Fish Story

THE GAUNT WOMAN -- Edmund GilIlgan--Scribner ($2.50).

Broad-beamed, baric Edmund Gilligan (White Sails Crowding) knows a lot about sailing vessels, good violent storytelling, and wild Irish prose. In The Gaunt Woman his triple talents are contributed to the war effort with a driving energy that sometimes bruises the story and the prose. But the book as a whole has the glow and momentum of a particularly likable Grade B movie.

Young Captain Patrick Bannon, a "sound chip off an old Gloucester block" ("God rest his iron soul"), is a Reservist whom the Navy has told to "fish a little longer." Obeying the order with a true seaman's pleasure ("his mighty nose snuffed up the spray's champagne"), he takes the "sweet sailer and . . . good earner" Daniel Webster out to the Grand Banks with a weather eye peeled for wartime trouble. Aboard are two new men, Danes by their claim-Conrad and Holger.

Bannon becomes suspicious of a Danish square-rigger, Den Magre Kvind. His suspicions mount when the Daniel finds, in an open boat, three slaughtered Danes whom Holger mourns too loudly and whom Conrad deduces, from their pallor and their oily hands, to be U-boat engineers executed for a breach of discipline. The square-rigger has been shelled into half-ruin and her Captain Skalder, whose curses fall "like bars of iron" through his great red block of beard, says he is bound for Halifax with a cargo of rum. But Bannon notices that the shell wounds were made with axes and he suspects the cargo.

Snooping, he learns that the cargo is a good hundred torpedoes, enough mines to drive a hole through the seabottom. The Gaunt Woman is a U-boat supply ship, "the bitch at whose dugs they must feed or starve." With the aid of Conrad and Margaret MacLean ("a strapping girl, done up in seagoing style"), Bannon sets about forcing the devils to eat their own brimstone. He succeeds in making the Gaunt Woman one gigantic time bomb for the ruin of her U-boat offspring. As she blows, Bannon lifts "his clenched hands in a gesture of malediction," says "so perish the enemies of free men." With his incipient "Navy wife" Margaret nestling to leeward, he sets off after his halibut.

When Edmund Gilligan is at his best, as in White Sails Crowding, he is one of few men living who can galvanize the dying art of literate romancing. But in The Gaunt Woman his Hibernian lilt and lustiness often overshoot the mark. Like most Irish storytellers, he must beware of riding with his Erse too high.

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