THE VILLAGE

Taylor's third volume of Irish reminiscences (Quench the Lamp, 1991; To School Through the Fields, 1990) continues in a sunny vein as it evokes the history, landscape, and sometimes dotty citizenry of tiny 1960's Innishannon, where the author raised five kids, opened a guest house, and manned the local post office and grocery store. When Taylor, then an energetic young switchboard operator in Brandon, married the orphaned nephew of a pair of shopkeepers and moved with him to his hometown of Innishannon in County Cork, the locals greeted the bride with a joke and a smile but remarked among themselves that she might turn out to be a tad too flighty for village life. Set on the wooded banks of the Brandon River, Innishannon had once served the grand estates of wealthy British and Irish families, but 20th-century uprisings and industrialization had rendered it a small, sleepy hamlet whose residents knew every detail of each others' lives. To the villagers' relief, Alice proved more dependable than she at first seemed—helping out in the shop until she and her husband were able to turn a large house on the main street into a successful inn; raising four sons and a daughter; tending to the elderly; dabbling in the arts; and, always, noting down the whimsical tales told in the shop, the post office, and the church by Innishannon's hard- working carpenters, priests, grandmothers, and children. The result is a portrait of a placid, charming, and remarkably isolated Irish town—certainly a different Ireland than the war-torn land farther north. Sentimental but entertainingly so: the story of a village well kept and a life well lived.