The holy ground can be the place of one's undoing

Author: By Anna Mundow

Date: SUNDAY, January 25, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

How refreshing, then, to come across a thoughtful, unembittered Irish first novel that is a work of pure and impressive imagination. ``One Day as a Tiger'' by Anne Haverty is a delicate love story, a family tragedy, and a compelling psychological drama. Set in the distinctly undramatic agricultural midlands of County Tipperary, Haverty's home turf, the novel goes quietly and economically about its task of exploring the human heart and the heart of a region. Preferring not to make a racket or a political point, Haverty conveys the reality of a changing Ireland with poetic clarity and enormous compassion.

``I was never a chap who needed much explaining. And yet the most crucial acts of my life defy any reasonable explanation -- defy it, yet cry out for it. After all, you cannot ruin people's lives without attempting to explain why and how you did.'' When Marty Hawkins introduces himself, it seems that we have entered the dark territory charted by Patrick McCabe in his novel ``The Butcher Boy.'' A similarly unstable narrator is setting a recognizably ominous tone. Like McCabe's hero, Marty is a misfit, but there the resemblance mercifully ends. Haverty is not condemning us to see through the eyes of a homicidal lunatic; being inside this narrator's mind will be unsettling but not appalling.

Marty is, in fact, a promising Trinity College student. While his older brother, Pierce, farms the family land in the parish of Fansha, Tipperary, Marty researches 19th-century agrarian policy. When we meet him, however, the scholar has become a dreamer. And he dreams only of home. ``I could not bear anymore the thought of the flowering chestnut in the middle of the long field, and the pink hawthorn and the white hawthorn of Fansha . . . the pomp of summer to come going on without me.''

With Marty's return, the stage at Foilmore, the Hawkins farm, is set for tragedy. Kindly Pierce has married bewitching Etti (short for Goretti), and Marty is soon lingering in the fields to catch a glimpse of her. Romantic longing sharpens his sense of isolation in a homeplace that loses its magic at close quarters. ``Separated from them, platonic versions of . . . Fansha and Foilmore would whirl seductively in my head,'' he recalls. ``Returned to . . . mockingly they assumed the familiar bleakness of unrequited reality, while I wandered around the place like a rueful ghost, tricked and cheated.''

The midlands region has traditionally and unfairly been regarded as Ireland's bleak core and the ideal setting for its most depressing novels. County Longford, for example, will forever be associated with John McGahern's brooding cogitations. But Haverty corrects the injustice by describing the dreamy, undulating Tipperary landscape with lyrical economy. Of its bogland, for example, she writes ``A lazy bee was droning near at hand, and far off a curlew called. The heather under my head was spiny and springy and arid as sun-bleached bones. Flowers dry and delicate as tissue paper clinging to the dust.''

Only Patrick McGinley, in his 1983 novel, ``Foggage,'' conveyed Tipperary's soporific charms as memorably. And like McGinley, one of Ireland's finest and most underrated writers, Haverty's rendering of laconic rural dialogue is flawless. `` `'Tis hungry work, the bog,' said Laddy, `and no mistake.' ` 'Tis hungry work,' I echoed. `You can't beat the ham sandwich,' remarked Laddy. `You cannot,' said I. This is bog-talk, ceremonial and inevitable.'' To the unitiated, this may also sound like shamrockery, or warmed-over Flann O'Brien. But it is as accurate as it is comic.

Even minor characters are carefully observed. Old Laddy, a farm worker ``in his mid-week garb. Two halves of a suit, the coat blue and the trousers brown pinstripe, bony legs elegantly crossed, small feet in shiny cracked shoes. On Sundays, he dons a newer grey suit.'' The Frenches, faded gentry living in squalor, ``moping around with tepid cups of tea and scribbling short-lived plans with battered Biros into notebooks.'' Young Delaney, a neighboring farmer, is ``in his element out tearing with some heavy implement into a field'' while his farmyard is ``Strewn with the remains of industry and indecision.''

But Laddy and Delaney are relics of a more bucolic era. Change is palpable, even in Fansha, particularly when its emigrant youths return annually. ``In highly polished cars bearing foreign registrations, bashful aunties, boisterous uncles and old lads on sticks were ferried around to a refurbished abbey here, a new lounge-bar there.'' With the utmost delicacy, Haverty presents Marty as the touchstone for such change. Disoriented by his parents' sudden death, he also feels undeserving of their legacy. ``My present is not worthy of that past,'' he remarks. Haverty is making a subtle point about the ambivalent relationship of educated Irish youth to the land that shaped them, land that now feels like alien territory. But above all, she is telling a story that never falters, even in its final, heartbreaking chapters.

Just as McGinley's novels are incorrectly classified as ``romps,'' ``One Day as a Tiger'' has been mistakenly acclaimed by some British critics as ``magic realism.'' This is probably because of the role played by Missy, a genetically-engineered lamb, adopted and anthropomorphized by Marty. This mutant familiar serves the practical purpose of bringing Marty and the terminally dimwitted Etti together and hastens the novel's denouement. It is not, however, an ambassador from beyond. In Haverty's Tipperary, livestock is livestock.

The novel's title is borrowed from a Tibetan proverb: ``It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.'' But Haverty the realist employs that proverb ironically: Marty's one tigerish act is not a courageous engagement but a childish, doomed escape attempt. Anne Haverty is too subtle and mature a writer to let her characters off with either heroic or mystical redemption. Instead, she has written a blessedly contradictory novel, too human to be uplifting and too beautiful to be depressing.

ANNE HAVERTY, from ``One Day as a Tiger''