This second part of a proposed trilogy follows The Flood , also set in the little Irish village of Bridgeford in the 1930s. Broderick died before he had completed the revisions for this novel, and his publisher has endeavored to polish the manuscript into a book consistent with the author's intentions. No reader can be certain, despite these praiseworthy efforts, that occasional awkward passages owe as much to these circumstances as to the author's own stylistic lapses. The story is a good one: Canon Sharkey's old housekeeper suddenly dies, and when he replaces her with a sweet young thing who can cook like a charm but who is ``below canonical age'' (i.e., young enough to attract gossip), there is disapproval on both sides of the Atlantic. The canon is known in Boston because of an illegal sweepstakes he masterminds, and a minor Mafia figure whom the canon has more or less kidnapped has tipped off the Boston papers that the canon is employing a slut for a housekeeper. In fact, poor Maureen is innocent, and it's her amoral sister, Polly Pox of the next parish, who fits the bill. Broderick presents this material in a somewhat confusing manner, however, and he indulges in pages of dialect along the lines of ``Oh, id's nudding, Fadder, ony me aul palpiterations, dey do come on me terrible bad, bud ony for a few minnuts.per MS '' Yet the book has the power to delight as it evokes village life with its intrigues and secrets . If E. F. Benson had written Wheat that Springeth Green , the result would have been a lot like this. (Feb.)
Until his death in 1989, Broderick was one of the most reliable chroniclers of the divine comedy of small-town Ireland. This book rounds off a life work of a dozen well-received novels keyed, especially in dialog, to the endearing charms of the Ireland that was. Here, in a generic market town in the 1930s, Canon Sharkey funds a new church with an illicit sweepstakes. At once his housekeeper dies and a small-time American mobster appears to extort a percentage of the sweeps. Orchestrating a cohort of memorable Irish types, the Canon contrives to assimilate the mobster and to turn innuendo about his new housekeeper to his own advantage. The congenial treatment of frequently satirized social mores makes this an essential final volume wherever Broderick's work has found the readership it deserves.-- John Harrington, Cooper Union, New York
