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Reviews 209 body and faith are dying. Wittgenstein, aghast at Connolly's "moral absolutism," remarks: "Revolutions ... are of two kinds. Those that leave everything exaaly as it was, and those that make it a good deal worse. Which variety is yours?" (99) Bakhtin rejoices in what he sees as the frivolity and uselessness of the Rising, but despairs when he hears Connolly talk of goals and necessary sacrifice. "As long as you believe that," he says, "I'm afraid you will never be free. What kind of revolutionary is it whose laughter is always deferred? ... What you've described as having happened in DubUn is a kind of fiction. Now you're beginning to mistake that fiction for reality" (102). Connolly, for his part, skillfully narrates the plight of the Irish, rails against the British Empire, and remarks himself that the British regard Ireland as a fiaion: "if they insist on retaining that choice morsel in the north, they will be sowing a whirlwind and will reap the bitter fruits of it in the future ... The British don't believe Ireland is real; they just dump their fantasies here" (121). A socialist, Connolly saw clearer than any other leader of the Rising that the British would not, indeed could not, easily let go of the industrialized north. Yet for all his political commitment and impassioned oratory, Connolly finds his actions and words become meaningless, useless — finds himself believing nothing, caught in his own well-engineered rhetoric, lost on language's surface: "If salvation lay anywhere it lay in the word, but the word had to be its own reality. It was hopeless to ransack it any longer for hidden richness; it was just what it was. There was nothing behind it" (110). Perhaps Connolly's one effective language act in the novel is his death, which opens and closes the narrative. As he is shot, ConnoUy disappears "entirely into myth, his body nothing but a piece of language, the first cry of the new republic" (145). Connolly's last word punctuates the entire novel, bringing to a temporary close the debate on the power of the word — for Connolly's language is said to have a definite effect, voice more than its own being. It is much to Eagleton's credit that he can carry on this dialogue in a book at once stimulating, pleasurable, and at times downright funny. KEVIN FREY Albuquerque: Coming Back to the U.S.A by Margaret Randall. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1986. pp. 350. $12.95 (paperback). Yesterday, in the biting wind, we hiked up Mount Washburn for an overview of YeUowstone National Park. At 10,243 feet the afternoon showers blew laterally into our face as snow, and we could look from the Gallatin Range in the west, to the Absaroka range in the east. The peaks were under new snow, with clouds roUing across the breadth of YeUowstone Lake, trailing a curtain of rain across the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, whose yellow gash gives the river its old Indian name. With my infant daughter on my back, her small hands pink from the cold and her cheeks chapped by the wind, I had another chance to review old questions: What is too much to ask of our children — or anyone we love — in showing them the wild beauty of the world? For me this is the same question as: what is too much to ask of them in showing them the bravery of workers in the class struggle? Coached by her mother, my six year old struggled to the top ofthe peak behind me. Frankly, it was not a rough hike, but each mountain often raises the same old questions. Another family was returning back down the trail, even as the wind picked up. AU we said was "hi" to them before a boy of about ten chimed up, "It's worth it!" Like the best authors I read, Randall's words reverberate through my life in a search for answers to these questions. Like so many families, both my wife and I work full-time, and I'm also occupied with night classes, along with political work, teachers' union...

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