RITUAL OF BLOODLETTING

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33857, 31 May 1975, Page 10

RITUAL OF BLOODLETTING

The Bird in Last Year’s Nest. By Shaun Herron. Jonathan Cape. 303 pp. N.Z. price $5.40. A change of locale and a slower pace make Shaun Herron’s, latest novel very different from his earlier Irish thrillers. As in “Whore-Mother” and “Through the Dark and Hairy Wood” the message is revolution with personal commitments warring with political convictions, but here the similarities cease. The setting is present-day Spain. Instead of Irish insurgents of the I.R.A. we have young members of the Spanish Fifth Assembly — the . military wing of the Basque Homeland and Liberty — following a successful and systematic programme ofsubversion against the government. To be Spanish, says one of Herron’s characters, is to belong to a race "whose national sport is to make a ritual of bloodletting, the blood of horses, and of bulls and of men.” Dion Ugalde, the ageing doctor” of the village of Burguete. is “the bird in last year’s nest", the nest of anarchy fashioned by his fiery father-in-law Luis Arrabal years ago when they both fought in the mountains as Republican rebels. The doctor and his wife Maria are trying to live down the memory of * h

those years, praying that their son Mauro, a medical student in Bilbao, will not follow in the footsteps of his grandfather and father. But Mauro’s love of adventure is his undoing; he and his girlfriend Pureza become part of a militant Fifth Assembly cell in Bilbao and after figuring in bombing and kidnapping incidents are caught by the Civil Guard. The stiff but warm friendship between Doctor Dion Ugalde and Colonel Julio Basa, a commander in the Civil Guard, creates widening ripples in the quiet life of Burguete but is an important factor in the lives of both men — and in their deaths. Towards the book’s end, when they are both on the run, Dion Ugalde says bitterly to his son, “When you fight evil with its own methods, you create more etui and become part of the evil you fight. ..” Although “The Bird in Last Year’s Nest” is a thoughtful novel with plenty of climatic tension, it lacks the fizzing vitality we have come to expect from Shaun - Herron. The first part of the book especially, has a sluggish heavy-handed air and at times reads like an earlier novel that has been dusted off and refurbished.