THE BODHRAN MAKERS

Poverty and the Church-led attack on Celtic traditions force 1950's Irish farmers into exile—in a rich, poignant if occasionally heavy-handed novel (first published in 1986 in Ireland) from Keane, who writes a column for the New York-based Irish Echo. In rural Dirrabeg, farmers work hard cutting turf and raising a couple of cows or pigs, but it's not easy keeping up much less getting ahead, especially when relatives are in desperate need—but as Donal Hallapy reassures his wife before taking hard-to-spare fuel and groceries to his sister and her children, ``We never died a winter yet.'' One bright spot in the year is the ``Wren'': stepdancers and musicians—including Donal, who plays the traditional goatskin drum, the ``bodhr†n''—travel around in costume collecting contributions that pay for an all-night ``wrendance.'' The authoritarian parish priest in the town of Trallock, however, considers the wrendancers not just drunker pagans but competitors for money and loyalty; he resolves to crush the old customs—as well as an excellent but unorthodox rural teacher and a couple of budding romances between single men and married (though long-abandoned) women. What ensues is not only a struggle between Catholic and pagan but also between classes, between town and country. Trallock emerges as an oppressive place without privacy or compassion. Ultimately, ironically, villagers like Hallapy—as well as sympathetic priests—find their only chance for dignity in emigration to the enemy country, England. A thorough, pained, loving account of a lost world—with the novel itself an act of cultural survival.