The Irish Struggle Within : THE HEATHER BLAZING, <i> By Colm Toibin (Viking: $20; 245 pp.)</i>

We Irish are often said to be obsessed with the tangled history of our small island. Over the past few decades historians have been busy revising the simplistic version of Irish history that pitted ever virtuous Irish natives against evil foreign conquerors. That traditional scenario is still accepted in some Irish-American circles. The more differentiated or revisionist view of Irish history informs this splendid new novel by Colm Toibin, a well-known journalist in Ireland and author of “The South,” winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus literary award.

In “The Heather Blazing,” Toibin explores the impact of changing Irish attitudes toward history, religion and sexuality on the life of a successful but troubled judge. The main character, Eamon Redmond, has climbed from relatively humble origins in the small but historically significant town of Enniscorthy to a seat on the High Court in Dublin. His early life is characterized by traumatic losses: His mother dies when he is a baby, and he has to care for his devoutly Catholic father, who is felled by a stroke during--ironically enough--Mass. Deprived of his childhood, he learns “to wait, to be quiet, and to sit still.”

One could see in this story an Irish version of what psychoanalyst Alice Miller calls the drama of the gifted child. Having endured two great shocks in the course of his childhood, Redmond finds it safer to avoid the risk of emotional intimacy with others by burying himself in his legal work. In the process, however, he loses touch with his true self.

This theme might seem like old hat. After all, there are countless novels about emotionally constipated older males. Toibin, however, has hit on a simple but effective device that greatly increases the emotional impact of his tale: In alternating chapters he switches back and forth between the judge’s youth in the 1940s and scenes from his life in present-day Ireland. Since the narrator refrains from any overt commentary, it is up to us to figure out the relationship between the two phases of Redmond’s life. We are the ones who must fill in the blanks left by the hero, who for all his intelligence, is lacking in self-insight. This increases our empathy for Redmond, who isn’t an immediately likable sort.

In the chapters dealing with his life as an older man, we learn that his private life is by no means as successful as his legal career. He keeps his wife, Carmel, and two grown children at arms’s length. Although he genuinely cares about Carmel, he is incapable of expressing his feelings. He is secretive about his own past and a bad listener too, since he fails to register basic facts about her history. He has no idea, for instance, that she came from an unhappy home. Carmel doesn’t know much about him either: “You’ve always been so distant, so far away from everybody. . . . I watch you sometimes and wonder if you will ever let any of us know you.”

Redmond’s professional work as a judge is marked by similar contradictions. He has long since ceased to believe in the religious and patriotic pieties of his childhood. Yet he is incapable of striking out for new moral ground. A case involving a pregnant school-girl hits close to home: His own daughter is a single mother. For a moment he considers issuing a ground-breaking ruling that would radically reinterpret a few clauses in the sectarian Irish constitution, originally introduced by his namesake Eamon de Valera in 1937. However, he rejects this possibility on the grounds that he would have to be an entirely different person to issue such a novel ruling.

Toibin widens the resonance of this fictional psychobiography by linking the main character to the ambivalent legacy of Irish nationalism. The very title of the novel evokes the sectarian streak that has dogged Irish Republicanism. Taken from a rebel ballad, the image of the blazing heather refers to the insurrection by the United Irishmen in 1798, which began with idealistic speeches in Belfast about the need to unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter but subsequently degenerated into sectarian violence in Wexford, the setting of much of the novel. To this day Irish Republicanism has remained tinged with a similar brand of sectarianism.

The hero, however, is unwilling to tackle the tainted legacy of Irish nationalism in his own family. Even his father, a gentle teacher and local intellectual, was implicated in the burning down of mansions owned by Protestants during the struggle for Irish independence. Toibin didn’t invent this episode: 192 such houses were destroyed in Ireland in the 1921-23 period. In the novel the hero is clearly embarrassed by these dubiously patriotic deeds. So when a historian--no doubt a revisionist--starts grilling him about his family, he is careful not to mention that his father and uncle were involved in those activities.

This is on the whole an artfully constructed novel, full of unobtrusive foreshadowing and subtle allusions. Little is there by accident, even the seemingly inconsequential reference to a novel by the Victorian writer Elizabeth Gaskell, which Redmond stumbles across in his uncle’s house. It’s only much later on that we come to realize that the book, which is marked “Ex Libris Lord Carew,” was taken as a trophy from one of the torched Protestant mansions.

The extensive flashbacks to Redmonds past, however, which give us a welcome peek into the inner life of this tight-lipped hero, aren’t always entirely convincing. For one thing, Redmond is such a haunted figure that it’s hard to imagine him recalling his past with the lucidity that Toibin attributes to him in the flashbacks.

In the closing pages of the novel Redmond experiences an emotional renewal of sorts. This is heralded, appropriately enough in a novel that has been so attentive to the vagaries of the Irish weather, by his joy at seeing a sudden break in the clouds:

“He recognized the exhilaration: it came each day unless there was rain. It came, he thought, from walking a long distance and then turning towards the light, or witnessing a sudden brightness in the sky. He walked faster now, breathing in the rich sea air. He sat down and took out his sandwiches and flask again, but kept his eye on the sea as much as possible. It was so still now, grey-blue and glassy.”

The hero’s sharp eye for the physical world--people are another matter again!--lends the novel an engagingly crisp texture. That effect is accentuated by the steady beat of the prose, which owes something to Hemingway.

Toibin tells this moving tale in such a deceptively straightforward manner that it would be easy to mistake “The Heather Blazing” for a good read and nothing more than that. Yet the more one thinks about this clear-headed yet intense book, the stronger the impression it leaves.