forsakes her—for instance, when she makes a fanciful guess at why a local family called Carroll got the nickname " Shift," she plunges from her easy, native realism into the bathos and clichés of the amateur. But when she tells the local stories as she picked them up in the town or in Gran's kitchen, she just simply gives them " alive, alive-o." And she has heaps of good stories, of tinkers and shopboys and priests and I.R.A. men and " unfortunate" women. She has understanding, humour and irony, and an unusually strong regional sense ; her danger lies in fanciful- ness and in yielding to the apostrophic mood.
" Gran," with whom she lived on a small farm in Ballyderrig, is her heroine, and a very fine and strong on; well worth these generous memories ; wise, shrewd and distinguished of spirit—but also a cook in a million, apparentiy, and Miss Laverty's loving, detailed accounts of meals and dishes prepared in Ballyderrig kitchen make bitter-sweet but irresistible reading now! When " Gran " cooks supper for the turf-cutters or serves a Shrove Tuesday party, you just tighten your belt and read on in an agony of incredulous pleasure. Potato thump and creamed mushrooms and boxty-on-the- pan ! Well, autres temps autres moeurs, and Miss Laverty writes so well of food that she makes you enjoy the Sisyphean torture. And I long to ask her if " Gran " ever cooked a dish of " drisheen "? KATE O'BRIEN.
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