BOOK REVIEW : A Cloudy Vision of Life’s Unresolvables : The South <i> by Colm Toibin</i> ; Viking; $18.95, 238 pages

Dooms are inhabited, history has to be lived, and emotions are in need of people to have them. Colm Toibin, interweaving the orphaned bitternesses that go back to the Spanish Civil War and the Irish Troubles, chisels neatly his lines of history and fate. In the person of an upper-class Irish woman, he suggests a high, desolate anguish and a final reconciliation.

His novel, “The South,” is spare, grave and finely articulated, but it is terribly abstract. The characters stand in a half-light. We see their taut movements and know what they signify, but we rarely see their faces.

Katherine Proctor, born into the old Irish Protestant gentry, suddenly abandons her husband, Tom, and the lands they own, and travels to Spain. It is 1950; she is 32, and she leaves behind her 10-year-old son, Richard. It is a violent move; it is buried history erupting in her.

She remembers a Catholic nationalist mob setting fire to her family’s house when she was a child. It is a memory that will last her life, but it burns in a conflict of its own. Tom, hard-working and unimaginative, rules as a local squire. When he insists on moving harshly against the mob’s children--poor neighbors whose animals trespass on his land--Katherine tries to oppose him, fails, and leaves.

When the book begins, she is alone, in winter, in a lodging-house in Barcelona. Her purpose is unformed. She has fled the embers of Ireland’s hatreds; she is in some fashion trying to find herself. But on the train, a man assaults her in her sleeping compartment; in Spain, the Civil War retains its bitterness.

Gradually recovering from her near-rape, she cautiously explores the city. Soon she meets Miguel, a surrealist painter. They become lovers and she begins to take lessons with one of his friends. Hers is a buried talent that bursts forth; her work, more painterly and less political than his, begins to sell.

Miguel takes her to a village high in the Pyrenees for the local Corpus Christi Festival. It is a place that arouses violent emotions in him; with Katherine, he is alternately passionate and estranged. Eventually, he persuades her to move into a rented house there. Michael, an older Irish painter from the same town as Katherine, is a frequent visitor.

But it is Miguel’s past that flares and finally consumes their life together. He’d fought in the Pyrenees during the Civil War and was tortured and jailed after Franco’s victory. But he is still not free: moving to the village is a way of keeping his memories alive. The police harass him, imprison him and release him once more. An old comrade, driven mad by 18 years in jail, dies in an asylum. Eventually, Miguel cracks. He takes their jeep and the little girl Katherine has borne him, crashes, and kills them both.

Long before that, though, his past had darkened their lives. He had burned his paintings, he rarely spoke. Earlier, he had told Katherine in painful detail of the atrocities he had committed as a guerrilla, of the innocents he had killed. She loves him desperately; at the same time, she sees he could stand for the people who burned her family out. And she, of the Irish gentry, could stand for the victors in the Civil War.

The last part of the book is a long healing. Katherine returns to Ireland with Michael, who becomes her lover. She reconciles with her son--her husband is dead--who runs the estates and whose love for her overcomes his bitterness at being abandoned as a child. She works on a climactic series of paintings.

Toibin’s patterns are clearly and darkly etched. His characters are fine delineations of the tragic histories they bear. We sense their anger and the force that moves them. We sense too the harsh beauty and solitude of Katherine’s life in the Pyrenees, the anguish of childbirth, the deepening shadow that Miguel casts upon her. The Spanish and Irish landscapes are wonderfully expressive presences.

But the characters are all but invisible in what they represent and feel. There is drinking and conviviality in the bars and restaurants where Miguel and his friends meet, yet somehow there seems to be no food, drink or anybody celebrating. The sex between Katherine and Miguel is meticulously described, but has no odor or fleshy feeling.

Toibin has a vision of the working out of history’s irreconcilables through lives that must, with time, try to reconcile them. The figures that embody the vision are puppets, impressively carved but stiffly manipulated, and only occasionally expressive, even in the way that puppets can be.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Drowning” by Lee Grove (Viking.)