The End of the Hunt.

Near the beginning of Thomas Flanagan's The End of the Hunt, a novel of the Irish Troubles of 1919-1922, there is a brilliantly constructed scene in which the principal female character, Janice Nugent, witnesses the summary execution of a British collaborator by the IRA. It is brilliant in its management of perspective, of what is seen at a distance and up close, of pieces of visual information seen at first as fragmentary and random until they cohere in a climax of horror.

A train bound westward from Dublin to Galway carries Janice Nugent in first class and, in second class, a nondescript man in a gray suit attended by a squad of the Royal Irish Constabulary or RIC. During a stop in a small town, a "flying column" of Republicans manages to disarm the RIC and capture the man they were guarding. In short order, the Republicans' commanding officer shoots the man dead before Janice Nugent's eyes, and, as they flee, she impulsively runs out to kneel over his corpse, with its gray suit still pressed and neat under a head and neck reduced to bloody pulp. As she learns later, the dead man was an expert bank examiner named Bowers brought in by the British to trace and confiscate the Republicans' illegal funds.

The scene is tightly restricted to Janice Nugent's point of view, and it begins to unfold in the horrified expression of the conductor as he looks over her shoulder out of the first-class carriage window to the approaching gunmen. That window serves as the frame for what follows. Janice turns and sees the gunmen cross from right to left, followed by a young farm boy who turns out to be their commander.

The frame of the window is violated when this leader sees the conductor's hand moving to an overhead alarm cord and abruptly steps into the carriage and orders him to stop. The permeability of the little proscenium arch of the carriage door, the gunman's good manners as he apologizes to Janice for the disturbance caused by this "military action," and the humanizing, concrete detail of his wiping his mouth with the back of his hand convey with wonderful narrative economy the fact that she, and we, are implicated in the scene that we witness. When the gunman shoots his prisoner, outside once again and framed by the window, it is Janice who violates its boundary as she screams and runs to kneel by the fallen Bowers, looking closely and forcing us to look at the consequences of the two gun shots that killed him.

And then we move far back from the scene to a perspective that includes the future of Janice's love affair with Christopher Blake, a propagandist for the Republican movement to whom she told the story of this day, and the future of the Troubles that were ushered in by this and similar raids throughout Ireland. The individual event is resolved into the context of a tragic history in a way that feels just right, morally and aesthetically. Yes, we say to ourselves--and can almost imagine the author saying as he wrote it--that is what this random-seeming, jerky, violent action finally meant.

But here is a temptation, and the frequency with which Flanagan succumbs to it is the basis of my main complaint against this well-written and largely conceived novel. The resolution of the individual act into the significant form of history is just too easy. It is like playing a subdominant chord followed by the tonic chord on the piano. Those of us who cannot play the piano know how bewitching and false the sense can be that we have made a significant musical statement when we complete this elementary sequence. Or, to use a more relevant analogy, consider how the visual experience of driving is reformulated--and formalized--by the rear view mirror.

Too often Flanagan has recourse to history as an organizing principle, to the fact that the events that rise to meet us can also be recalled as past and,

simply because of that, as part of a significant order. Too often we are told that years later X would recall these words (or events) and would realize etc., etc. When Robert Frost considered his choice between two roads, he promised himself that he would tell "with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence," that his choice had made "all the difference." Like Flanagan, Frost says that passing time confers meaning, but, unlike Flanagan, he pokes fun at himself for doing so because that meaning may be spurious.

The practical consequence of this is that too often Flanagan's book becomes a chore to read. It becomes hard to separate one anecdote or character from another because they are held together only by that easy appeal to history. This is a shame because there is so much that is vivid and memorable and morally deep in the novel. The blend of historical characters (Michael Collins, Cathal Brugha, Eamon De Valera, Winston Churchill, and Lloyd George) with fictional characters is very effective. But with the exception of Janice Nugent, the fictional characters do not always emerge as forcefully from the page.

I know a man whose potentially romantic connection to a young Irish woman was abruptly terminated when he confessed to an admiration for Churchill. Read this novel and you will see why.

In particular the novel's use of violence is morally judicious. Like Janice Nugent bending over the dead bank examiner, we must look at the sickening mess left by the Republican gunman and deny the glamour lent to him by patriotic balladeers. Two striking instances of this are the story of "Bloody Sunday" when the Irish revolutionaries wiped out a British spy ring in Dublin, and the account of the last, exhausted, meaningless rounds of the civil war between the Republicans and the Free State government in 1922.

Finally, there is an authoritative saltiness of dialogue and a sharpness of scenic atmosphere throughout that make episodes stand out in the reader's memory. One that comes to mind is the desperate conference between the Irish delegates to the Anglo-Irish peace negotiations in which the course for civil war was set with a deadline passed and the blackness of the London midnight pushing in on them through the windows of No. 10 Downing Street. This goes a long way to make up for the structural flaw that keeps these episodes from cohering into a finally satisfying whole.