THE FIRST DAY OF FRIDAY

Another of Honor Tracy's forays into the Irish Republic, this ninth book, one of several devoted, amusingly, to Irish demonology, is essentially a story about the servant problem. Here, the problem reaches its fullest expression in the person of one Atracta Smith, a devout but mindless Catholic, lodged like a tick with her incredible triplets in the Protestant decaying household of Michael Duff and his demented mother. The Duffs, along with a few others of their intractable kind, are landed but impoverished gentry, in Ireland for centuries, but as alien to the Irish mentality as only Englishmen can be. Mainly concerned with Duff's efforts to be rid of Atracta (she has been fired 19 times but regards her employer's curses and oaths as a kind of wooing), the novel is also a very funny exaggeration of the deviousness of this particular Anglo-Irish community. Of course there's no hope for Duff or for any of his breed. They will just have to struggle on. The Atractas win the day though in their wily, benumbed way they're scarcely aware of the battle.