SECOND READING

December Bride By Sam Hanna Bell (1951). ANDREW ECHLIN and his two grown sons face domestic confusion when the woman of the house dies. The only solution is to find help. The widow Gomartin and her daughter, Sarah, are recruited for the task.

The women assess the situation and move to the farm, quickly bringing order. Little comment is passed on the arrangements. In a tough presbyterian farming community scattered across the magnificent landscape of Strangford Lough in Co Down, there is scant time for nonsense. The locals work hard, heed nature, attend church and abide by the rules. Yet gradually many of those rules begin to be challenged by Sarah, whose determination to defy her destiny shapes her every thought and gesture.

It is no coincidence that Sam Hanna Bell prefaces his dramatic narrative with a quote from Thomas Hardy's Honeymoon Time. If ever a literary presence were seen to grace the telling of a tale, it is that of Hardy, whose bleak, lyric genius presides over this wonderful novel. Andrew Echlin proves a kindly patriarch, and to young Sarah Gomartin, well used to hard work since childhood, the securing of his favour is all important for her future.

Although she is aware of the interested glances directed by Frank, the attractive younger son, Sarah knows that real power lies with the father. What begins as a treat, the granting of a boat trip, ends in tragedy. Andrew gives up his life to save his sons and the girl. From that point on Sarah, long convinced she has no need of God, having reminded her mother, "My father died on the roads, and ever since I can mind my life has been nothing else but slaving for other folk", is confident she can handle the sons. She does.

Bell was born in Glasgow in 1909 to an Ulster-Scots family and worked at many jobs before turning to writing. He was lucky in the support of Louis MacNeice, but there was more than luck to it: Bell's descriptive, austerely rhythmic prose lives off the page, the characterisation is exact; here are plain-speaking Ulster farming people caught in a bizarre dilemma. Ever simmering in the background are the realities of religious bigotry, tribal loyalties and sexual jealousy. It all takes place in the early years of the 20th century but it previews McGahern's Ireland and could as easily be set in the France of Balzac or Zola.

Sarah soon attracts a suitor, Pentland, a local man of property, but she gambles on securing the Echlin household and defies her mother, who returns home without her. Pentland gradually detects the sexual tension between Sarah and Frank, and abandons his quest. The stark power of December Bride rests in the astute characterisation of the calculating, secretive Sarah, who engages sexually with the brothers but not emotionally. "She shared herself between them both, in body and in mind, and so disarmed the younger brother."

Frank's desire is balanced against his older brother Hamilton's less complex needs. Sarah plays them both and Bell carefully plots the power shifts within the household.

When a baby boy is born his paternity is questioned. The local rector becomes involved and takes flight at his own responses. All the while Sarah watches. Just when she feels she has control, Frank loses interest in her, causing Sarah to see a potential threat to her position - should he eventually take a wife.

Resentments grow. Frank's bid for freedom ends in disaster. The Echlin farm expands and Sarah sees off the local Catholic woman tenant who never approved of her. Lives end. Sarah loses her mother, and then old Agnes, her only friend. Agnes's death leaves her husband, Petie, increasingly helpless and prey to a nightmare end. As the years pass, there is a second child and Sarah, never relaxing her watch, retains control. When an accident results in yet another death she realises where her love really lay.

This is an intensely humane morality play about desires sought and ambitions grasped. Situations become local history and regrets linger as major decisions are reduced to logical outcomes. Sarah Gomartin emerges as a shrewd, dauntingly human survivor in Bell's unsung masterpiece that ranks high among Ireland's finest novels.

This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon