Tempest in the East Riding

SUNK ISLAND (221 pp.)--Hubert Nicholson--Coward-McCann ($3.50).

Roger Wellincroft is told by his father to "go coortin' " Louisa Kilner for her "brass." To the God-fearing Yorkshire farm folk of the East Riding, brass is land, the deity they worship six days of the week. Louisa is to inherit her father's farm on Sunk Island--a flat, melancholy spit of land reclaimed from the Humber estuary. To Sunk Island, Roger goes a-coortin'.

He finds Louisa a soft-spoken girl with pudding-round cheeks and plain as rain. But her younger sister Ida is another matter--lithe, shrill, dark and electric. Roger kisses her on a dare, and shortly dares more. "What about Louisa? What are we going to do?" asks a momentarily sin-shocked Ida. "Do? Why, keep our mouths shut, I should think," answers Roger.

But the East Riding folk refuse to do the same, and gossip begins to sputter. Roger and Ida resolve to stay out of each other's way, but it is a promise made between a magnet and a nail. With Ida at his side, a shaken but straightforward Roger deals Louisa a crushing blow: "It seems as if her and me can't help it, Lou, can't keep apart, we shall have to wed or die."

Up to this point Novelist Nicholson keeps his story of reckless love under perfect writing control. After it. he resorts to an old-fashioned plot development that is more fortuitous than convincing. Roger and Ida marry, and it turns out that she is being consumed by something more than love's fever--a mortal case of TB. A novel as sod-bitten and fate-haunted as Hardy's The Return of the Native thus veers towards a kind of rustic Camille. It is a token of the solidity of Author Nicholson's character-building that he can still make Ida's death moving without being sentimental, and Roger's reconciliation with Louisa fitting and proper.

Himself Yorkshire-born. Hubert Nicholson, 49. is the first novelist in years to give tragic stature to the mute inglorious farmer. He uses the pungent local dialect tellingly but never unintelligibly. Above all, he has created one of those rare images of an ardent, convention-defying love in which the lovers do not "know what or care where or ask why''--but the reader page-hungrily does.

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