Irish : Ever After.

'Tis: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt (Scribner, 367 pp., $26)

The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World, by Thomas Keneally (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 736 pp., $35)

The Irish diaspora is a tale of such extraordinary complexity that even a crowd of monks, laboring in a sanctuary on some wind-blasted rock with access to all the resources of the Internet, would be sorely pressed to tell the entire tale.

The shape of the larger narrative is, of course, generally known. From the time of Elizabeth I until the early 1920s, the story of Ireland was the story of an oppressed majority. The English colonial settlers were a small fraction of the population of Ireland. And for centuries, this minority used force of arms, a corrupt legal system, religious division, and a snarling cynicism to maintain an iron grip on their stolen property.

To be sure, many of the Irish resisted; sporadically, they rose in foolishly brave rebellions that were put down savagely. But the English attacked the Irish spirit in other ways-with networks of spies and informers who made uncertainty part of the Irish character, and with the impositions of codes of manners intended to make the Irish feel permanently inferior. The urban Irish were forced to bend to the minority power, collaborate with it ("taking the king's shilling"), and surrender their language and religion, or be cast out to the margins of society. The immense numbers of rural Irish were deprived of property rights, education, and religious freedom, forced to subsist on the potato, while paying rents to English landlords and tithes to the Church of Ireland (which they did not attend). This vicious system was perfectly designed for maintaining power (Oliver Cromwell was one of Hitler's heroes), but it created a seething population. The calamitous British mismanagement of the 1846-52 famine removed from the Irish any temptation to believe in the myth of British justice. Hundreds of thousands of the Irish died; more than a million would cross the Atlantic, in desperation and hope, to America. That great migration changed the United States, and changed Ireland too.

"An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country," wrote Oscar Wilde in 1889, referring to Ireland, and this factor is the Irish-American, and his influence. To mature its powers, to concentrate its action, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic. At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses. What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.

In their separate ways, these two fine books confront the realities of exile, the long leaving of Ireland by Irish people. It is a measure of their value that they add new dimensions to the story without in any way inflating it, or reciting a mere catalogue of injuries.

Frank McCourt's book is a continuation of the personal story begun in his superb, and astonishingly successful, Angela's Ashes. Part of the harrowing, accumulative power of the first book lay in its clear-eyed focus on an Ireland from which the British had departed. For millions, that departure from 26 of Ireland's 32 counties removed a factor that had become a crucial part of the Irish character: a sense of the enemy. The Ireland of Frank McCourt's childhood was the Ireland of Eamon DeValera, the cold, autocratic politician who dominated Irish life for a half- century after Irish independence in 1921 (and who, like McCourt, had been born in New York). That is, it was the country of DeValera's peculiarly anti-modern utopian vision: rural, Catholic, neutral. The country was priest-ridden, oppressed by an obsessively puritanical censorship (you could buy whiskey, but not James Joyce), economically backward by design.

The gray bitter drizzle of the DeValera years, the emptiness and hardship, can be sensed in many of the stories of Frank O'Connor, in the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and in Angela's Ashes.

In 'Tis, McCourt tells the story of his escape from Ireland to that dreamed-of city of his birth, New York. He fled in 1949, with $40 in his pocket, 19 years old. He had left school after the eighth grade. He had bad teeth and infected eyes, conditions that serve as recurring motifs in this second memoir, perhaps symbolizing the damage done to him physically and psychologically in Limerick.

"The minute I made some money in America I'd have to rush to a dentist to have my smile mended," he writes. "You could see from the magazines and the films how the smile opened doors and brought girls running and if I didn't have the smile I might as well go back to Limerick and get a job sorting letters at the post office where they wouldn't care if you hadn't a tooth in your head."

We never learn when he had the bad teeth repaired. The same is true of his eyes, rimmed with caking yellow pus. At one point, he mentions conjunctivitis. It's as if in some deep recess of his Irish heart, he believes that fixing his teeth and his eyes would be a double sin of vanity. In New York, he finds work, almost immediately, through a priest with Democratic-party friends. He met the priest on the ship; later the priest would make a pass at him in a hotel room. At the Biltmore he is assigned to a menial job, sweeping up in the lobby. His American life begins.

Much of it is at first a social torment, a period of adjustment through which all immigrants must pass. He carries an American passport, but he has a Limerick accent. He is afraid to open his mouth-partly because of his teeth, partly because of the accent. He looks at college boys and girls in the Biltmore lobby and is sure they would laugh if he spoke to them. He carries around the permanent baggage of shame: ashamed that he only finished the eighth grade, ashamed because during the war his father chose to drink in England while his children starved in Ireland, ashamed because his all-too-human mother, Angela, fell in her loneliness and abandonment into the arms of an uncle. He can tell nobody in America any of this. Instead he continually thinks about what he wants to say, but doesn't. That interiorized impulse is the beginning of his vocation as a writer.

By insisting on the importance of the local, McCourt expresses many emotions felt by millions of other immigrants, of every nationality: solitude, bafflement, social clumsiness, inadequacy, the confusions of personal freedom, and the seesawing emotional pull of the country left behind. This memoir complements in many ways the story told by the fine Australian writer Thomas Keneally, author of 23 works of fiction including, most famously, Schindler's List.

The time is different; most of Keneally's history takes place in the 19th century. But woven subtly through his long, powerful, understated narrative are threads essential to the fabric of McCourt's work, and other accounts of the Irish diaspora: the feeling of apartness, of social dislocation, of the knowledge that the Irish could never- through any kind of oppression, seduction, or alchemy-become British.

As an Australian, Keneally correctly concentrates much of his work on the experience that the Irish were forced to undergo in that country so far from Ireland. He focuses his attention on several generations of Irish people who were sentenced to transportation to Australia by the British. The first group was made up of semi-anarchic Irish rebels called Ribbonmen, who in the 1830s resorted to violence against landlords and their properties. The second were part of the 1840s movement called Young Ireland, whose leaders were well educated and included a good number of Protestants. The third wave was composed of militants of the Fenian Brotherhood, established in 1858 with the goal of achieving independence for Ireland through any means necessary.

Clearly, Keneally has absorbed the vast primary-source literature of the period, and made use of much modern scholarship. But he also brings to this narrative his own special talents and vision. As a novelist, he is drawn to drama and conflict. He has a refined sense of place, evoking the beauty and grandeur of the Australian landscape as well as the squalor of prisons and Irish-American ghettoes.

He also is drawn to the contradictions in the cast of characters handed to him by history. One such character is John Mitchel. A Protestant member of Young Ireland, he was found guilty of seditious libel by a rigged jury in 1848 and transported to the Australian gulag. Mitchel was a gifted writer, a vitriolic polemicist, and a brave man. In 1853, he made a daring escape from the Australian penal colony, found his way to New York, offended almost everybody he met, and ended up as a defender of slavery. During the Civil War, he moved to Richmond and wrote propaganda for the Confederacy. He saw no contradiction in his fiery advocacy of freedom for the Irish and his insistence that slavery was good for black people. His contradictions were Whitmanesque, and novelist Keneally-while disapproving of his ideas-clearly savors him as a character.

Especially interesting is Keneally's masterfully compressed account of the Fenian movement in America. His account of the pathetic Fenian invasions of Canada is heartbreakingly funny, except for the corpses. Among the Fenians was the extraordinary John Boyle O'Reilly, an Irishman serving in the British army. Born near the legendary hill of Tara, symbol of lost Celtic glory, he was writing for the Drogheda Argus by the time he was 11. A member of the Tenth Hussars at 19-he was regimental boxing champion there-he was an active Fenian recruiter within a year. Three out of every ten members of the British army were Irish, and Fenians believed that these forces could be inspired to mutiny in the cause of independence. In 1866, all seemed ready. But the British discovered the plot through informers, and the uprising never occurred. O'Reilly was arrested, found guilty of treason, and transported for life to Australia. Three years later, he made a daring escape and went to America. In Boston, he had a distinguished career as a writer and editor of The Pilot. He remained a supporter of independence for Ireland, but unlike the pro-Confederate Mitchel made a connection between the beaten-down Irish and the newly free black Americans.

It is here possible only to suggest the density and richness of Keneally's work. Some might cavil with him over certain techniques more natural to the novelist than to the historian; he tries to imagine the lives of certain Irish men and women who left no records, and is forced to use such locutions as "he must have felt" and "he certainly would have known that . . . " Keneally's imaginings might irritate others; I consider them modest and reasonable, and part of the honorable enterprise of acknowledging a few of the anonymous millions who left Ireland.

Frank McCourt, in his personal and specific way, adds still more detail to the ongoing story of the Irish diaspora. Neither writer would presume to have written the final word on that subject. After all, nobody can.

Mr. Hamill is author of the memoir A Drinking Life. His biography of Diego Rivera will be published in October.