Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Children's Books-Ages 7 to 14 GOODBYE, DOVE SQUARE, by Janet Mc-Neill (Little, Brown; $4.50); TROUBLE IN THE JUNGLE, by John Rowe Townsend (Lippincott; $3.75); THE LIVERPOOL CATS, by Sylvia Sherry (Lippincott; $3.95). Three fine books about domestic adventures-including murder-set in the slums of English cities. The writing is clear and fast paced, without ever talking down to the reader. Americans may be stumped by an occasional term-perhaps not by "tea" for supper, or "chips" for French fries, but certainly by "scuffers" for cops...
...that were not enough, June 16 is Bloomsday. It is a good time to reflect on the ways and woes of the Irish, and TIME asked Novelist Wilfrid Sheed to do so. Sheed is only part Irish (on his father's family's side). But as an English Catholic schoolboy and an American writer of quality (Square's Progress, The Blacking Factory and Pennsylvania Gothic), he has had the opportunity and inclination to observe the Irish, fondly and sharply, for years...
...even that statement would probably fetch you a fight in any decent Dublin pub. So before a word is said about the Irish character, let it be stated that very few Irishmen have it. The Irish character, if the truth be told, is a silly joke played on the English, and is only kept around for the sake of the tourists...
...made to look grotesque. Not so different from other people's legends perhaps, except in their very high quotient of mockery; but Ireland's history, or rather the lack of it, has decreed a strange long life to them. The gods turned eventually into English landlords, and later into American tourists; sex remained an object of death and terror; and the put-on was confirmed as the basic Irish style...
...Face of Another, a novel about a chemist with a burnt-out face who attempts to function behind a life mask he has fashioned for himself, is as direct as any contemporary exploration of the identity-crisis theme. The Ruined Map, his newest novel to be translated into English, involves the Japanese version of a traditional Western private eye, but the view is strictly from an Eastern slant. The suspense is stirred up metaphysically rather than neatly plotted. The landscape is always as delicate as it is ominous...