Nightlines

Admirers still lamenting his loss to filmdom (The Crying Game) will cheer Jordan's (The Dream of a Beast; A Night in Tunisia) return to literary fiction, for Nightlines should propel him into the front ranks of contemporary Irish writers. Grounded in Ireland's ambiguous neutrality during WWII and in the Spanish Civil War, Jordan's novel is essentially a love triangle with a peculiar twist: two of the participants are father and son. The third is Rose, a piano teacher who arrives at the family house in Bray after the death of narrator Donal Gore's mother and triggers an unspoken battle between Donal and his father, an ex-minister in Ireland's troubled Free State government (which lasted from 1921 to 1937). Donal and Rose become involved, but the relationship seems to end when, having already betrayed his father's strongly held political principles by fraternizing with the IRA, Donal leaves Ireland to join anti-Fascist forces in Spain. Avoiding execution through the intercession of an anonymous Irish official he believes is his father, Donal befriends a German officer who arranges passage home in return for a promise to contact the IRA with a view to arranging an arms shipment. Back in Ireland, Donal finds his father wheelchair-bound and mute after a stroke, resumes his affair with Rose--now his stepmother--and waits for instructions from Germany. Jordan's highly controlled first-person narrative gracefully evokes the moral uncertainty of the period and, despite occasional overwriting, the novel remains a moody, passionate and entirely compelling examination of Ireland's equivocal past. (Sept.)