This richly varied and beautifully produced collection [The State of Ireland] puts Benedict Kiely in the front rank of modern short-story writers. While he follows from such Irish masters as Moore and Joyce, O'Connor and O'Faolain, the temper and manner of this northern Irishman's writing are very different from his predecessors'. Though once destined for the priesthood, Kiely secularized his outlook so thoroughly that he can express a fascination for women and their lives and a guiltless pleasure in the attractions of sex that are never undercut by any note of damp Jansenist remorse. His sense of society is democratic and complicated, reflecting the experience of growing up during the 1930s and World War II in a town, Omagh (County Tyrone), of a British province that was half Catholic and half Protestant and that was used as a staging area by American troops making ready for D-Day. Later on, after he had been in and out of seminary and launched a Dublin career as a novelist and journalist, he became a sort of Irish Charles Kuralt, junketing frequently to the remotest areas of the island, from where he sent articles to one of the Dublin dailies on local topography, history, and traditions. The keen sense of place in Kiely's stories and his animated—one reviewer has called it “Druidic”—rendering of the charms of Irish landscape, river and lough, mountain, bog, and glen, stem from a singularly intimate knowledge of his subject.

Another distinction of The State of Ireland is that it is political in the best sense. That is, the book is arranged to move from stories about private and domestic experience in Parts I to III toward a consideration in Parts IV and V of the severe problem of Northern Irish sectarian violence and the general Irish problem of which this violence is symptomatic. If there is an implied message to the embattled communities it would be Auden's “We must love one another or die.” It's clear Benedict Kiely would not give a tinker's dam for an Ireland whose divided parts had been yoked into spurious unity at gunpoint. Rather, his book's title alludes approvingly to Conor Cruise O'Brien's States of Ireland (1973), a work of liberal political analysis which urged postponement of the question of reunification until all factions and sects, north and south, had been thoroughly reeducated and the teaching of Irish history reformed and demythicized.

As for manner, Kiely typically employs a self-surrogate in a loose and fluid “autobiographical” narrative which may jump about in time from earliest childhood to full maturity from story to story, or even within a story. There is much quotation and buried quotation from all sorts of high- and lowbrow sources—Shakespeare and Robert Burns, Irish balladry and newspaper doggerel, pop songs and movie hits of the Ginger Rogers to Doris Day era—which may be interspersed with stunning bits of natural description laid out in the most elegant and crafted prose. The narrator of these stories is genial, sly, gregarious, and extroverted. He wants to party with the reader, just as a reader might imagine partying with the rather Falstaffian author appearing full-length on the back jacket, staring straight out at the viewer, with a cool, scrutinizing look from under wickedly arched eyebrows.

Or rather, he wants to perform for you because Benedict Kiely, man and boy, is a born performer. Take the little story, “The Night We Rode with Sarsfield,” which introduces the later Ulster story group in Part IV. The narrator recalls how as a small boy he used to go next door with his three sisters to visit a kindly Presbyterian couple, Willy and Jinny, and eat the delicious hot scones that Jinny baked. The two poor families, side by side, papist and Protestant, shared a common thatched roof over their attached dwellings. Once the youngster, coaxed to perform in Jinny's kitchen, bellowed out a fierce IRA song he'd just learned, then encored by reciting an old ballad celebrating Catholic resistance at the Siege of Limerick in 1690. His sisters were mortified, but Willy the Orangeman laughed his head off and even got quite entranced by the “good story, well-told,” of the ballad.

This tale of child life is a bit misplaced from its natural position in the collection just to make a point about the deterioration of Protestant-Catholic relations in the course of time. The next story, “Bluebell Meadow,” set in the 1930s, is about a Protestant boy and Catholic girl whose friendship and budding affection are wrecked by sectarian pressures. From the same town, they used to meet at a lovely small riverside park where she liked to read her book in good weather. He'd come by and make her gifts of fish when his luck was good and once gave her a few bullets for no particular reason. Their relation, however, is giving scandal to bigots of the town and she is warned by the local Orange Lodge grand master—a butcher when he's working—to stick to her own kind. Then she is summoned by the police to give testimony about the wretched bullets. The boy is thrown out of the B-Specials, a paramilitary Protestant force dedicated to the principle of “croppies lie down,” and the two young people end up not speaking when they pass each other on the street.

As for the way the park and town look now, why—

the children's swings and all the seats were gone, smashed some time before by reluctant young soldiers from the North English cities doing their national service. Repair work had been planned but then the bombings and murders began. [Now] the soldiers go about in bands, guns at the ready, in trucks and armoured cars. There are burned out buildings in the main streets—although the great barracks is unscathed—and barricades and checkpoints at the ends of the town. … Still, other towns are worse. Strabane which was on the border and easy to bomb is a burned-out wreck. And Newry, where the people badly needed shops and factories, and not ruins. And Derry is like Dresden on the day after.

It was ever so much better before, when the narrator of “The Little Wrens and Robins,” about to go to college in Dublin, would visit with his poetastering cousin, Ellen Lagan, who was dying of consumption, and listen to her recite the charming sentimental verses she tried to have published in the newspapers. Or she would just talk about culture and romance (“Freckled people are always great talkers and even illness could not stop her tongue”) while he indulged in sexual fantasies about the pretty servant girl in his mother's inn who'd walloped him when he tried kissing her. Other fine stories which blend life, death, comedy, and sex in a heady mixture are “A Great God's Angel's Standing,” “Maiden's Leap,” and the very subtle and beautiful “A Room in Linden.” “The Dogs in the Great Glen,” though finely written, is a bit Brigadoonish to my way of thinking, but the first story, “The Wild White Bronco,” about a town where the eccentric, the unsuccessful, and the unlucky are secure in the esteem and charitable concern of their more fortunate fellowtownsmen, is both wonderful and probable. For even the golden boy, Isaac, the Fusilier's son, “the best fighter our town ever had,” proves vulnerable and mortal when he falls fighting his way to the Rhine with a British unit during World War II.

Although Benedict Kiely is a Dublin author and Dublin wit there is only one Dublin story, “A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly,” but it is a good one. It features some excellent bawdry about the romance of a literary-minded Anglo-Irishman named Hunter with a Eurasian girl who is a second-generation Dublin tart and, in the opinion of many, the meanest whore in the city. Yeats and Maud Gonne—she by then a gaunt old lady wearing a black veil—put in a cameo appearance on a deserted street, and when Hunter, thinking to relive the Yeatsian romance, takes “Butterfly” on an excursion to the Hill of Howth (“Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train / Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head”), all hell breaks loose.

A few words of praise should be offered for the book's design and production, for Thomas Flanagan's affectionate, knowledgeable introduction, and for the striking black and white photographs, supplied by the Irish Tourist Board, which mark the five main divisions of the text. As both artifact and work of art the book is worth the money.