The Killing Frost

Four very different Irishmen, each steering his separate course into the conflagration of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, animate this convincing, posthumously published first novel. Con Gallagher, the proud, rugged son of a tenant farmer, returns to rural Carewstown to have his revenge on the land-hungry bullies who burned his house and drove him out years earlier. Alec Carew, a British intelligence officer and heir to the dwindling estate of Gallagher's former landlord, seeks to quash the rebellious Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the promise of knighthood induces loutish William Durkin, the affluent publisher of a Dublin scandal sheet, to help Carew. Meanwhile aged Myles Burke, a hero of both the Fenian uprisings and the American Civil War, rejoins the rebels as much to die gloriously as to keep his cause alive. Although Hayden's prose waxes theatrical at times, generally it suits the bloody period chronicled here, successfully evoking the rat-infested slums of Dublin, decaying Carewscourt manor, the gore of battle. And Hayden, a native of Dublin who died in 1989, dextrously allows politics to proceed from the circumstances and personalities of his characters, rather than vice versa. (Mar.)